Atletico v Arsenal fall-out continues with Ben White evil and feet counted | OneFootball

And so it came to pass that Atletico Madrid v Arsenal was not quite as soul-nourishing as PSG v Bayern, almost as if two teams who have to try really hard in all their matches for the whole season instead of just a handful of games in April have a tougher time of it.

But it was not without its charms and certainly not without its controversies as penalties and non-penalties set the agenda before the real main event after the final whistle when a man walked across some ground.

Elsewhere, there’s news of Spurs’ dream summer that has to keep pointing out they will need a dream May first and raises the undeniably valid concern that if they’re not careful they might not even qualify for Europe this season.

Foot in mouth

Why has everyone suddenly forgotten what incredibly commonly used and widely understood idioms mean?

After yesterday’s disgraceful claim that a Bayern team trailing by a single goal after the away leg of a two-legged tie had but ‘a puncher’s chance’ in their semi-final comes today’s surely equally absurd suggestion.

Oliver Holt in the Mail the guilty man this time, and we do have no choice but to once again declare this an unapproved usage. ‘One foot in the final’ very obviously means a clear advantage. A job almost done. Bags packed, flights booked.

This tie is quite literally level. Sure, Arsenal have home advantage in the second leg. But only that advantage. It’s not nothing, but it’s not everything either.

You wouldn’t say a team drawn at home in a one-legged knockout game against high-quality opposition had ‘one foot’ in the next round, would you? Obviously not. It would be absurd. This is the same.

We don’t want to be officious like this. We hate that you keep making us do it.

And it’s not us being picky. Well, it is that. But not just that. Almost everyone else agrees.

The Mirror have it ‘finely poised’ and ‘VAR FROM OVER’. The Sun declare it ‘on a knife-edge’. And then there’s this one…

Which is, of course, from the Mail.

Crest of the rest

The big news from the Metropolitano besides Arsenal’s planting of one foot in the final was of course Ben White shamefully planting both feet on the Atletico Madrid crest, to the enormous chagrin of assorted Simeones.

The daft ‘unwritten rule’ that you mustn’t stand on any large club crest placed right there on the ground in a high foot-traffic area directly in front of the players’ tunnel is one of Mediawatch’s longstanding favourites.

Watching players and pundits make a big, performative show of not standing on a crest is right up there with the ostentatious non-celebration of goals against former clubs, a rule which only ever applies to not celebrating goals you’ve scored yourself. It’s perfectly okay to celebrate all other goals scored by your new side against your old one, for some reason. Almost like it’s purely done for attention.

The whole crest thing is also, of course, at its most hilarious when an attention-hungry pundit is so keen to make sure a) he doesn’t step on a crest but also far more importantly b) everyone knows he didn’t step on a crest that he goes back and makes sure someone is filming this vitally important and definitely off-the-cuff real moment that is in no way betrayed by any lack of naturalistic acting skills.

White is also the one current player above all others we can easily believe isn’t even aware of this ridiculousness at all given his famous ambivalence towards football in general after his day’s work is done.

We very much enjoyed Marca asking its readers whether White had been disrespectful or merely made a mistake when he did some walking on some ground.

Henry Winter opted, at great and tortured length involving tangents on symbolism and cultural differences, obviously, for ‘innocent mistake’. Mediawatch, for what it’s worth, leans strongly towards an answer involving a long, weary sigh and the words ‘Neither, next’.

Dream on

Regular readers will know Mediawatch always gets an eye-twitch about ‘Dream XIs’ and ‘How Team X could line up under Manager Y with Z new signings’ content. It’s all just guff.

But it is even guffier guff when you attempt, as the Express have here, to do it right now about Spurs.

For very obvious reasons, Spurs are not really thinking about dream squads right now. Their dream scenario right now extends no further than somehow avoiding increasingly likely relegation that would fire every other ‘dream summer’ prognostication directly into the sun. They can’t even begin to consider a dream summer unless they have a dream May first.

The sheer quantity of caveats and reminders the Express have had to insert into this copy is numbing. From the intro onwards.

That ‘should’ is carrying far greater load than any word can be expected to hold.

Sure, but they really do need to un-embroil themselves from this one first for any of that to matter. And, SPOILER ALERT, they probably won’t do that. Rendering all that follows the fipsiest of tish.

It goes on like this at length.

You’re so close to getting it, guys.

But the absolute standout, beyond even the fact that Spurs’ perfect, unbeatable yet entirely hypothetical and very likely moot dream summer involves signing Marcus Rashford and Jarrod Bowen but still having Dominic Solanke up front, is this line.

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we really do feel like Spurs absolutely are going to fall short of their seasonal targets and, indeed, miss out on European competition.

The fact ‘should’ is widely deployed throughout this piece in reference to something quite unlikely and then again in reference to something absolutely guaranteed does make us wonder if the whole thing is just a clever joke we’ve missed. It has been a long old season after all, and we are very tired.

Then we remembered it’s the Daily Express. They don’t really do jokes. It’s just a lazy update from February or somesuch isn’t it?