By Tony Attwood
- Losing a match badly in the early days of the sseason
- Premier League losses club by club: part 2. It’s rather frightening!
Herbert Chapman took Arsenal to 14th position in the league in 1929/30. The following season he won the league. Then after winning the league three times in succession, in 1935/6 Arsenal came sixth.
Put another way, no one wins everything all the time, and cock-ups happen. They don’t mean that everything that went before was a fluke, or that the team is rubbish, it just means that just like most of us, Arsenal management and players can have bad days. We might hate it but that’s how it is.
So when the media now wants to dismiss all of Arsenal’s endeavours and achievements in recent years because of one match, they are talking total bollocks. Only Wenger’s Invincibles were, well, invincible, and not long after that a lot of “fans” turned against him and said it was time to go. Arteta will know that is how the media and some fans work, and he won’t be affected.
Put another way, it is better to have all your mistakes in one match rather than spread over three. Or indeed you can ask how many of the current top eight are going to be there at the end of the season? Arsenal, ManC…. any others?
| P | W | D | L | F | A | +/- | Pts | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manchester City | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 2 | +6 | 12 |
| 2 | Arsenal | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 4 | +4 | 12 |
| 3 | Brighton & Hove Albion | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 16 | 5 | +11 | 10 |
| 4 | Brentford | 5 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 10 | 4 | +6 | 9 |
| 5 | Everton | 5 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 6 | 3 | +3 | 9 |
| 6 | Leeds United | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 3 | +4 | 8 |
| 7 | Hull City | 5 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 4 | +2 | 8 |
| 8 | Newcastle United | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 8 |
Few seasons get by without a disaster happening somewhere and sometime, and yes of course if we get a series of defeats following this one I am going to be very pissed off. But one disaster? When Chapman won his first title with Arsenal the club won 28 out of 42 games, drew 10 and lost four. Which is to say that Arsenal won 66% of their games. Last season Arsenal won 68% of their games. This season so far Arsenal have won 80% of their games and people are suddenly suggesting it is a disaster. So, yes, we go our separate ways.
Of course everyone can have an opining; it is just minie is different from theirs. Maybe all is lost already because Manchester City, still never been held to account because of their accounting, and will go on winning league. I hope not but the failure to deal with them has always been an utter disaster for the Premier League and might well continue.
But if they go on unrestricted, winning every single match, we are not going to catch them anyway, but no one outside the hardcord ManC supporting group will think that they have achieved that victory through fair means in the normal sense of the term.
So we have to live with that feeling, just as we have to live with the fact that Arsenal have just lost 3-0 to Brighton. We have beaten them 20 times, drawn seven and lost nine (I hope that is right, the stats website I normally use is not responding properly this morning. May be it is in shock too). Defeats do happen.
And we can be sure Arteta will recover. The players will recover and Arsenal will recover. Maye this is the start of the end although at the moment it looks as if ManC will go on, spending as much as they want on anyone they want, and win the league. But even that won’t wipe out last season’s Arsenal achievement.
And maybe just like Chapman’s opening seasons with Arsenal, Arteta may take the club up and down a bit. Maybe people will actually look up the record books and see that at the start of Arsenal’s glorious run in the 1930s the club in 1930 itself, under Chapman, actually lost more matches than they won and came 14th in the league.
And maybe some of us will think, yes, cock-ups do happen and some of us will recognise that we have just had a really grotty result in which a veteran and a teenager took Arsenal to bits and ended up in the league two points behind us.
We have won four and lost one having scored eight and conceded four. That means we have won 80% of our league games that far. Last season we won 68% of our league games all told. “Ah,” but say the nay-sayers, “if we go on playing like that they we are gong to lose a lot more than the five games we lost last season.
Except in the first five last season we won three, lost one and drew one, and as I recall we went on to win the league. So we are still doing better than last year.
Of course I would much sooner we had won than lost yesterday at Falmer, but I wasn’t banking on a second unbeaten season this campaign – and maybe the management and the players will have learned something yesterday. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be dropped with a bump this early on, and to allow everyone else to have a laugh, so we can get on with working out what went wrong and ensure that it is put right.
Thankfully we have an extraordinary 30 days before the next game, and hopefully not too many of our players will be injured playing the pointless internationals in the interim. We can then come back against Leeds on 10 October and show the world just how recoveries work.
