The media sinks into the mud as Arsenal rise to the heights

 

 

The Arsenal Teams and the Meduia mish mash

By Tony Attwood

What on earth can I say?   Another victory over the tiny totts and has anyone noticed that the gap between first and third is ten points and 25 goals?  Or that Arsenal have seven wins and one draw against Tottenham in the last eight games?   Or that Arsenal have won the last five against the tiny totts, or indeed scored eight goals against them in the last two games?

 

	Team	Pld	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	28	18	7	3	56	21	35	61
2	Manchester City	27	17	5	5	56	25	31	56
3	Aston Villa	27	15	6	6	38	28	10	51
4	Chelsea	27	12	9	6	48	31	17	45

 

So two equal top scoring teams at the top of the league, with Arsenal having the best defence, best goal difference and being five points clear.

And before the game there was all that talk about how much the Hottentots (sorry I may have miswritten that)  have improved, how they have a new manager, how they are getting better, and how Arsenal will need to watch out…

And amazingly all those Tottenham supporterse turned up, some of them actually feeling that their side could win.

And all the way through, commentators largely ignoring the fact that the last time Tottenham won a league game was last year, when they beat the mighty Crystal Palace by a single goal.

But the media, of course, have been talking the Tots up for years, as they always do, and Arsenal just walked in and showed the world what Arsenal are, and what the Tiny Totts. are.   But don’t expect any of that to be replicated in the media, for by the next north London derby, they will be back to their favourite message as it is churned out over and over again..

In fact before the match there was yet another assault on Arsenal from the New York Times which decided to use the match againsts  Tottenham as the opportnity to write about Arsenal being “relegated from the old First Division at the end of the 1912-13 season and played two campaigns in the second tier before competitive football was suspended in the summer of 1915 as a result of the First World War.”

OK that is a fact, although there is no particular reason to bring that up now.  But they continue…

“The north London club finished that second season (1914-15) in fifth position but upon the resumption of the game — in one of the most controversial episodes in the history of English sport — were ‘elected’ to the top flight to replace Tottenham, despite the fact Barnsley and Wolverhampton Wanderers, who had finished above them in the second tier in 1914-15, stayed down.”    The article is at How long is it since each Premier League club last suffered relegation?

Now of course, you will know if you follow your Arsenal history, that there was no controversy at the time, (it was invented by a bitter club manager to beef up his history of Arsenal written during the second world war) and that the ballot saw Arsenal win its place back in the top league ba huge majority and no clubs made any objections and no newspapers reported anything amiss, at the time.    It is a controversy that was invented by the manager Arsenal sacked because he almost got the club relegated!

If you want to follow the story through in the greatest detail ever written up, then the story starts here, on the Arsenal History Society website, and continues over subsequent episodes.

But let’s get back to now.   The next matches for the two front-runners are…

• Leeds United v Manchester City on 28 February
• Arsenal v Chelsea on 1 March, 
• Manchester City v Nottingham Forest on 4 March
• Brighton and Hove Albion v Arsenal also on 4 March

So everything could change again, but if anyone had offered me at the start of the season Arsenal five points clear and a better goal difference by now, I would have grabbed it with both hands.  Especially if it included mention of thumping the Tots.

And of course, it is not just me getting a bit excited.   The Telegraph newspaper, not known for being kind to anything Arsenal related, has the headline “How ‘incredible’ Gyokeres produced his most complete Arsenal performance.”    V. Gyökere is the fifth-highest goal scorer in the Premier League this season.   But the amazing thing is that, as noted above, Arsenal are the top scoring team in the League.

Which is exactly how these things should work.   Be the top-scoring team but not utterly reliant on just one particular forward for knocking in the goals.   It means if that forward is injured (and of course he will be targeted by opposition thug defenders), we still have lots of backup, and of course that makes defending against Arsenal much harder for all the opposition clubs.

I sometimes do wonder if all those writers who knock particular players early in the season ever think of publishing a public apology.     If they do, it must be in very small print.  Or maybe I missed it.

And of course, what is particularly thrilling is that this all happened after Arsenal allowed Wolverhampton to get back into the previous game, after having secured what looked like a good lead.   

The mass media is, of course, based on the notion that we all have extremely short memories.   And to that, the only thing I can say is, don’t let your daughter marry a football journalist.   They change their minds daily, but deny they ever said anything to the contrary.