By Tony Attwood
And I must admit that sometimes I find myself wondering if the Fifa story will rumble on forever. Certainly if we were to go back to the opening weeks of the summer break I did not foresee the infighting continuing into the start of the new season. But then I hadn’t really thought: what does Fifa have to do with the new English football season.
The second is that I didn’t really expect the media to admit just how good Arsenal had become – nor indeed how good their transfer work had been each year under Arteta. Nor come to that did I expect us to have yet another very good summer window.
Of course the Fifa nonsense has now been around for so long that we can deal with the story quickly – the headline in the Guardian reads, “Fifa chief sacked after criticism of Infantino’s World Cup sell-off plan.” And maybe that is the clue to what happens there next – the infighting takes over.
But here’s a point – does England (and come to that do all the other countries) just go on playing internationals in the name of Fifa, irrespective of the fact that the European countries have to all intents and purposes pulled out? And does the Premier League gone on having international breaks when the whole of Europe has said that they don’t acknowledge the authority of Fifa? Shouldn’t Uefa by now be setting out its own competitions and its own timetables and just telling Fifa to go away?
And meanwhile we have to focus on Arsenal in the Community Shield. Some people seemed to expect the old ManC turning up and giving us a game, but in fact we got the new ManC and there really was no game..
Plus it seems some of the media experts really were not quite up to date with what has been happening inside the two clubs in the summer. Yahoo website chose to run a story supplied by the Standard as its lead before the match and I guess if they ever pay any attention to what they publish they are now feeling a bit embarrassed
A penalty shootout cannot be ruled out, especially as four of the last six Community Shield matches have been settled in that fashion - including the last time these two teams met in this fixture in 2023. However, we think with Man City looking a little bit sharper than the Gunners, Maresca will get his reign off to a winning start. Man City to win, 2-0.
I think we might keep an eye on the Standard to see where it takes that. And although they don’t apologise for getting it all so wrong they do at least now say “Arsenal were superb in Cardiff and the temptation for Arteta could be to stick with near enough the same lineup, even with big stars available again. Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka both came off the bench against City to start their campaigns, having played no part in pre-season following post-World Cup breaks.
“The reason this was such an ominous afternoon for the chasing pack is the fact Mikel Arteta’s team played with intensity of a team with everything to prove.”
Now it would have been nice if they had added “and we didn’t expect them to have that. In fact we expected them to take a saunter in the park while still trying to work out what their best line up for the coming season might be, but to our total surprise Arsenal apparently knew what they were doing during the transfer window, and now we can see the results.”
Anyway, there is a sign that maybe the newspaper’s writers have got the message when they now say, “Arsenal remain ravenous for success.” And that I think is the key message. It really does look like Arteta has said, “Last season was just the start. We are going to exceed what Arsenal did in the 1930s.”
Indeed there is an extra point there. Everyone knows that Sir Henry Norris persuaded Herbert Chapman to come to Arsenal (who had never won anything) having just won three successive titles with Huddersfield Town. Arteta was brought in because the Arsenal ownership had made a total balls up of appointing Emery as manager and needed a way out of that mess quickly.
What is forgotten is that Chapman took over a club that had missed relegation by one place, and in his first season took Arsenal up to second in the league. Arteta has done it differently – he had two 8th place finishes and a fifth, before that run as runners’ up.
But in both cases it seems, once the new manager had got things sorted Arsenal were away and flying. Chapman took five seasons before he won the league with Arsenal during which time the club sank as low as 14th (in the 1929/30 season). Arteta took us through five complete seasons with the club coming 8th, 5th, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd. And then the title.
And now, rather like Chapman with his run of finishing 11th, 10th, 9th, and 14th, Arteta has reached the top spot, and by the look of things it seems he would rather like to stay there.
