Mediawatch: Will Arsenal ever face a trickier opponent?

Daniel Storey

Laying it on a little bit thick
‘Even if the Gunners go on to reach Wembley, they will have few trickier ties than this’ – John Cross, Daily Mirror.

Literally true – they only have a maximum of three more ties. But we’ll remind you of this when Chelsea, Manchester United or Manchester City have more than six shots and one on target against Arsenal.

 

Ha! He ate a pie in an off-the-cuff, pastry-based display of banter
February 14: Sutton United announces a short-term sponsorship deal with bookmakers Sun Bet.

February 15: The Sun asks Sutton United reserve goalkeeper Wayne Shaw for his assessment of every teammate as part of their coverage. It is banterous.

February 18: The Sun interview Shaw about his love of pies, because sports journalism is a bit f*cked.

February 19: Sun Bets offers a special price of 8/1 for Shaw to be seen eating a pie on the bench during Sutton’s match with Arsenal.

February 20: Shaw eats a pie on the bench during Sutton’s match with Arsenal.

February 20: The Sun run a story on their website headlined ‘Sutton reserve keeper Wayne Shaw chomps a pie gives two fingers up to the modern footballer’s lean diet’. That headline does not make grammatical sense, but hey.

February 21: The Sun’s newspaper edition on Wednesday makes a story out of the pie-eating, which focuses solely on the betting angle.

Set aside the insider betting furore, and focus instead on how even football’s supposedly light-hearted moments are now manufactured and exploited by a tabloid newspaper and its affiliate betting partner. Now that’s magic…

 

Ten thousand spoons

That’s a writer for the newspaper who made a deliberate song and dance of Shaw, and whose sister company organised the stunt, telling everyone to stop talking about it.

Mediawatch looks forward is scratching its ears off in anticipation of the indignant ‘football takes itself too seriously’ pieces when Shaw is charged by the Football Association.

 

Fat’s entertainment
Interesting that Shaw was so keen to embrace his weight and have it widely mocked by Sun Bets and, on Tuesday morning, Good Morning Britain, because he doesn’t exactly have history for taking that approach.

In December 2013, Shaw was released by Sutton United after he climbed over advertising hoardings to fight Kingstonian fans who were taunting him about his weight.

“So for the record, calling someone fat, asking them if they are the fitness coach and laughing at them is banter I find not acceptable in today’s society,” Shaw said at the time. “Please correct me if I am wrong, but in any walk of life if you say this to someone then you have got to fear a backlash, and that is what this was.”

“Sun Bets had us at 8-1 to eat a pie,” said Shaw on Monday evening. “I thought I would give them a bit of banter and let’s do it.”

It matters more when there’s money on it.

 

They come over here…
On Monday evening, Martin Keown was part of the BBC’s punditry team for Arsenal’s FA Cup game at Sutton. At half-time, when the panel were reviewing several incidents from the first half, the BBC showed footage of Craig Eastmond tackling Mohamed Elneny.

Cue Keown’s frankly mental take on the situation:

“This one from Eastmond on Elneny. I mean look, bang. Just a little taster. You’re the foreign player who has come over here to take my place. And I’ll let you know.”

So Keown is suggesting that Eastmond went in hard on Elneny not because he wanted to put down a marker in a cup tie, not because he was pumped to play against his former club and not because hard, fair tackling is what tenacious central midfielders do, but because Elneny is foreign. Sheesh.

As for ‘come over here to take my place’, Eastmond was released by Arsenal in 2013 having not made a league appearance since 2010. Elneny was signed in January 2016. You can step down, Sergeant Brexit.

 

Why the Premier League is rubbish
This may shock you, but in the Daily Mirror Stan Collymore is annoyed. This week, he is annoyed that Burnley lost to Lincoln, because it means the Premier League is a bit sh*t.

‘I have to think that result says more about the quality – or lack of it – in the Premier League than it does in non-League football,’ begins Collymore in a sentence that makes no grammatical sense.

‘Sean Dyche played more or less his first team, they were at home and it should have been 2-0 or 3-0 comfortably for Burnley.’

Dyche made six changes, but do carry on.

‘There’s not a cat in hell’s chance that a fifth-tier side from Spain would beat a Valencia or any of the other top sides. Likewise in Germany, it wouldn’t happen there either.’

There is one good reason why a fifth-tier side from Spain hasn’t beaten Valencia or any other top side, and that’s because fifth-tier teams aren’t invited to take part in the Copa del Rey.

However, in Germany Sportfreunde Lotte of the third tier did beat Werder Bremen and Bayer Leverkusen this season – both significantly bigger clubs than Burnley – and face Borussia Dortmund in the DFB Pokal quarter-finals. Collymore’s anger that no German teams would lose at home to minnows is offset by the fact that all German top-flight teams are drawn away in the Pokal first round. Presumably Ulf Kirsten is writing a column as we speak about why German clubs are so arrogant about the Bundesliga.

‘It was a reminder that our top league’s individual players aren’t as good as we think they are.’

And nothing sums up the Premier League’s greed and arrogance more than Burnley, right?

Why on earth does Burnley’s defeat to Lincoln prove that the Premier league isn’t as good as it thinks it is? A non-league team has beaten a top-flight team twice in 27 years; it’s hardly cause for panic.

It might suggest that English football has more strength in depth – in terms of professionalism – than any other league in Europe. It might suggest that the gap in average player quality between lesser top-flight clubs and the club at the top of the non-league ladder is smaller than in other countries. It might suggest that top-flight clubs care less about the FA Cup than they used to. But using a much-changed Burnley’s defeat to Lincoln as evidence of unsubstantiated Premier League arrogance over La Liga and Bundesliga? Welcome to the house of the straw man…

 

Brucie Bonus
Because Mediawatch has both a good memory and an unattractive fondness for pedantry, a thought sprung to mind when seeing that Aston Villa had lost a fifth successive match on Monday night: Does the Daily Mail’s Martin Samuel still think that Steve Bruce should get the England job?

Here’s Samuel, from June 2016. Yes, last year:

‘I think the captain of Manchester United knows who can play and who can’t. I think he knows how to play, too. And I think Bruce, old school though he may be, has the gravitas to stand in a dressing room of England internationals, and make them listen. Steve Bruce would be my England manager.’

Just a shame he can’t seem to make non-England internationals listen.

 

Breaking news…

More as we get it, but we’re hearing that Chris Coleman might also play a part…

 

It’s like manna from heaven
When asked by Sky Sports for their prediction of the three clubs that will be relegated this season, it is to Phil Thompson and Paul Merson’s credit that both picked Marco Silva’s Hull City to be relegated.

However, the pair had some unusually kind words for Silva. He’s Merson:

“Hull’s form under Marco Silva has been great, especially the home win over Liverpool, and people might wonder why I’m going for them to go down. They have done well against teams like Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea and Arsenal – but those games are free swings when you’ve got nothing to lose. In their next few games they will be playing other teams around them and need to go and attack them. The pressure will be on them to win matches.”

No mention of his previous assessment of Silva, though Mediawatch did enjoy the logic of ‘it’s easy to beat the best teams’. As for Thommo…

“Then I’ve gone for Hull. Squad-wise they are probably not strong enough. Marco Silva has done extremely well but I’m not sure they’ve got enough.”

Neither voiced their concerns that Silva “doesn’t know the Premier League”, nor the Portuguese’s inability to “dig in”. Funny, that.

 

The name’s Bond…
‘Arsenal and Tottenham are in a tug-of-war over Toulouse’s Issa Diop. The bitter rivals sent spies to watch the centre-back, 20, at PSG on Sunday’ – The Sun.

‘Spies’, or scouts as we call them in football. Reports of Arsenal’s head scout wearing a fake moustache and muttering ‘red fox’ under his breath are, for now, unconfirmed.

 

Stones, glass houses
‘Zola needs to go to a Rochdale, a Lincoln City, and prove himself and not just rely on a name he made for himself in his playing days,’ writes Stan Collymore in his national newspaper column.

 

Recommended reading of the day
Jonathan Wilson on the evolution of the full-back.

James Horncastle on Juventus.

Igor Mladenovic on Monaco.