The haters really are out of the woodwork…
Arsenal remaining the only Invincibles of the modern era really has exposed the haters for what they are.
Ever since Liverpool’s 3-0 defeat to Watford, we’ve seen various people in the media questioning how great our 2003/04 side actually was. In a way that’s fair enough – many of us would perhaps swap the unbeaten season for a Champions League title or two. It’s one thing to have a healthy debate about the pros and cons of it, but some of the weird dismissive attitude shown towards the Invincibles seems downright unfair.
And then there’s this, which is just something else altogether…
Yep, you’re reading that right. Despite us having the longest unbeaten run in English football history, the BBC have placed us third on this list of ‘best English runs’ on the basis that we had a slightly lower points per game average than Liverpool and Chelsea did when they went 44 and 40 games unbeaten, respectively.
Where to start with this? The achievement is surely in remaining unbeaten, rather than the number of points you collect. And even then, Liverpool only picked up one more point than us, and of course their average is higher on the basis that they got those points over a lower number of games!
While there’s obviously a discussion to be had about points tallies, with Manchester City’s 100 from 2017/18 obviously impressive, and Liverpool perhaps set to break that this season, I don’t understand this sudden rewriting of the rules regarding our unbeaten run. Suddenly we seem to have drawn too many games, as though that means it doesn’t count somehow?
Perhaps the haters can answer me this, then: if we drew too many games and going unbeaten isn’t actually that difficult, why could the great Sir Alex Ferguson not do it in 26 attempts? Why has no other English team *ever* done it over 38 games like we did?