- Are Sun journalists encouraged to laugh at each others work, as the rest of us do?
- Are Arsenal the biggest “bottlers” in the Premier League?
By Tony Attwood
It seems that with a tiny minority of Arsenal fans booing their own players and protesting against transfers because of the club that incoming players come from, football fans elsewhere are taking up the idea that you can boo Arsenal anywhere, any time. After all, the argument goes, if their own fans boo them, why not us?
So it is now suggested that Arsenal are the biggest “bottlers” in the Premier League, and we now find that it is ok to boo Arsenal players as they get awards. For so it was as Arsenal were voted as club of the year in Paris – amidst booing. I am not sure I can recall when there was booing at an award ceremony before, but now with Arsenal, it seems anything goes. The message of the media over recent years seems to have spread to the continent.
Meanwhile, quite a few newspapers are getting worked up about the ‘Scouse, not English’ attitude of some Liverpool supporters who refuse to support England in international tournaments. It is one tiny step for the media to recognise this – but I wonder when they will make the big leap and realise just how incredibly annoyed many of us get by having the Premier League season constantly broken up by international breaks, and by the number of players we can lose because of injury in the international arena. Still, even one little bit of recognition is better than nothing, I guess.
Mind you, one of the strangest of headlines today must be that in Football 365 where it is written that, “Pep Guardiola ‘in danger’ of becoming both Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger.” What I find is interesting is that Football 365 goes on to say…
“Oliver Brown in the Daily Telegraph… Pep Guardiola risks transforming into Mourinho tribute act by parking bus Can you ‘transform’ into something by doing it once in 10 years?”
And yes, this is the sort of critique we could do with more of, because football journalists have been getting away with sporuting nonsense of this type for far too long.
The newspaper went on to say, “‘this was a shift so stark that the manager traded all his principles for bleak pragmatism.”
And that took me back to Mr Wenger who did indeed have principles about the way that football should be played. But he also had a fair amount of pragmatism. too, which is needed in football, because the game, certainly at the Premier League level, changes all the time. It changes in the way that the opposition players behave, it changes in the way that referees act, and of course, it changes in terms of the philosophy and finances of each club.
But there does seem to me to be a growing realisation among some clubs (not all but some) that when they take to the field, they are playing not just the opposition club, but also the referee’s interpretation of the rules.
For how else can we explain the fact that this season, Premier League match by Premier League match, Simon Hooper has seen 57% more fouls than Anthony Taylor? This is simply not credible.
Or that Simon Hooper has seen fit to award three times as many yellow cards as Michael Oliver, with both referees having overseen five Premier League games? Now, of course, the argument back is that this all evens out in the end – but that is dependent on each club getting each referee the same number of times, which doesn’t happen.
We have been calling for years for each referee to oversee each team only twice in a season, one at home and once away. But under the current system, referees can see the same team five or more times in a season, and that means if a club gets the “wrong” ref that number of times, their yellow card total goes shooting up – not because they are a dirty team but because of what referee they have.
And already we are seeing bonkers results from referees. Simon Hooper hasn’t seen a home win yet while 75% of Darren England’s games have been home wins, and the other was a draw.
Yet again, we are pretty much back in the position that for many games, you can tell what the result is likely to be by the referee that is chosen to oversee the game, and that can never be right.
