By Tony Attwood
- Before Arsenal buy anyone they’ve got to get rid of their non-HG players
- Suddenly the number of players coming to Arsenal has shot up. What’s going on?
It was of course, a great moment of celebration for Walsall last night, and a moment of humiliation for Manchester United, but really it is a bit of a shame that some of the commentators yesterday still don’t know exactly what the context was. For not everyone realised that Grimsby are unbeaten this season in seven games and sit fourth in the league just one point behind the leaders. Which is not bad after coming ninth in that division last season. ManU on the other hand, came 15th – pretty awful but still above Tottenham H.
So last night was not quite the same as Walsall beating Arsenal in 1933, or indeed repeating that feat in the league cup in 1983 (that time at Highbury). But accuracy and historical context has always been less important than hysterical context, and anyway, the whole event last night was indeed rather amuisng.
But there is a broader point for Mancheseter United, which is that they ended last season with just four wins in their last 14 games, amidst talk of rebuilding and regalvanising the club during the summer, ready for the new season. That has resulted in two defeats and a draw at the start of this season. Still their next match in two days time is at home to Burnnley. That club currently sit five places above Manu in the league.
So far this season Man U and Burnley together have scored three goals. In fact the seven lowest scoring teams in the league have together scored fewer goals than Arsenal.
Mind you, problems seem to be abounding everywhere this campaign. Everton fans have been making a lot of noise about the inadequacy of the ticket entry system into their new ground, which journalists (who have their own entrance and don’t have to pay) haven’t really bothered much about – at least until last night when it became perfectly clear that the entry system of the much-praised stadium was not fit for purpose – unless you had a press pass.
Teething problems can happen, of course, in all new grounds, but in this case, the local media had been full of warnings from fans to the club that the system didn’t work properly. And yet curiously, the club didn’t seem to want to listen. Everton, using that strange language that football clubs that don’t really understand what it means to be a supporter often use, issued a statement about, “improving the matchgoing experience at Hill Dickinson Stadium.” So that’s all right.
Perhaps most worrying was that statement after saying that, “Everybody, including the subs, did their job.” That seems to imply that no one had the job of allowing fans to get into the ground in time to watch the kick off.
And what is particularly worrying in cock-ups like this is that the clubs are always utterly dependent on the goodwill and acceptance of the fans.
Of course, Man U are not the only club with the thought that they ought to be near the top only to find themselves near the bottom. One other such club, although less soften mentioned, must surely be West Ham Un. Having been given what is ludicrously called the London Stadium for nothing, after the person in charge of the London Olympics (I forget his name) failed to find a way of getting any more back for the stadium we had all paid for, are getting worse and worse.
This is the 10th season since West Ham were given the stadium. At the time, Baroness Brady (sometimes known as Karen) promised “a world-class stadium for a world-class team”. A look at the foot of the Premier League gives us an insight into how that is going….
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arsenal | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 6 | 6 |
| Wolverhampton Wanderers | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 5 | -5 | 0 |
| West Ham United | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 8 | -7 | 0 |
But then, since 2016, the club has come 6th, 7th, 9th 10th, 11th, 13th, 14th, 14th, and 16th. Now you might think that someone who had promised a “world-class stadium for a world-class team” might notice that stream of results (although I must acknowledge that they are in descending order of achievement, not in chronological order), might have the decency to resign from a board having promised the delivery of, not to put too fine a point on it, a world class team. But it seems not.
Anyway, in case you missed it, on Tuesday night, the two bottom teams in the Premier League (Wolverhampton Wanderers and the World Class Team, played each other and the World Class Team lost 3-2.
Sometimes new stadia don’t quite work. Sometimes they are by themselves not enough.
