Quote Originally Posted by Marc Overmars View Post
At times they can provide decent analysis, Carragher last night said our defence is the best in the league and why we could still win the title, but end of the day they are partisan and that will always come through when a result goes against their predicted narrative. You can tell they had prepared a spiel on Arsenal being out of the title race come Sunday. No one felt that we’d not only win but win fairly comfortably.

Most punditry now is just about personalities who provide clickbait and gather views. It’s geared towards younger fans who partake in the trolling and back and forths online.
The Arsenal Vision guys were discussing the pundits' complaints about our 'over celebrations' on their recent podcast, and an interesting point was made. There are prevailing views amongst non-Arsenal analysers. One is (with some justification) that we have not shown staying power in our recent title attempts (ie we are bottlers). Another (again justified) is that Citeh and Liverpool have better title credentials because they have shown this in the past. So the prevailing narrative on Sunday was that Arsenal would slip up, and our disaster when we conceded fed into this. The issue is that narratives take time to alter. In the long term, we will only counter the 'Anti Arsenal' narrative by winning the league/CL. In the short term, there is a clear reluctance/inability to deviate from the script. So an excellent win is responded to not by conceding that Arsenal (in this instance) defied expectations (and analyising how/why this happened), but criticising so-called over celebrations. This plays into the existing narrative by suggesting that the reason for our wild celebrations was because we are also rans - in other words a team that has serious title aspirations does not celebrate a single win as though it has won the league.

Trying to take off my red and white spectacles, there remains a grain of truth in the above view - that will only be squashed if we stay the course this season.

Of course, you are right about the clickbait. There is also some truth IMO in the fact that Arsenal (in the Premiership years) have never been regarded particularly fondly outside its fan base. I can only conclude that this is a hangover from the years when we were regarded as a 'foreign' team, and also the perception that we are whinging cry babies who somehow think that we are entitled to success.

Bottom line - fuck 'em. I'm glad that our manager seems to be feeding off the hate.