Maybe this is the moment when Arsenal fans should believe the media’s commentary

 

• The triumph of the return of goals from everywhere
• Having been flat footed by Arsenal’s last display, the football media are now lost

By Tony Attwood

It has been a fact since football transfers began in 1893 (when Willie Groves moved from West Bromwich Albion to Aston Villa for a fee of £100) that transfers alone can’t be guaranteed to take a club up the league.   Indeed a current comparison between Arsenal and Tottenham both in the Premier League and in European competition proves that.

Tottenham last night were in Europe, exactly as Arsenal had been on Tuesday, although Tottenham were of course in the lesser of the two competitions.    Tottenham lost to AZ Alkmaar in the Netherlands while Arsenal you might remember (although it could seem but a distant fanciful memory by now) beat PSV Eindhoven 1-7.   We can compare the current status of the four clubs involved in the table below…

 

Pos	Club	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
2	PSV	24	16	4	4	73	29	44	52
6	AZ	24	13	4	7	40	24	16	43
2	Arsenal	27	15	9	3	51	23	28	54
13	Tottenham Ho	27	10	3	14	53	39	14	33

 

Looking at those table extracts above we can the PSV that Arsenal played are quite a bit stronger than AZ, and Arsenal are of course a lot better than Tottenham.

Son Heung-min insisted that ­Tottenham’s defeat by AZ in the Europa League must be a “wake-up call” and s Ange Postecoglou admitted his side did not have the “right mindset for an away game in Europe”.

Indeed the tiny totts managed only one shot on target in the  game.  And yet the Guardian, seemingly with all seriousness, runs the headline “Son warns Tottenham defeat at AZ is ‘big wake-up call’ with season on line”.

Now surely that “wake up call” (which I suppose means a realisation that the team is not doing very well and needs to do better, only no one has realised it until now) should have come before then what with Tottenham being 21 points behind Arsenal and running on only half the goal difference.   Of course Tottenham have scored more goals than Arsenal this season, but surely one might ask, “so what?” when the goals scored is only two better and the goals against is 16 worse.

And all this in a season when, according to Transfermark Arsenal have spent €108.90m on transfers but Tottenham spent €175.35m.

What strikes me as so stupendously stupid about the notion that the match this week should be a “wake up call” is that, for a club like Tottenham with pretensions of being a “big club” pushing to be up near the top of the league, that wake up call really should have come a lot earlier.  Like for example last season when Tottenham let in over twice as many goals as Arsenal.  How come they couldn’t get their defence sorted out last summer?  (Oh but I forgot; the media can endlessly criticise Arsenal’s transfer operations, but not Tottenham’s.)

Instead the media has endlessly been making excuses for Tottenham.   Take this piece from the BBC just a couple of weeks ago, which began, “The ability to grind out a win while showing defensive strength has not been a regular part of Tottenham’s season so far.

“But, in a week that could define their campaign and the future of boss Ange Postecoglou, Spurs showed spirit and character to win 2-0 at Brentford and bring their four-game losing league run to a halt.”

So let’s contemplate that.  Before the European games this week, Tottenham were congratulated for beating Brentford away – a team whose home goal difference shows at just +4.  Was it really that big a deal?

Yes it was for the media have that this constant love-in based around eternal excuse making for Tottenham Ho.  Although in a strange way it might well be helping Arsenal because nonsense like this, in which a club of Tottenham’s proportions and expectations is congratulated on beating Brentford away, and the result seen as a “turn around”, is one so weird it might be convincing Tottenham that they are doing ok.

Tottenham is a club with a ground capacity which is 2000 bigger than Arsenal’s and is talked up daily as being “state of the art” (whatever the art is) and yet their ambitions are so modest that after the Brentford win the BBC seriously wrote, “Under-pressure Postecoglou could not have been happier.”

But maybe that tells us all we need to know. Beating the 11th placed team in the league takes the manager to heaven.   So much for expectations.

The way Tottenham is treated by the media in comparison with the remourceless attacks on Arsenal, even when Arsenal’s results are massively superior to Tottenham’s, is nothing short of constant propaganda, which to their eternal discredit some Arsenal supporters actually believe.  As a result such “fans” turn on Arteta, telling him he has to change his tactics both on and off the field.

But because Arsenal are used to the negativity, they have learned how to carry on doing their thing no matter what the media say.  Tottenham’s biggest problem is that the media tell them they are doing ok, when clearly they are under-performing, and Tottenham H go ahead and believe this nonsense.

So maybe in this regard one should not attack the media too much.  Maybe we should be pleased that they are regularly telling us how well Tottenham are doing – for the simple reason that Tottenham seem to believe it.