By Tony Attwood
- The injuries mount for Arsenal but the outlook still looks good
- Liverpool show signs of the “dip” syndrome, which Arsenal have overcome
One of the most common aspects of football reporting involves taking one set of results and ignoring another set of results. We saw this particularly with Arsenal and Olympiacos, with multiple comments about Olym beating Arsenal at the Arsenal stadium in each of their last two visits.
What was hardly mentioned at all, except by Untold, was that, balancing this, Arsenal had beaten Olym in their last two away games to the club, with Arsenal coming out better on goal difference, although only just. Instead, most of the commentaries sallied forth with tales about Olympiacos beating Arsenal even though on each occasion this was by a single goal.
A proper look at the past fixtures and results would have led to a strong feeling that Arsenal stood a very good chance of victory. Which of course they got.
A look at the Greek league table would also have suggested that Olympiakos was hardly a super club. True, the current standing shows them having played six, won four, but this is a league of three major clubs (AEK, PAOK and Olymp), and then the rest; a league being ranked 12th in the Uefa rankings.
But still the media decided Arsenal were on a hiding to nothing, until of course they were not, whereupon the media simply forgot all it had written about the game and moved on to something else.
In a sense, we are now seeing the same sort of thing happening with Nottingham Forest. Much is made of their six defeats and two draws at the start of this season, with just five goals scored in the seven games in the league.. But in the last seven games of last season, Forest won two games and scored six goals. The signs were there.
And of course the media always want it both ways, as with the headline, Edu’s exit leaves stuttering Arsenal on unfamiliar ground from the eternally anti-Arsenal Sky Sport
In fact last season won just two of their last nine games of the campaign which indicated where this season might go. But the media missed that and as ever picked bits and pieces out of the statistics to meet their desired editorial aim. So Arsenal are going to be in real trouble playing this European match because they lost their last two home games against them (ignoring the fact that they won their last two away games).
Plus the notion that Forest should be doing much better now because, well, because the media says so. (The actual best Forest stats that can be found are the eleven games between 30 November 2024 and 19 January 2025 in which they won nine, drew one and lost one. Better still, that draw was with the all-conquering Liverpool while the defeat was to Manchester City.
But Nottingham Forest played nine games from 5 April on and won just two of them. Five were lost and two were draws (one of which was against relegated Leicester City).
So Forest were in trouble last season, but somehow the media ignored that but now make a fuss about them being 17th, so they can run a story about the manager being in trouble. In fact the club is just continuing its form of the latter part of last season, but that’s not a good story. Forest in decline and will sack the manager, which works much better for the media.
But here’s the problem. Nottingham Forest spent around a quarter of a billion pounds in the summer, and they have not seen a result. But this is less of a story, because the media exists on transfer rumours. It needs them. If clubs stopped buying, what would the papers write about?
And my point is that under the guidance of the media, club owners have begun to think that transfers will always make clubs better. Thus, as soon as the window shuts, the media take up the issue of who the clubs will buy in the next window.
The media know perfectly well that no one seems to mind that 97% of their transfer reports are false – for once the window is over and the club is shown to be not doing very well, the media blame the club for not buying the players they could have had.
So the mood declines and the owner, trying to retain some credibility among the other Very Rich Men who are by now laughing at him, shows his “strength,” sacks the manager and brings in someone else. And so we go round and round again.
Arteta did not follow the mad buy-buy-buy pattern when he joned Arsenal, but focussed instead on moving out some of the players he did not feel were pulling their weight and he did so often at a significant loss to Arsenal, arguming it was better to have them out of the club for nothing, than to keep them playing badly and possibly having a malign influence.
Not all players fell into that category, but the list of names he let go on a free is quite extraordinary. Pepe Mkhitaryan, Kolasinac, Sokratis, Özil, Mustafi, Willian, Kolasinac Chambers, Aubameyang, Lacazette, Bellerin, Maitland-Niles, Elneny, etc etc.
Most managers do not have the nerve to make such changes, although, to be fair they also do not have the promise of sufficient funds to buy a new team. But that is the difference. The clubs that don’t rise up to challenge ManC and the like are those generally not willing to have a complete clear out.
