Why Mikel Arteta ‘has to look at himself’ and his ‘mentality muppets’

Arsenal beat Newcastle United but a man who thinks Mikel Arteta is The Deluded One still has to have a dig.

We also have the least unlikely midfield stand-out and a supercomputer run by brainiacs and boffins…

When the result ruins a good narrative

‘Mikel Arteta is in danger of becoming The Deluded One and must accept Arsenal have gone backwards’

‘Arsenal are more mentality muppets than monsters and you can see why fans have major reservations over Mikel Arteta’

Those are just two of the headlines from The Sun in the last few months on pieces written by Football Editor Charlie Wyett about Arsenal and Arteta.

So when he was tasking with writing a match report for Arsenal’s victory over Newcastle United, he apparently could not bring himself to delete the lines clearly written before the Gunners’ late winner:

Arsenal were then livid as they felt Gabriel was fouled when Woltemade scored but Gabriel went down far too easily.

Equally, Arteta, although unhappy with some of the decisions, has to look at himself.

He was forced to start defender William Saliba on the subs bench due to an ankle injury but maybe he should not have played all 90 minutes of the Carabao Cup win against Port Vale.

Over-playing his stars, and then seeing them injured, is something Arteta does far too regularly.

He started defender Cristhian Mosquera, who has done well since arriving from Valencia, but he was so poor that he was put out of his misery at half-time.

So to recap: Mikel Arteta did not over-play Saliba at Newcastle but instead trusted a player who had been brilliant this season, and then corrected what had become a mistake at half-time. He really does need to ‘look at himself’, doesn’t he?

And maybe he will then accept that he is ‘deluded’ and he is in charge of ‘mentality muppets’.

READ: Arteta swaps handbrake for kitchen sink as Arsenal outlast Newcastle and The Conspiracy

Who saw that Arsenal performance coming?

It’s not important (none of this is important) but the Daily Mail headline of ‘Newcastle 1-2 Arsenal VERDICT: Mikel Arteta takes the Gunners’ handbrake off and an unlikely midfield standout shines at St James’ Park’ really needs to deliver a more unlikely midfield standout than outstanding midfielder Eberechi Eze.

The geek double

Usually the tabloids opt for boffins or brainiacs to describe people who can turn on computers but The Sun have excelled themselves here:

A supercomputer devised by boffins and brainiacs over at Plejmo surprisingly reckons Arsenal will win the league by six points.

Boffins and brainiacs!

It’s little wonder that The Sun have chosen to trust Plejmo (‘the largest collection of movies in the Nordics’, according to LinkedIn) over the fools at Opta – who presumably only have boffins – who have predicted that Liverpool (reigning champions and top of the actual Premier League table) will win the title.

They need to get themselves some brainiacs.

What a Guehi day

Mediawatch has grown quite impervious to most of the nonsenses in today’s media but there is some absolute bull around after Marc Guehi was part of the Crystal Palace side to beat Liverpool on Saturday, and it truly perturbs us.

Let’s not pretend that footballers do not regularly Google their own names, and if Guehi did that this Monday morning after a phenomenal weekend in Palace colours:

Marc Guehi shows true colours with post-match actions as Liverpool transfer mistake laid bare

He must read that headline and wonder what the f*** he did ‘post-match’ that showed his ‘true colours’.

And you have to wade through over 600 words of perfectly fine content about the class of Guehi in victory over a Liverpool side that was at times defensively shambolic, to get to these ‘post-match actions’:

Even at the full-time whistle, there was a chance for a post-match embrace with Van Dijk but Guehi gave the Dutchman a small tap on the back and merely walked off. He did not want the plaudits as in his view, it was simply job done.

So he played brilliantly and then gave Van Dijk ‘a small tap on the back’? In what world is that him showing his ‘true colours’?

The answer is that it’s clearly absolute bollocks and nobody at the Mirror believes it is significant either; they are just charged with finding something that shows anybody’s ‘true colours’, presumably because an e-mail has been circulated about the phrases that prompt the highest click-through rates on Google Discover.

Also on that list was presumably ‘speaks volumes’ as we are told by the Liverpool Echo that ‘Marc Guehi makes new Liverpool claim after collapsed transfer – and it speaks volumes’.

Does he make a ‘new Liverpool claim’? Does he balls. What he did was write the programme notes for the Liverpool match. And the only reference to the Reds was this:

That mentality will not change when we take on Liverpool at Selhurst today. We know how well they have started this season, with seven straight wins in all competitions, including in Europe. But we are in our own brilliant run of form, and as we showed against Liverpool at Wembley back in August, on our day, we have the ability to compete with the very best sides in the world.

So his ‘new Liverpool claim after collapsed transfer’ was that Crystal Palace were really going to try and compete against Liverpool.

Nobody thinks this ‘speaks volumes’, least of all the people writing this sh*t.