First off, after a few days of technical hoo-ha, everything should be working fine again. The apps for Android and iPhone, our feeds, the site, everything. So thanks a million to our splendid hosts Tagadab for all their assistance in tracking down, and sorting out, the problem.
If you ever need a website hosted, I recommend them like a fox. And it’s no longer a simple effort hosting this site. In the old days we shared some space on a server which was run on solid fuel, now we’ve got a data centre the size of Nicklas Bendtner’s ego. Well, that’s an exaggeration because nothing is as big as that, but it’s still a much bigger operation than it used to be and they keep it all going swimmingly.
Thankfully the problems came in what has been a fairly slow news week. The only thing hitting the headlines is Chelsea’s continued insistence that they’re not boring – something backed up by experts it seems – but hopefully their win over a relegation threatened side last night will have provided some salve for the burns they’ve endured. Precious, sensitive little Chelsea.
From our point of view, the slowness of the week was interrupted by some comments from Theo Walcott which garnered headlines, some tutting, some shaking of the head, and that gesture where you spin your finger around by your temple (perhaps whistling) to indicate somebody’s as mad as a box of badgers.
Basically, he was talking about how difficult it was for him to get back into the team because everyone’s fit and the team is playing well. Nothing too outrageous there, and he’s very much on point because he hasn’t started a game in 6 weeks, and in the last 930 minutes of football we’ve played, he’s managed to be on the pitch for 25 of them.
Of course some of that is down to how others are playing and how the team appears balanced. There’s simply no clamour, or reason, for change when things are going quite well. Some of it, also, is down to what I believe is the manager’s reluctance to overlook some of the flaws in game, but it’s a combination of all of those things. And then he said this:
In this calendar year, we’ve been the best team in Europe.
MAYHEM!
I suppose the first thing we should really point out is that being the best in a calendar year is pretty irrelevant. If you play fantastically from January to May, and again from August to December, but then lose a lot of games in the next January to May period chances are you’ll end up with nothing. It’s August to May that counts.
And despite some fine maths work here, I think you’d be very hard pressed to suggest that Arsenal are the best team in Europe, because the best team in Europe doesn’t lose a Champions League game like schoolboys at home to Monaco; it doesn’t lose away at Southampton like a pack of hungover Keystone Cops; and it certainly doesn’t lose away at Sp*rs and concede goals to a bloke who looks like he needs instructions on how to breathe written on the back of his hand in permanent marker.
That said, when the rest of your fixtures provide you with 17 wins (including one which takes you to Wembley to try and retain the FA Cup) and 1 draw, you can say with some certainty that it’s a team in pretty exceptional form.
So look, while I’m never going to be Theo’s biggest fan, I don’t think there’s anything particularly outrageous about what he said. It’s one of those things a player says when they’re trying to be really positive when giving an interview to an in-house channel or website. There’s a tendency to over-egg the pudding a bit.
It’s similar to a manager coming out and praising the character and spirit of his side after a disappointing result. Nobody really believes him, but 99% of the time there’s very little else he can say. While he might be thinking, “I hate them right now and I want to bash their stupid heads in with a bat before disposing of their corpses in the sea,” he really can’t say it.
I doubt Walcott really thinks we’re the best team in Europe – I mean he must have Sky Sports and can see what Barcelona are doing at the moment – but he’s also somebody who’s not exactly known for his deep, critical thinking. He’s the archetypal modern pro, media trained to within an inch of his life, dealing in platitudes and cliches for the most part because anything even remotely contentious gets jumped on by a frenzied media looking for anything at all they can use for a story.
His comments don’t speak to the mindset of the club or anything like that either. It’s a throwaway line and all the fuss whipped up around it will ensure one thing and one thing only: that next time he gives an interview it’s going to be even more magnolia than ever.
Right, that’s your lot for this morning. I’ll be back tomorrow with an Arsecast as we get ready for a football-free weekend due to our next game behind Monday night in Hull (which sounds a bit like something a judge might say – “I sentence to you a Monday night on Humberside”).
Until then, have a good one.
