Arsenal bottle job guy completely bottles it as memeception grips title race | OneFootball

A tricky day for Mediawatch in many ways, because it’s one of those mornings where the most overtly outlandish of the media’s takes – ARSENAL ARE BOTTLING IT! SPURS ARE FOR SURE GOING DOWN! – actually feel entirely reasonable.

Not to say there isn’t some nonsense if you look hard enough, though.

And Mediawatch always will.

Bottle job

You’ve all seen it. The City fan with his Arsenal water bottle. He’s destined for fame or infamy now, one way or the other, depending on how the rest of the season pans out. And Arsenal fans should look away now because even the Supercomputers have lost faith with City now winning by a single point on their latest all-important (not important) projections.

You could viscerally feel the weariness in Gary Neville’s observation that the fan ‘has just realised he’s become an influencer’ after the memeception of the creation of a second meme in the moment other fans showed him he had become a meme.

And, in full old-man-yelling-at-clouds fashion, let Mediawatch join that weariness as we share just some of the sentences in print media today that caused an audible sigh.

Trolls. Brutal. Jibes. Viral. Antics. Sigh.

We did quite enjoy the vaguely surreal tone of this line from The Sun, however, as they desperately searched for and didn’t quite find a suitable second mention variation for the word ‘drink’ and ended up here.

We also enjoyed The Sun clearing up the deep complexities of the gag.

Oh! Now we get it!

You have to hand it to the guy. He set out to achieve meme status, and he has done so in the grand manner. It will be the go-to banter image for every Arsenal defeat between now and the end of the world, which is admittedly even at the Gunners’ current wait probably only two or three more defeats. But still. Listen, fair play.

But our question is this. Why is nobody talking about the fact that Arsenal Bottle Meme Guy has himself completely bottled it? Because what kind of clown tries to drink from a bottle with the lid still attached?

Stack overflow

Mediawatch isn’t quite sure how it’s happened, but former Arsenal reserve goalkeeper Graham Stack appears to have carved himself out a tidy little media niche as a teller of wild tales.

That’s fine, but does mean that we must, as a public service, warn you to ignore any and all headlines that contain the phrase ‘Arsenal Invincibles star’ for the foreseeable. From this point, there is approximately a 99 per cent chance that it’s Stack. A man who played no Premier League games for Arsenal during the Invincibles season. Or, indeed, any other season.

Does have some entertaining tales to tell, though, as this trademark Daily Mail headline attests.

Other Stack tales ripe for this kind of headline treatment include: punching a pitch invader and deciding to drive the Arsenal team bus for a laugh. He’s just a crazy guy! A crazy guy with some outlandish and, dare we suggest, possibly slightly embellished tales of his time at Arsenal.

All of which can be placed under headlines that suggest it might actually be Patrick Vieira with all hooky designer gear in the boot of his Vauxhall Nova.

Missing Words Round

Another day, another headline left sadly short of the space required to stop it being misleading. This desperately unfortunate curse continues to strike many of our proud media institutions, with the Mirror the latest victims.

The words sadly forced to spend their days on the cutting-room floor this time being ‘with current club’ because Nico Schlotterbeck, for it is he, has signed a new Borussia Dortmund contract.

Model behaviour

Plenty of football news around this morning, isn’t there? You’ve got the title race, obviously. City on the charge. Arsenal being bottlers. Then there’s Tottenham going down, which is in danger of becoming just too normalised when it is absolutely mental really when you think about it.

There are crises of various levels of alarm at Chelsea, Liverpool and Newcastle. The early cogs are in motion for a summer that promises to be a bumper one for player moves and manager changes.

So what’s the third biggest football story in all the world this morning according to The Sun website?

Great to see a popular outlet look beyond the narrow Premier League lens and bring fascinating stories from around the global game. You can mock all you want, but who else is putting Paraguayan football front and centre in their coverage right now?