Arsenal ‘boost’ but ‘heartbreak’ for Premier League rivals in Champions League ‘forecast’ | OneFootball

Luckily for us all but especially for Mediawatch, the trusty ol’ supercomputer has been dusted down for the final night of Champions League action and has exclusively revealed that being top of the table with seven wins from seven games is good.

Elsewhere there are forecasts and projections based on the ever-reliable method of assuming everything will just stay exactly as it is, more on Cole Palmer’s done-deal move to Man United and geography lessons with Gordon Strachan.

Whether forecast

Final night of the Champions League league stage (we have all got to get our collective heads together and come up with a less sh*t name than that, by the way) tonight and that means permutation fun.

Now Mediawatch is all for that. Up to a point. We absolutely love a ‘What Team X must do to qualify’ explainer. Crack on, with our blessing.

But we would suggest that the Mirror have got slightly carried away by excitedly offering a ‘forecast’ and ‘projections’ of who the English clubs could face in whichever next stage they end up in.

The slight problem is that these are neither forecasts nor projections. What the Mirror have done is simply imagine the league table will remain entirely unchanged by the final night’s games, with every team ending up precisely where they currently reside.

Given that only the top two are currently absolutely certain of a top-eight finish, and that only three points currently separate third from 15th, this seems a bit of a stretch and thus leaves the whole thing a fun if rather futile exercise.

Spurs are currently fifth but after tonight’s results could be as high as third or as low as 16th. The identity of the teams whose assorted current positions would see Spurs bracketed with from their current position isn’t entirely meaningless, but it’s not far off.

Mediawatch knows this is largely an us problem, but sentences like this make our teeth itch.

That’s not ‘we forecast’ anything. There is no prognostication here; that’s just literally the four teams currently occupying the positions that provide the only possible last-16 opponents for the team in the position Liverpool currently occupy.

Eight ball

At least the Mirror have done the work themselves, though, and looked upon the current standings with their own human eyes.

Over at The Sun, our old friend the supercomputer is calling the shots beneath a genuine atrocity of a pun.

We’ll skip straight past the pun, because we simply cannot bear to look at it for even a single second longer, to note that ‘top 8 heartbreak’ is maybe a tad strong as shorthand for ‘inconvenience of two extra money-spinning matches in huge competition everyone wants to be in’. Especially given the actual ‘heartbreak’ predicted for the five English sides bidding to join Arsenal in direct qualification is this:

Heartbreakingly, six English sides will, in heartbreaking scenes of unimaginable heartbreak, reach the last 16 of the Champions League.

Thank goodness the supercomputer was on hand, though, to inform us all that Chelsea (away at Napoli) and Newcastle (away at PSG) have the toughest tasks in trying to hold on to their current top-eight spots.

Arsenal, meanwhile, have received a ‘boost’ in the news that the supercomputer has declared the team currently top of the standings with seven wins from seven games to be the likeliest winner of the whole shebang.

Thanks for that, future robot overlord. And for those of you in any doubt about just how rock-solid that is, let us point you in the direction of The Sun’s report on the boffins and their number-crunching from around this time last season.

Okay. So they were wrong about Arsenal last season. But did they at least get the winners right? That’s what matters, isn’t it? Given the boffins have Arsenal going all the way this time?

Ah. It’s almost like the ‘massive boost’ for Arsenal is that they are top of the table with seven wins from seven and have been the best team in Europe this season.

Cole shoulder

You may remember from yesterday’s Mediawatch that the Daily Star were so certain of Cole Palmer moving to Man United that they were only ‘one transfer away’ from it happening, and that transfer wasn’t even Cole Palmer to Man United.

That part was so firmly in the bag that the only t to cross and i to dot was packing Bruno Fernandes off to Saudi Arabia.

We don’t like to brag, but we did point out that, rather than relying on Fernandes heading off elsewhere, ‘it would rely on Manchester United making a bid, Chelsea accepting that bid, and then Palmer agreeing to move’.

Enter Chelsea manager Liam Rosenior ‘breaking his silence’ (of course he was) on the subject:

Really does sound like we might be two transfers away with this one, guys.

Marching on together

Gordon Strachan has some advice for Andy Robertson as he nears a Liverpool exit, which he has directed at the left-back via the accepted modern method of ‘quotes in exchange for cash from a bookmaker that make their way to a tabloid live transfer blog with nothing better to fill the space’. In this case, The Sun’s.

That’s absolutely fine advice. We certainly can’t disagree with anyone advising anyone against joining Tottenham at the present time.

But Strachan is not done there.

Whe… where does Gordon think Leeds is? The Pennines are not – yet – an international border. The petition has been signed.