Arsenal ‘fresh injury nightmare’ leaves them with no strikers as Harry Kane ‘transfer verdict’ revealed

Editor F365 12 Feb 2025 11:30 AM

Harry Kane has been linked with a move to Arsenal.

Kai Havertz will be delighted to know that his injury setback – sorry, nightmare – has seen him upgraded to Proper Striker status after all. Plus there’s some more nonsense about Harry Kane and even more nonsense about Arsenal.

Kai Havertz: An apology
On behalf of all UK football media, we issue the following apology re. Arsenal striker Kai Havertz.

Previous coverage of the former Chelsea forward may have created the impression that he is not in fact a Proper Striker, and his presence in the Arsenal team a clear indicator of just how far short they remain of achieving their goals.

We may or may not have spent the entirety of January insisting that Arsenal needed to sign a Proper Striker, lest Havertz ruin their season entirely with his ineptitude.

We now realise that his tally of 15 goals this season is absolutely fine, and that his injury during Arsenal’s warm-weather training camp this week therefore represents a ‘fresh injury crisis’ (the Mirror), a ‘fresh nightmare injury concern’ (the Mirror again), a ‘fresh injury nightmare’ (Daily Star), and a ‘plunge into injury crisis’ (Daily Mail) as ‘key man suffers scare’ (Daily Express) to leave Arsenal ‘without any strikers’ (The Sun).

We are happy to correct the record.

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Harry’s game
One striker Arsenal were never signing in January despite all manner of excitable guff about release clauses was Harry Kane.

Mediawatch has long been obsessed with just how overpowered the humble ‘as’ has become in your modern football headline armoury.

We’ve toyed previously with the idea of some kind of Headline Word Power Rankings, an idea doomed to only be of interest to us and literally two other humans (not, admittedly, a hurdle that has stopped us before), and we’re starting to think ‘as’ might genuinely be top.

Its value is twofold, operating as a kind of bullsh*t amplifier and deception diffuser, allowing an irresistible yet entirely illusory idea to be compiled and spread from two entirely separate events.

And the best part is you don’t even need both of those events to be bullsh*t. Indeed, ‘as’ is probably at its most potent in headlines when it joins one real but uninteresting piece of information to a flimsily far-fetched but intoxicating one.

Which leads us in the most roundabout of ways to the Mirror, and this magnificent bollocks.

Arsenal news: Gunners given Harry Kane transfer verdict as bid for striker explained

Even without the many, many clues in the six paragraphs above, we’re confident that you, like us, had already assumed a few things about this headline before clicking on it. Because it contains many of its own clues, doesn’t it?

Clue one: It is in the Mirror.

Clue two: ‘Arsenal news:’ Tabloid websites love these ‘round-up’ stories of the day’s news for a particular club. Not because it provides a useful one-stop shop for fans to get all the info they need about the goings-on at their club – the readers are there to be tricked and deceived into handing over their clicks, not provided with a useful, trustworthy and reliable service. No, these sites like these stories specifically because they allow the deployment of the ‘as’ headline style linking two entirely unconnected events.

Clue three: ‘as’. Our old favourite.

But the specifics of how this entirely deceptive yet technically-not-actually-wrong headline has been confected still merit piecing together.

The ‘Harry Kane transfer verdict’ Arsenal have been ‘given’? Does it come from Harry Kane, or Bayern Munich or even dear old Charlie Kane? Obviously not. Good God no. It comes from Joe Cole, of course, who has said, quite reasonably, that Harry Kane probably won’t join Arsenal.

That’s that dealt with.

But what about the ‘bid for striker explained’? Have Arsenal actually made a bid for Harry Kane?

Again, no, of course they haven’t. But what they did do was bid for Ollie Watkins, didn’t they? And he’s a striker, isn’t he? And Football.London have had a story explaining some of the ins and outs of the timing of that bid with regards to Jhon Duran’s departure from Villa.

And if you take Joe Cole saying Arsenal won’t sign Harry Kane, and Football.London explaining why Arsenal made a bid for Ollie Watkins and feed that into the great Reach headline-o-matic, out pops that unimprovable nonsense.

Captain Obvious
Declan Rice has said some unremarkable things about Arsenal’s season that have been turned into guff almost everywhere, but nowhere guffier than the Express.

Declan Rice vows ‘big things are coming’ for Arsenal in obvious message to Liverpool

You already know precisely how many mentions he made of Liverpool in this ‘obvious’ message. Of course it’s zero. That actually is obvious.

He did say this, though.

“There’s still a really long way to go. The manager said in a press conference the other week, no matter what, the only thing we can worry about is ourselves.”

That is, if anything, the opposite of a message to Liverpool, isn’t it? Obvious or otherwise. It’s another tough day in Mediawatch’s losing (lost?) battle for the idea that words have meanings.

After burners
More words and meaning content, we’re afraid, as we charitably give the Daily Star a tiny little helping hand with their headlines.

What the Daily Star have written is this:

Pep Guardiola made view clear on Jadon Sancho after Chelsea ace’s petulant dig at Man Utd

When what they actually meant was:

Pep Guardiola made view clear on Jadon Sancho six years before Chelsea ace’s petulant dig at Man Utd

And even that is generous, given the way Guardiola made his ‘view clear on Jadon Sancho’ in 2019 was saying ‘I don’t know why’ Sancho left the club in 2017.

Capitalisation of the Day
From the Mirror: