- How Arsenal is being undermined from without
- How West Ham’s stadium is costing all Londoners quite a lot of cash
By Tony Attwood
In my last article, I raised the point that there appears to be a serious effort being made to undermine Arsenal’s confidence. And it appears that no wins in the last three games is enough to send many football journalists into delerium. Indeed, the New York Times is currently noting how “Arsenal on occasion, over the years, have struggled.” No other club, which is four points clear at the top of the league, would ever have such a headline written.
It is nonsense, of course, but such articles help deflect from the struggles of Tottenham and Manchester United, to give but two examples. Tottenham pulled off the trick of building a stadium that was just bigger than Arsenal’s ground (by 2.1% in fact) – and it is still described as the “incredible 62,000-seater stadium” (the New York Times), not forgetting to throw in the “state-of-the-art training ground” and the fact that the Totts have “just been named the ninth-richest club in the world by Deloitte’s Football Money League report.”
Finding reality can be difficult, as it was when searching for journalists who wanted to write about Liverpool winning one game in ten (while losing the rest) between 27 September and 26 November last year. Or the struggle one might have to find a report that notes that Tottenham have done worse in their last six games than Wolverhampton Wanderers. But still, we battle on.
And Tottenham are Arsenal’s neighbours, although they have moved away a bit (it used to be 4.1 miles from Arsenal, now it is 4.5 miles, not that we are counting).
And I suppose I thought of Tottenham today, because although Arsenal never go down, Tottenham have been relegated four times. And this in turn makes me think of being at the bottom of the table, which makes me think of relegation. They won’t go down, their season ticket holders will renew, the club will sign a couple of players, and the media will tip them for top four next season.
Except for one little thing that I read in the same article in the New York Times. It was headed, “Who has the easiest fixtures over the next ten games?” and the asnwers was Aston Villa, followed by Crystal Palace, and Liverpool. In that chart, Arsenal come seventh, and bottom of the table (meaning that they have the highest level of opponent difficulty of any club in the Premier League) is… Tottenham. Although of course, to show their unfailing support for the club, the NY Times calls them “Spurs”.
In the next few games, it seems they play Eintracht Frankfurt, who are currently 8th in the Bundesliga, followed by ManC, ManU and Newcastle, before playing Arsenal at home on 22 February.
Now that is Tottenahm’s fifth match in their schedule – I just counted it twice. But for Arsenal, before we get to playing the Tiny Totts again, we have a schedule of Kirat, Leeds United, Chelsea, Sunderland, Brentford and Wigan Athletic, which is to say six games, making Tottenham our seventh game in the sequence. It seems one team has a lot easier run than the other. But of course, the NY Times don’t mention that. Or maybe numbers work differently in New York.
So let us turn for a moment to our opponents tomorrow: Kairat. As I have mentioned before, they play their league season from spring to autumn, so, rather unfortunately for them, much of the European Cup comes in their winter break. As a result, they find their players end up playing all year round.
They started off on 8 July and played no fewer than eight qualifying matches before having two goalless draws with Celtic in the Champions League play-off round. Then of course, it was penalties, and they won 3-2, and thus had the honour of playing eight games through their winter, and getting no end-of-season break.
As we might expect, given the size of the club, the league and the country, they have since lost all of their group games, but they have scored a few goals along the way, and presumably given quite a boost to their family fortunes. So it really is a case of top v bottom.
|
Club
|
P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|
Arsenal
|
7 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 2 | 18 | 21 |
|
Kairat
|
7 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 5 | 19 | -14 | 1 |
