Arsenal's team tonight, the media's prediction and the media's reaction tomorrow.
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By Tony Attwood
So now we have a new way of insulting and attacking Arsenal. “most gruelling of title pursuits…”, and “another night of football as pain, sport as trauma…” We’ve moved on to yet another way of attacking Arsenal. Arsenal may win the league, but with terrible football. Bring back ManC s league winners, they know how to do football properly – who cares about the money?
So here we have it. No mention of the billions of pounds spent on making the “project” work, no mention of over 110 contraventions of the rules all now quietly put away and forgotten, no – it is now all about the fact that Arsenal were not entertaining enough. Not like that Manc team.
Of course, no one knows where the Manc manager is going, but we can only hope it is somewhere a very long way away, involving a competition Arsenal does not compete in.
And so will Manc ever have to answer for the 100+ breakages of the rules? It looks like … well what does it look like? Like the League has been waiting for the Manc manager to leave before they punish him with a ban from management that cannot reach him… Or they dish out a punishment which won’t be imposed on the new manager, as that would be unfair, so Manc get away with it all, once more.
Or maybe they do have the guts to punish ManC, but only once the Arabian influence has gone. Which suggests that the manager leaves, his staff leave, and then the current owners sell the club and retreat from English football, leaving it scarred, battered and bruised, with players demanding to leave and a dreadful sinking feeling surrounding the entire entity that was once the best league in the world. And Arsenal’s winning of the league tarred forever by the thought that this was when there was all that cheating going on…
And as for those 100+ charges – well, that was all to do with the old regime, and they have all gone now, so it would hardly be fair to punish the new people who are valiantly trying to keep the club solvent without Arabian money.
As I say, who knows, but I rather suspect that just like the way ManC have run rings around football for the last ten years or so, it will be wholly unedifying, and rules won’t mean a thing.
And what of the media? As suggested in comments here, they will pretend that they were pushing for a proper investigation of Manc finances all the time but the league were so slow it was a scandal. Nothing to do with the media, oh no. They just report football…
But increasingly, football is politics. The politics that allow ludicrously rich men to buy a club, break the rules, win everything and then vanish without punishment. The simple fact is that the League’s management committee is not fit to run the League, but because they are self-electing, they will carry on. Another ManC will appear and get away with it for ten years and then take the finance somewhere else.
Arsenal are five points clear of ManC with one game to play. Manc have two games to play. The goal difference of the two clubs is identical at +43, but ManC have scored morer goals.
Arsenal have a possible total points of 85 and a lowest obviously of 82, which is what they have at the moment.
And given the way ManC have conducted themselves in the past, leading to the oft noted 100+ breakages of the rules, they could be trying anything under the sun. After all that is what they have been doing in the past – and getting away with it, or so it seems. But of course I just write what I feel – I have no evidence, I leave all that up to the League.
But just in case you think I am making too much of the ManC crimes against the rules of the League, imagine that a few years ago I had written a piec about how in the coming years ManC will be found guilty of over 100 breaches of league rules, will tell the League that if they take the matter further that ManC will then tie the league up in so many legal knots it will itself go into liquidation, and their manager who was in charge during all this period will be lauded as one of the all time greats. Even I wouldn’t have believed such a scenario could have been on the horizon a few years ago. But here we are.
Of course I want Arsenal to win the League with a fine win in the last game of the season. I just wish that this title – if we get it – would not forever be accompanied by an asterisk explaining just how many tricks the Mancs had pulled to try and stop Arsenal winning the title, and just how much criticism of Arsenal’s style of play the media had thrown at the club – at least until it became apparent that indeed Arsenal might actually win the league.
And what about that asterisk after Arsenal’s name in the league table? I want it to refer to a footnote saying that Arsenal won despite the second-placed team being found guilty of over 100 breaches of the league’s financial rules during the seasons leading up to 2025/6, while persuading all the media to run stories about how negative the Arsenal style of football was. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Arsenal style didn’t become known as “anti-football” while the ManC approach this season became known as the “golden age” of the Premier League.
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Arsenal's team tonight, the media's prediction and the media's reaction tomorrow.
Next Post Coming Soon...