By Tony Attwood
In one sense, one might feel a bit sorry for football journalists, as they are under instruction to come up with a new story on a club, quite often not just once a day but sometimes twice or even three times a day. Worse, each story has to have a new headline provided by a sub-editor, and run on the outlet’s website – at least until the next piece comes along.
And the point here is that the story can be either positive or negative about Arsenal, although they are normally negative because those stories are so much easier to write. If Arsenal don’t win a match, a criticism can be made of certain players in hindsight, and as we all know, when you are criticising after the event, well, that is dead easy. If they do win, certain players can be criticised as “worn out” or “not fit” or simply not suitable for the position they are playing in.
Consider this one for example, “Rice ‘shattered’ thanks to Arteta ‘trust’ issue as Arsenal ‘grow away’ from midfielder.”
Now for anyone who thinks that the purchase of Rice was one of Arteta’s masterstrokes, despite the huge fee, that can be a bit worrying. But the clue that this is going to be cock and ball gibberish comes with the inverted commas around “shattered”. We can all be “shattered” by having done a brilliant job. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong. When I was writing adverts for a living, I could be shattered at the end of a day through having to write three completely new adverts on completely different topics, each of which was going to bring in significant sales for the company’s clients. It may not sound shattering, but you try writing three new adverts each day five days a week, each of which will bring in new sales at high volume.
The Arsenal “shattered” story is then developed by the statement that Rice is “shattered” thanks to the manager’s “trust” in the player, which has resulted in him playing too many games. Meanwhile, the writer says Arteta should drop another player from whom the side is “growing away”.
The implication is that these ex-players can see the mistakes that managers can’t see – which is an utterly preposterous proposition. Indeed, to hide how nonsensical it is, we have to go through eight paragraphs of rambling prose before we get an explanation of where this “shattered” idea comes from. And then it becomes clear that Rice is ‘shattered’ because Arteta plays him too often, and because Rice is now not such a good player (because he is overplayed) Arteta is now losing faith in him.
Of course, dismiss this as nonsense, but anyone who reads tale after tale of this type day after day may start believing that Arteta hasn’t got a clue how to manage players, and will soon be calling for Arteta to be sacked.
Has Arteta’s trust shattered Rice? It seems very doubtful, and no evidence is provided to back up the simple case that Rice is shattered, let alone the secondary case that it is all the manager’s fault. Although recently I was told by an insider of a publication that told its guest writers who to criticise after each game, irrespective of anything they actually thought.
Tactics always change of course, because the opposition is always looking at past videos. Which is why yesterday in the Telegraph it was reported that Arteta was responsible for “The tactical tweak that got the best out of peerless Declan Rice.” Although there are always negatives, as with the Sun saying, “Declan Rice risks Uefa rap after referee rant following Arsenal draw at Atletic.
One can, of course, argue that if all the media is saying Arsenal players looked shattered, then they perhaps were shattered. But one might also argue that the essence of the whole business is that if one can think of a story and get it published in a newspaper, and the next thing you know is that a similar tale turns up in half a dozen other papers and in blogs too, each suggesting that it was their observation in the first place. As a result, the impressionable reader thinks, “It must be true, it’s in all the papers.”
So will Arsenal be shattered today against Fulham? I doubt it, for the simple reason that Arteta knows enough about football and his players not to use “shattered” players.
And this is what it all comes down to. Do ex-pros putting their names to short pieces in the tabloids know more about management and players than Arteta? If yes, why are these ex-pros picking up scraps from the media instead of earning big money managing a club? The answer is that several clubs may have interviewed these “correspondents” and decided that there is no way on earth they would employ them as a ticket collector, let alone as a manager. After all, I suspect Burnley, Wolverhampton, West Ham and Tottenham wouldn’t mind a manager who really knows how to get that bit more out of their players
Fortunately for Arsenal, I think we already have such a manager. A man whose team keeps pace with ManC without spending 5% of what they spent, and without running up over 110 charges against the club. That’s not bad going.
