‘Crazy’ Arsenal prove Champions League credentials, just like Wimbledon, as Liverpool hit by ‘dig’
There were three English teams in Champions League action last night and all three picked up impressive wins. Good for the co-efficient, terrible for Mediawatch.
We can’t even pretend the reaction to Arsenal beating Atletico Madrid 4-0 is overblown, can we? They absolutely did display their Champions League credentials, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Luckily, there is still some nonsense out there. There somehow always is.
Does that make me crazy?
Mediawatch feels slightly bad now for having a pop at The Sun for an oh-so-topical reference to the Crazy Gang when discussing Manchester United yesterday.
At least there it was just a throwaway line, albeit just mortifyingly out of date to those of us who know that the best and most topical references are obviously 30-year-old Simpsons quotes or lyrics from songs that to our horror we’ve just checked and discovered came out nearly 20 f*cking years ago. But definitely not 40-year-old football ones, is the point here.
A point that must now be reiterated because over at the Daily Telegraph Jason Burt has taken that Crazy Gang line and really, really, really run with it after Arsenal produced a thumping 4-0 Champions League win over Atletico Madrid that obviously simply screams mid-to-late 1980s Wimbledon. They were always up to that sort of thing, those wacky maniacs.
‘Crazy Gang’ blow Atletico away to put Arsenal in Champions League dreamland
We’ll leave it to Football Cliches to decide whether anyone can truly ever be in ‘Champions League dreamland’ three games into the low-intensity league phase. It’s the Crazy Gang we’re interested in.
Set-pieces, long throws, a big old No 9 banging them in from close-range and now cold showers. Mikel Arteta is turning Arsenal into a kind of blue-chip, luxury version of the Crazy Gang.
Is he, though? Is he doing that?
Not that Wimbledon ever played like this or achieved this kind of top-class result as Arsenal made the kind of statement performance that will resonate across Europe.
That’ll be a ‘no’, then.
It’s all about you
A fun game for us all to play. Let’s start with this headline from the Mirror.
Diego Simeone aims thinly-veiled dig at Liverpool after Arsenal humbling
And now your challenge. Which clever sausage can guess how many times Simeone mentions Liverpool in his thinly-veiled dig?
Oh. You all got it right. We thought that might be harder.
By the intro, Simeone’s thinly-veiled dig has become a ‘slight dig’ and finally, by the time his actual quote is revealed, a statement of the bleeding obvious.
For what Simeone has done, and this really is disgraceful, is say the Arsenal team that just thrashed his Atletico Madrid 4-0 are the best team they’ve faced so far this season. And who else have Atleti faced this season? That’s right, Liverpool. Who beat them 3-2 via one of what were at the time their trademark late winners. Very weird for Simeone to think the team that beat his team 4-0 is better than the team that needed an injury-time winner to beat them 3-2. Definitely something sus there.
For full transparency, the wildly out of control Simeone has also with this shocking comment aimed subtle and thinly-veiled digs at: Espanyol, Elche, Alaves, Villarreal, Real Mallorca, Rayo Vallecano, Real Madrid, Eintracht Frankfurt, Celta Vigo and Osasuna.
Truly he is the master of the dark arts. Meanwhile, we urge the Mirror’s pearl-clutchers not to glance at the Premier League table, lest they suffer a further attack of the vapours at the thinly-veiled dig it too is currently aiming in Liverpool’s direction.
As you like it
Regular Mediawatchers will know just what huge fans we are of the way ‘as’ has established itself as the single most powerful headline word in all of tabloidland due to its ability to seamlessly splice two entirely unrelated pieces of information into one captivating whole.
Examples are so widespread that we’ve long since given up any attempt to try and catalogue and record them all for prosperity, preferring now only to point out the very best examples of the genre. And this one from the Daily Star had us standing and applauding once we’d put all the moving parts together.
Man Utd news: ‘Brilliant’ £80m signing hailed as transfer target has said ‘yes’ to switch
Now obviously what we all instantly would know for sure is that this story is absolutely not in any way a story about Man United being about to sign anyone – ‘brilliant’ or otherwise – for £80m. That wouldn’t do at all.
But it’s just how very far from that the truth actually resides that makes this stand out.
The ‘£80m signing’? Mr Jacob Harry Maguire Esq. Why is he ‘brilliant’? Because Paul Scholes says so.
Fine, so that bit is just some tish and fipsy milking the very last drops from the giddy Anfield fallout three days on. No problems there. But there’s still some exciting news here, isn’t there? Even if it’s not a brilliant £80m signing, it’s still quite a big deal that a transfer target has said yes to joining. Isn’t it?
Well let us tell you it is absolutely not exciting news. Or in fact news of any kind. For the ‘transfer target’ who has said yes to joining Manchester United is none other than Robert Lewandowski.
Barcelona might release him in the summer, you see, what with him now being 37 and all. So where do United fit in here?
Because he has indeed said yes to joining them. Why has he said yes to joining United? Let’s defer to the great man himself.
‘I wanted to join Manchester United to see Alex Ferguson.’
If that sounds a bit of an odd thing to say in 2025, it’s because when he said yes to joining Manchester United we were all busy watching the London Olympics.
Reminder that the dictionary defines ‘as’ in this context as connecting ‘something that happens during the time when something else is taking place’. Not wanting to meet Sir Alex Ferguson in 2012 and Harry Maguire scoring a goal 13 years later.
The eyes have it
We had planned to just be a bit arsey here about the Mirror claiming Marcus Rashford scoring a couple of stat-padder gloss-adders in Barcelona’s 6-1 thrashing of Olympiacos being a ‘clear message’ to Man United or proving Ruben Amorim ‘wrong’ because we’re pretty sure Amorim never said Rashford couldn’t score a couple of goals against a beaten team that just wants the game to end.
But it would have been harsh of us. United and Amorim have made a mess of things with Rashford, there’s little doubt about that.
We had perhaps just naively and forlornly hoped that with United currently revelling in their post-Anfield glow and Rashford’s goals here not of a particularly vital variety that we might at least have found a situation where not everything good he does at Barcelona has to be some kind of pointed statement to United.
It was foolish of us. We’re mainly angry at ourselves.
However, we must now also concede that Rashford’s already impressive numbers at Barcelona are even better than they first appear, on the back of this revelation.
Rashford will be hoping that he can maintain his stunning form, with one eye on earning a permanent transfer to Barcelona and one on earning a place in Thomas Tuchel’s England squad for the 2026 World Cup.
Scoring all these goals while having one eye on his contract and one on the World Cup and, if our maths is right, therefore no eyes on the actual football is very impressive indeed.
