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The Importance of Sport (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Mick Harper wrote:
But to return to taking the knee. The obvious break-point -- presumably there has to be one -- is the start of the new season.

Brentford didn't do it last season but now they're in the Premiership they are showing solidarity, the commentator simpers. Was he taking the knee? What exactly are we showing solidarity for now? With African-Americans not being mown down in their accustomed numbers I suppose it will have to be abused African-British penalty takers. I expect they want to be reminded of that before every match.

I see Jadon Sancho has joined us. He'll have to get used to our little ways. Showing solidarity with the Premiership now he's part of it. Not that Catford is Africa exactly but you try telling cabbies that. And talking of the Beautiful South, why isn't Wilf Zaha up before the Race Relations Board? If he doesn't like it here he can clear off to the Bundesliga and refuse to sieg heil before every match. Or whatever they do. Kick off, knowing them. Bastards. Dunno why I'm feeling so harrumphy today. Anyone got any theories?
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Mick Harper
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And we need that sales income to buy a decent defensive midfielder.

Everybody (apart from Man City and PSG) says things like this but it doesn't make it true. Think about it. Manchester United need a decent defensive midfielder. He (probably, but you never know these days) would improve the team by x amount and is therefore worth spending up-to-x amount to acquire. Have Manchester United x amount on hand to buy him?

The board is now so concerned about being seen as soft seller

One hears this all the time but again cannot really be true. The most extreme form of the syndrome is experienced every year when relegated clubs have to sell players. Is it a fire sale? Not really. Rather the reverse since everyone knows who's available and a fairly brisk market is going to be created.

that we are unable to off-load the deadwood (that is currently inflating our squad) due to unrealistic price tags (Lingard, James, Pereira, Mata, Matic... plus one or other of the goalkeepers).

The crunch. Certainly Arsenal have been saying it for years. It appears to be true but again cannot really be so. However, this is the AE heart of the matter so I will express myself forcefully as soon as I've finished dealing with Amazon who have got some beef or other about wanting to offload some deadwood because of unrealistic price tags. Honestly, you write 'em, you edit 'em, you publish 'em, now you have to have an HGV licence as well apparently. I can drive a forklift truck, I told them, if that's any help.
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Mick Harper
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Roma announce £34m Tammy Abraham transfer from Chelsea as England striker teams up ... The Sun

They are crazee. Nobody loves 'Wynette' as we call him at the Bridge more than I do but you gotta box a bit cleverer than this. Ol' Abe, as we call him at the Bridge, is no longer young. He's played for long enough under sufficiently diverse managers in a statistically significant number of good sides to know that he is what we at the Emirates call A Forever Giroud Man. These are a special breed of striker. They look like strikers, they play like strikers, they score goals like strikers, but never enough of them to be your striker.

Everyone thinks they know the key that will turn the lock -- even England -- but nobody ever finds it. You may be able to stand by your man if it's somewhere like Burnley or possibly even The Championship, but for the Eternal City it will soon be D-I-V-O-R-C-I-M-E-N-T-O.
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Mick Harper
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Crystal Palace vs Brentford
Arsenal v Chelsea


These two matches (one played, one today) illustrate -- but extend -- a well-known beef of mine. Managing professional football teams is such an odd profession that nobody knows who will be good at it and who won't. Being a professional player, being a professional assistant manager, attending professional management courses at the FA, being a professional football pundit -- none of these preparatory undertakings are predictors of who will succeed at managing a professional football team.

The only known predictor -- and even this is only sort of 50/50 -- is being a successful manager of another football team. This is why candidates start with a lowly club and work their way up. This is why football clubs should always pick successful managers, unless you are a lowly one and can afford to have a punt on an unproven 'face' i.e. someone who hasn't been a manager but might prove advantageous whether he works out as a manager or not.

So far, so obvious. So what's the extra wrinkle you promised us, Mick? It's this
1. Occasionally non-lowly clubs misguidedly appoint a face.
2. Naturally these almost never work out. Certainly nowhere near 50/50.
3. Arsenal have gone one better since, having appointed a face (Arteta) they have given him a third season even though they now have pretty good evidence that it has not worked out.
4. Crystal Palace have gone one better than one better by appointing a manager (Viera) who was a face appointed by a non-lowly club (Nice) and it didn't work out for them!
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And Arteta really wasn’t a “face.” He was nothing special.

Palace’s appointment of Viera is doubly stupid, because if he is successful he’ll be poached by Arsenal when they get rid of Pep’s water carrier
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Mick Harper
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And Arteta really wasn’t a “face.” He was nothing special.

Ah, but he was. The Arsenal hierarchy are not so stupid that they would appoint a former luminary (eg Viera), luminaries are well known to be mostly duds. But they are stupid enough to appoint an ex-Arsenal player who was Pep's watercarrier on the grounds -- and they said so at the time - that he would have learned such a lot from the master. And so he did, he can carry water with the best of them.

As an AE aside, it would not matter if he had learned everything that Pep knows about management, it would have done Arteta no good. Football management appears to be an art rather than a science. Even as a skill, it is played out in real time and you have to think out the solution each time. Or at least for your particular team. Watching Arsenal today (I gave up when we were 2-0 down, I am nothing if not a fairweather fan) but added to Brentford and added to a season and a half, it is obvious that Arteta hasn't a clue, either strategically or tactically.

Item: every time Arsenal have a goal kick they position themselves to play it out (clearly under instruction). The opposition send three players forward to disrupt this plan. The goalie waves them all upfield and hoofs it, thereby gaining the worst of both worlds. Not playing it out and not catching the opposition re-grouping when hoofing it.

I don't mind what you do, Mikel, but for Chrissake don't allow the other side to choose what it is.
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Mick Harper
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if he is successful he’ll be poached by Arsenal

As Chelsea did with Lampard. With my cautious approval since he had, further to my test, proved himself with Derby. Is this a case of 50/50 random failure rate or was the jump too wide? Probably the latter because the Top Four are special cases and their managers presumably have to be poached from either the English premiership or foreign top-fours.
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Mick Harper
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Dork of the Day

"It must be one of three things: either they're not being prepared, or they're not listening or they can't carry it out, and Mikel Arteta is not going to send out a side that is underprepared."

It's a firm convention of punditry that one is not allowed to criticise a manager in the sense of "he's gotta go". In extremis you are allowed extreme circumlocution: "He's coming under a lot of pressure" and then "If he doesn't get something out of the next two matches he may get the dreaded vote of confidence." But the above is a new departure.

It is well known that Arteta is a martinet and a control freak so the geezer was quite right, no team of his is going out underprepared. But now we have a situation in which perhaps the tenth most expensive squad of players on the planet 'do not listen' or 'they listen but they are not able to execute'. Pundits should not subscribe to the old Soviet maxim: there is nothing wrong with the ideology, it is the people who are to blame.
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Mick Harper
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I will offer one more explanation for Arteta's inexplicable longevity. He's one of the best post-mortemists in the game. I know something about this since I was a mediocre bridge player but an ace post-mortemist ("I had to take a view, partner, and the odds were clearly that the king would drop even if, as events proved etc etc") so everybody thinks I'm 'sound'. Honestly, I'm rubbish. I didn't even know the king was still out.

Arteta is brilliant. Always adopting a beetle-browed but accessible mien. Always denying that Covid, injuries, duff transfers, board room penny pinching etc etc are a factor while listing them. Always referring to the ongoing project. And that perfected boffin accent! You don't get that without long hours on the Linguaphone. We shall not see his like again. Hopefully.
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Mick Harper
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Ted Dexter

Boys of a certain age (mine) have a complex relationship with 'Lord' Ted Dexter who's just joined St Peter's XI. He was our generation's Denis Compton, i.e. lovely to watch and stacked up the runs. He played for Sussex, who nobody minded, so that was OK too. But unlike Compton he really was 'lordly', you instinctively wanted to touch your forelock. But not in a bad way, he was always Lord Ted.

Anyway he retired and disappeared into something lordly in the City but he would occasionally pop up on the telly and made us genuflect all over again with his singularly insightful judgements, served up with just the right amount of asperity. Benaud meets Bob Willis. He resisted all attempts to join the twats in charge of the game until, at a particularly low ebb in the national fortunes, he suddenly did and became the England supremo. Whereupon he became the silliest man imaginable e.g believing Devon Malcom was Malcom Devon.

We shall not see his like etc etc. It was a waste of time inviting India over, what a shower.
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Mick Harper
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Harry Kane and The Group of Death

Tottenham
Vitesse
Rennes
Mura
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Mick Harper
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Young chap delivering my whotsits wasn't a Lithuanian. I could tell because a) he was black and b) he was wearing an Arsenal shirt. "Yeah?" I said, looking meaningfully at the shirt (in case he was a Congolese asylum-seeker supplied out of the Community Chest). "He's gotta go," the youth said. Our eyes locked for a moment. "Yeah," I said, closing the door. We're all brothers under the shirt.
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Grant



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Daniel Levy is an idiot. £127 million for Harry Kane was the deal of the century for the seller.
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Mick Harper
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Depends. At 29 this is Harry's last shot at the big time. If it impinges on his form -- as it ought if he's even vaguely humanoid -- then Levy's blown his stack. If Harry buckles down then it's a very wise move on Danny's part. The more I watch these £30-60 million players that clubs have to get three of to replace their departed main man, the more I am convinced you should keep hold of your main man, whether he wants to be there or not.

You may not know the origin of the problem. Agents are forever advising their charges to sign new deals, in mid-deal, committing to years into the future in return for a big pay rise because the agents benefit in the short term. When the player says something to the effect, "Yeah, OK, but s'pose I wanna move in a year or two?" "Don't worry about that," says the agent, "you just make enough want-away noises the club is forced to grant you a transfer. It's too unsettling for the fanbase and the dressing room and then into the boardroom, they've got no choice. I'm telling you, it's worked every time so far." And it has, cue another big payout for the agent.

"Unless you're playing for a Daniel Levy club," commented Daniel Levy.
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Mick Harper
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Man City Lost Count Arsenal Nil

This was the best news possible, especially before the international break. Even the West Brom result proved useful since it demonstrated what the players could do once it didn't matter they were an organisational red hole. Even so it was noticeable that these midgets from the West Midland Senior Youth League reduced us to a shamble every time they pressed, pointing up the significance of yesterday's commentator, "Under Arteta Arsenal are never going to abandon their policy of playing it out from the back. And nor of course are Guardiola's City... ooh, the goalie's kicked it against Smith-Rowe and..."

The point being that City can afford the odd ricket because the overall effectiveness makes it worthwhile; Arsenal start hoofing it as soon as it is obvious they might make a ricket, and the opposition knows it regardless how far down the league ladder they are. The other bit of good news is that Granit Xhaka has agreed, while on international duty in Switzerland, to take Arteta along to the Exit office to investigate the very generous retirement packages a club like ours provides for those with yeoman service but perhaps not the silver service we have grown to expect over the years.
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