By Tony Attwood
One of my big concerns about British society and the way the country of my birth is travelling, is the focus constantly on individual detail and not on the bigger picture.
Sometimes the details are very big – like the failure of big projects to be delivered on time and on budget Crossrail, the behind time over-budget London rail system, is the obvious most recent example, which Blacksheep and I were discussing last night while waiting for the train north out of Finsbury Park.
And there was another on the news this morning: the failure of the outsourced army recruitment programme ever to get anywhere near its target since it was set up, so now millions of pounds more has to be thrown at it.
I won’t bore you with the multiplicity of other failed and failing large scale outsourced projects because that’s not my point. My point is that no one is writing articles saying, “Hang on, all of these projects fail. Doesn’t that tell us something about the way we are organising them.
And contemplating football as a whole on the drive home after a rather cold night at Arsenal Stadium I felt there was something of the same within the game. These headlines below all come from the two papers I regularly read, the right wing Telegraph, and the Liberal Guardian. All of them are on the home page of their football sections on the internet this morning. And that’s my point – they are not accumulated from the past month or even week. They are on the home page of the football section today.
From the Guardian
- Exclusive Aston Villa remove MacDonald from coaching after new bullying claims
- Vidi 2 Chelsea 2: blues condemn own fans over anti-semitic chants in Budapest
- Sterling’s racism ordeal was ugly but the outcome has been positive
- Gündogan says being racially abused ‘hurts’
- It was a toxic bullying culture for young players at Aston Villa
And then after that little list of front pages we get
My thought immediately is we will get stories of bullying, anti-semitism and racism, but not according to the Guardian’s futurologists we will just get stories about football. It is as if they are not reading (or not connecting to) their own newspaper!
So what of the right wing Telegraph?
Now they don’t give us the five or ten things to look out for – but they will do today or tomorrow and they won’t include anything about bullying, racism, financial failure, anti-semitism etc.
There is this real disconnnect going on. It is a bit like the disconnect of the bloggettas which rant on about how we are going to buy these three players (all of whom are non-home-grown) while also telling us that the squad is very thin and we are hanging on by a thread because of injuries without noting that
a) For every new non-home-grown player we bring in we will have to sell one.
b) Our injury list is at worst average for the Premier League
c) Although we have two players suspended for the Southampton game, they will be back after one match, and even for Southampton we have a good collection of defensive players we can use as backup.
d) We have just gone something like 22 games undefeated. (Sorry I have lost count and the newspapers are not publishing anything about Arsenal being undefeated at the moment and I don’t really want to count it line by line).
I am not saying that every article has to include every fact, but rather a certain amount of realism should be introduced to football reporting, rather than the fantasy land of unreality that seems to exist.
In the serious papers there is a constant background that something is seriously wrong with football, (and we should notice that the abuse of young players is off the agenda at the moment although the enquiries are labouring their ways on very, very slowly), and yet these are kept disconnected from the constant “hey look at all the excitement you are going to get this weekend”.
The fact is that if this weekend is like football at the moment we are also going to get some very unpleasant stuff as well and maybe a bit of realism in recognising it might come in handy.
Fortunately, or perhaps because of excellent hard work, decent people, and quality supervision, Arsenal is not on the agenda when it comes to accusations of child abuse, racism, bullying or maladministration.
We have had some of those things in the past. Antisemitism was rife and you still hear it (it really was awful on the journey to the stadium for the Tottenham game and I know several season ticket holders who now refuse to go to the Tottenham game each year), but otherwise the club appears to be separated from what is happening in certain clubs. And at least we can say progress has been made on antisemitism, although it is still there.
But surely one day someone is going to start connecting up the all dots and say, “Actually, isn’t there something terribly wrong here?”
Or maybe it is just not a story anyone wants to tell.