Last night I watched you batter the best team in Europe for half an hour. I watched Ozil and Wilshere dominate midfield without Ozil, in particular, getting any credit whatsoever from the so called TV experts. I saw Ozil win a penalty with a brilliant flash of skill - no praise from the so called experts - but when he missed it - the comments verged on personal abuse. Bayern missed a penalty and guess what - no critical comments!! In the second half you put up a wonderful defensive display but all we got from the experts is ' when will Wenger take Ozil off? ' At the end they kept up the line that Ozil had not put in an effort for the Team yet I understand the stats proved that Ozil covered more ground than any Bayern player and all but two of Arsenal players!! Then, after the game, the Scouser know all moaned about Flamini spending too much time organising his defence and not enough time getting his tackles in. Is this the same Flamini I saw put his body on the line time after time in the second half and the same experts who spent the last few years telling us that your biggest problem was the lack of someone to organise your defence? I understand that a lot of the press this morning have gone down the same track. Whenever you play teams like Palace, Hull or Cardiff who ' park the bus ' and you have trouble breaking it down all you get from the media is that you lacked the skill to break it down - when it happens to one of the other big Clubs all you hear about is the incredible defensive display by the smaller club. When it looked a couple of weeks ago that you might slip out of the title race most of the media were as excited as a schoolboy heading to the toilet with a porn mag? Why? I am not an Arsenal fan as such. I have been going to Carrow Road for 63 years and will continue to go every home match for as long as the Good Lord allows. I am a Canary through and through and want us to win every game including those against Arsenal but I am also a great lover of football and love to watch the way you try and play the game and, for what it matters, the way your Club has been run under Wenger. I watch a lot of football on the television but Arsenal are the only team I will go out of my way to watch. I would really love it if you only lost one more match this season - won't mention which one - and won a treble so you could turn round to the so called experts in the media and tell them to stick there opinions where the sun don't shine. Sorry to intrude on you board but the unfair attitude of the media towards you has been getting on my nerves for some time and the reaction to last night reached new levels.
We're kinda used to it by now - and thanks for your support! The media know which stories will sell and wont necessarily let the truth get in the way of a good story. Media 'pundits' are often selected for their controversial views rather than their knowledge and experience (maybe not including Gary Neville there). On other threads on this board our own fans have been 'constructively' criticising Ozil - he cost a lot and expectations are high. We are considered to be a 'big' club and so will be newsworthy. The bias will even out over a season, but a story is a story. Good luck to Norwich for the rest of the season
Thanks for that fella. Just a shame we do have not much to show by way of a trophy over the past 8yrs. That failure to win a major trophy is the monkey on ours and Wenger's back. I really don't care what we win, FA cup, mickey mouse.... I hope our players particularly the ones we have nurtured, do not feel the need to go else where to fufill their ambitions. We keep hearing we have gone about our business the right way, or we have a moral victory the shame for me is we seem to fluff our lines at the business end of the season, Burnley last season, Birmingham and a few losses to Chelsea in the FA cup. Just a shame we are not able to stick a finger to the bad guys! I will not judge our season on a failure to to progress in the Champions League, particularly against teams like Bayern who have all but sewn up the Bundesliga! I just hope we can give a good account of ourselves in a winnable game against Everton at home in the FA cup. If we win that and avoid Citeh in the Semis, it will be anybody's game in the final!
This is at the heart of it. Wenger came to England and tore up the old textbook on how the game should be played and developed. He took the game out of the depths of pies, ***s, pints and hoofball and created an exciting new game based on skill and technical excellence. Wenger's football has always been a bit of a slap in the face for the old English game and the media over the years have liked nothing better than seeing him fail.
I don't think the whole foreign players thing helped either, or the reputation we had for cheating, largely due to Pires' dive against Portsmouth
I don't think they have it in for us, the problem that exists is sport saturation. Not too many years ago the only live football we had were internationals and the FA Cup final, football focus for half an hour Saturday mornings and an hour of Match of the Day in the evening, this week along there will have been hundreds of hours of pre CL coverage and post match analysis. Ex players now make a living out of punditry and they must fill in every second of coverage with commentary, much of what gets said is rubbish or repeat because it's impossible to be original when scores beforehand and covered every conceivable angle/rumour/stat to death. Tomorrow Sky will have their cameras pointing at every premier lge manager as they perform press conferences, then they'll be a gazillion hours of analysing the weekends action, then a whole load more predicting next weeks action. It's relentless and saturation point isn't far away I feel....
It's easy lazy journalism from the media and it's encouraged by how quickly everyone including our own fans jump onto the bandwagon.
why ? is it because: Arsenal buy players that they can afford without having unrepayable debts; our board were old school tie types; AW is french; AW changed how teams train and revolutionised their fitness and diet regime [and excluded them from drinking]; AW has stuck to his principals about how we play football, and that it should be played in a certain way; AW bought foreign players cheaply at the expense of British players not getting in the team; Arsenal always sell their best players to everyone else. take your pick, it is probably 1 or more of the above, or is it simply that the journalists just dont like AW. i am old enough to remember that we are "lucky" Arsenal, and that we only won because we are "lucky" and that skill and good play had nothing to do with it. opposition fans still sing "same old Arsenal always cheating". Arsenal could win today 5 nil or go and beat Bayern Munich 5 nil away from home and we would still get negative press. Chavski and Jose get good press whatever he says or how well they play. today they get a winner in the 96th minute, and yet jose will be hailed a mastermind. it used to be the same about SAF and Manure, never do anything wrong, never say anything wrong. perhaps we should adopt the Millwall approach and start singing "we are Arsenal no one likes us, we dont care". or perhaps we should go get a new owner who sacks our manager every season, or a new loud mouth uncouth manager who spunks up £500 million on foreign players to get instant results, and then lets British players rot in the reserves or go out on loan to Championship sides so that they arent available for any PL teams. or we could show some faith in AW and back him both on here and at the ground. we cant change the media but we can change how neutral fans think about us. anyway good luck to the poster and Norwich and hope you stay up, as i like Delias cooking x x x
