Arsenal's secret that has taken the rest of the league by surprise
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By Tony Attwood
One of the things about Arsenal this season is that by and large, they seem to have planned rather well in terms of having cover for injuries, international call-ups and similar disruptions. Which seems to contrast rather well with the situation at Tottenham Hots.
For it is being written that Tottenham “currently find themselves in an extremely high-stakes race against time only to be repeatedly thwarted at every turn by a mixture of internal sabotage, the unbearable burden of leadership and immense dissatisfaction among the rank and file,” according to the Guardian.
Indeed, the newspaper, which has often been seen to be fairly positive toward the Hots, recently said,“A chaotic improvisation that suggests the club hierarchy are just making things up as they go along, one ill-judged managerial appointment at a time.”
We may compare this with Arsenal, where the failing Emery was sacked after 78 games and replaced by Arsenal’s most successful manager ever.
Now in effect, football is chaotic – players get injured, players lose form, there is that rarely discussed mental health pressure on players given that they are eternally in the public eye but often have little or no help to support themselves or their families psychologically, and so on.
And really there should not be too much to worry about when we look at Tottenham’s fixtures. Sunderland away, Brighton at home, Wolverhampton and Aston Villa away and Leeds at home, Only the Villa match looks the slightest bit troublesome. But troublesome it is. And compare that with Arsenal’s fixture list, which includes a couple of Champions League games and an away game to Manchester City which will probably be described as a “six pointer,” but will only bring ManC three points closer to Arsenal if they win. Which I hope they don’t.
I suppose what is making some people a bit uppity about Tottenham is that they have not won a single one of their last 13 league games, whereas Arsenal have only lost one of their last 13 league games.
In fact if we go back to the start of the year (which I seem to recall was on 1 January) the league table then read
At the moment of that league table after 19 games, Tottenham were not doing particularly well, but any talk about relegation would have been dismissed as typical wild Arsenal rumour mongering and dismissed at once by the media.
Yet today the table reads
|Team|P|W|D|L|F|A|GD|Pts|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|1|Arsenal|31|21|7|3|61|22|39|70|
|17|Tottenham Hotspur|31|7|9|15|40|50|-10|30|
… and the distance between Tottenham in 17th and West Ham in the first relegation position of 18th is just one point.
In fact what we could do is have a look here at the last six games table, including the top and bottom four.
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Now if you have been reading our commentary on Arsenal’s 100 years in the top divisin on the Arsenal History website, you might have noticed that by chance we have got to 1977/78 – a season in which we make no reference to any Arsenal / Tottenham games because that was the season Tottenham were playing in the second diviision having been relegated in the season before.
And I mention this because I have heard a few discussions in which it is said that it will be bad if Tiottenham go down, but they have gone down before, and immediately come back up again. And indeed in 1977/78 Tottenham did indeed get promotion from the second division, as it was then called.
But only just. Here’s the final league table
So perhaps one should not be too anticipatory about Tottenham bouncing straight back if they do go down at the end of this season. They might like it in the Championship. .
Indeed, there are a few warnings drifting around already. For example The Daily Mail (a right wing English newspaper) has a reputation for getting its retailiation in before the other side strikes, and it is certainly living up to that notin at the moment as it is reporting that some fans of Tottenham Hots have launched a ‘No to Roberto De Zerbi’ campaign even before the poor chap has said he will sign.
Sky called him a “combustible Italian” so I suppose the club will be putting in some new fire hydrants.
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Arsenal's secret that has taken the rest of the league by surprise
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