Monday 24 January 2011

Talksport: talking utter sh*te again

I was unfortunate enough to stumble upon this particularly foolish piece of journalism today on the Talksport website. The article is rather dishonest and misleading, typical of Talksport really, it starts off by asking 'How English is your Premier League Team' and then proceeds to base this all on some rather dubious statistics relating to Premier League 'squads'. The most stupid bit of the whole thing is the following:

"But just how proud can you Englishmen be of how well your team represents its home country?"

Firstly Talksport are assuming that all people reading are 100% English, in fact a lot of readers will be from outside the UK, and even those from England itself will most likely have a bit of non-English in them in the form of Welsh, Scottish and Irish, or even something else.

Secondly even if one assumes that everyone reading is 100% English, whatever that is, then one has to assume that those of us who are 100% English would be proud to have a squad with more English players in it. This is another faulty assumption. Most club supporters couldn't give a monkeys for the sheer number of homegrown English players they have. Most supporters want a good team first of all, then it's a bonus if they can produce some top drawer English talent for the national team, but the number of average English players making up the numbers in the squad is completely immaterial to most of us.

Talksport's hatred of Arsenal is obvious from the large picture of our 'non-English' players celebrating a goal at the top of the article but it may disappoint them to learn that their analysis of things is deeply flawed. For one thing they ignore the players in our squad who are out on loan, this is downright nonsensical. Their table also makes no mention of whether a club's English players have been home produced or purchased in for big money, should Manu and Tottenham fans be proud of buying in all their expensive English talent?

Fundamentally it is irrelevant how many English players each club in their squads, the overall numbers are a crude statistic which give no insight into the quality of these players. What is important is how good the English players in the squad are, how good a club's youth development is and how many players that club is producing for England teams of the future. Look around the Premier League and you can see how many have come through the Arsenal system, there are countless examples such as Bolton's Fabrice Muamba and West Brom's Jerome Thomas. While the current homegrown English lads in the squad, such as Wilshere and Gibbs, are top top drawer.

It is interesting to see that whatever Arsenal do they are criticised in certain quarters of the media. When we had a defensively solid English side, it was 'boring boring' Arsenal. Now we have a creative and attractive side we are criticised for not being English enough, despite the fact that our youth system is producing some of the best young English players around. I bet Talksport won't be mentioning the paucity of homegrown English talent in the Spurs side, just think when the last England national team player who actually came through their ranks? Was it as long ago as Ledley King?

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

all talk sport do is to get people like you at it.Football is no different from he rest of the country completely fucked up

Anonymous said...

Don't let Talk Spite get to you. They're ignorant clowns who can't get jobs in the proper media. Don't listen to it and don't read it and they won't attract advertisers.

Anonymous said...

DPT says.............

I'm 100% English and I couldn't give a f**k how many English players Arsenal have...........most English players are shite and the ones that are average cost a fortune!

Anyway, who gives a flying f**k what the media think!

Arsenal Articles said...

Absolutely.

And another thing: note that all the teams with more english players are fighting a relegation battle.

While the teams with more foreigners are actually chasing the title.

A point lost on tabloid wannabes Talksport but who cares what they say anyway ?

http://arsenalarticles.webs.com/

Anonymous said...

Apparently, Talksports Alan (wino) Brazil will be at the emirates tomorrow night. Lets give the anti-Arsenal prick a "warm" welcome.

1979gooner said...

indeed,

it is amusing that talksport's table is almost a reverse of the actual league table!

drew10 said...

What a load of bollocks, I would pay to see the BEST players no matter where they are from over a bunch of English so-so's any day.

This is just a blatant attempt to destabilise the already twitchy fair weather Arsenal fans. They want us to get on the back of our players so that their lovely Manure can stroll to the titles again.

Shit website, shit radio station run by muppets for chavs!

Anonymous said...

why can't these news agencies get the point that english players in general are..well..shite

Cornwall Gooner said...

Cornwall Gooner... I have only just recently started listening to talk sport, even though it is blatently anti-Arsenal I quite like listening to the station, maybe I'm just being too optimistic that one day they will say something nice about us, the most biased being Jason Cundy, he has recently remarked that his favorite game this season was our loss to West Brom, his favorite goals were Messis hat trick against us, his worst moment was us getting into the champions league and his most unlikely event happening this year would be for us to win a trophy, I thought he was a chav not a spud, all I can think of is that his kids are ginger and that the dad is either Ray Parlour or Perry Groves.

Anonymous said...

I'm English, couldn't care less about English players (virtually all crap technically) and I'm not proud to be English either. TalkSport are moronic.

Anonymous said...

100% english?

Next they will start at Arsenal for not having enough Indegenoious English players!

Sound very similar to the diatribe the BNP come out with, and no coincidence really as TalkShite and BNP share the same target audience of thick white van drivers.

Goonerking said...

With no disrespect, Darren bent for 24 million pounds. Enough said.

Foreign Invasion said...

What these xenophobic morons can't comprehend is that, without the swarm of great foreign players we've had over the last 19yrs (delightfully treating us to their exceptional skills, weekly), the English Premier League would be on a mediocre par with the Scottish Premier League.

I can remember in the early and mid 90's, after the ban on English clubs, playing in European Cups were lifted. The difference between the standard at English players were capable of operating at was NOTICEABLY inferior to that of their continental contemporaries. Teams such as: Galatasaray, Hadjuk Split, FC Porto, Standard Liege, Napoli, Marseille et al, regularly trounced our teams in all areas of the pitch (except, aggression).

Take out foreign players out of the EPL, and it will seize to be an attractive league to footballing purists, worldwide, who want to see attractive football played by the world's best players and not some drab, hit and miss, long ball run like a headless chicken on steriods game by technically inept 'english' terriers.

If we are totally honest, how many english players, over the last 30 yrs would get into the top foreign clubs' squad? Probably less than 5%. Furthermore, there is nothing stopping our 'English' players from plying their 'trade' on the continent - erm, apart from their glaring lack of technical proficiency and more importantly cultural awareness.

Foreign Invasion said...

Oops, please excuse my above typos - I meant "cease" and "steroids".