Morgan Rogers aims ‘brutal dig’ at Arsenal as Arteta hit by major World Cup ‘headache’ | OneFootball

It’s a distinctly Arsenal-flavoured watching of the ol’ media today.

Made all the better by the fact they haven’t actually done anything, or had anything done to them.

Oh to read the headlines you’d think they had. If you went by the headlines then poor old Arsenal have had brutal digs chucked at them, responded to those digs, suffered an unmatched World Cup disaster and done a £70m deal.

Thing with headlines, though, is that headlines are very often complete and utter bollocks.

Can you dig it?

We heard the Morgan Rogers quotes after he signed for Chelsea before we saw the headlines, and knew precisely what was coming.

Lo and behold, from the Mirror:

Their Reach stablemates across the desk at the Daily Star go with the slightly different…

And completing that particular Reach circle-jerk we have football.london…

Elsewhere you have the Mail:

And The Sun:

Regular Mediawatch readers won’t need two guesses at the precise number of times Morgan Rogers mentions Arsenal in his brutal/instant dig/swipe. Nevertheless, here’s that instantly brutal swipe and dig aimed at Arsenal in full:

Also a brutally instant dig-swipe at Brentford, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Tottenham, Charlton, Millwall, QPR, West Ham, AFC Wimbledon, Bromley, Leyton Orient, Barnet, Sutt… well, you get the idea.

Call and response

Only one way to deal with a brutal dig, of course. Respond. And when the dig is fictitious, makes sense for the response to also not actually exist.

That would be Christos Tzolis, then. A deal already agreed before the Morgan Rogers snub/dig unpleasantness and thus not really a response in the traditional – and indeed only – sense of the word. A presponse if anything, but that falls down on the technicality of not in fact being a word.

Still, the Mirror must have some idea of what Arsenal’s actual response is going to be? Having put it right there in the headline?

Get in there and make it about you

Fascinating glimpse here from The Sun as to which massive English football clubs generate the clicks, and which ones don’t.

Well we’re going to stick our neck out and say one rival comes off worse in said comparison. What with that ‘second most’ clue in there.

But let’s find out together. Takes a while to get there, but after wading through several paragraphs detailing the exhausting and exhaustive lengths those poor old Gunners had to go through in North America we finally get to this:

You can’t just put it in brackets and hope we won’t see it, lads. Man City players saw 1700 more minutes of World Cup action than any other Premier League club… and your entire story is ‘Won’t somebody please think of the Gunners’?

A timely reminder as the Premier League numbers gradually reassert themselves centre-stage that unless the Man City number in question is 115, find something else for your headline.

Deal with it

Not all doom and gloom and racked-up minutes and brutal digs for Arsenal, though, despite the Rogers setback and ghost response and playing much less football than Man City during the World Cup. The Daily Star bring glad tidings.

They know what that headline looks like, you know what that headline looks like, and they know you know they know what that headline looks like. They just don’t care.

You’re here reading this page so will have already worked out long before now that the £70m deal done is not what it looks like.

It’s a new sponsorship deal with Emirates. It’s not nothing. It’s more money for the club. But it’s not a the £70m player signing very obviously being promised and never, ever delivered by that headline.

Bet they couldn’t believe their luck when that sponsorship figure turned out to sit so squarely in the Bruno Guimaraes ballpark.

Seeing many colours but the only one that’s coming through is red

Quick fact-check sadly necessary on this Daily Mirror headline:

FALSE: the phrase ‘Gianni Infantino left red-faced’ implies he is capable of the human feelings of shame or embarrassment. This is not the case.