Thursday Cannon Fodder: good news, bad news

Yesterday was quite the day for Arsenal football club. Early in the day, news broke that the Gunners would be bringing Martin Ødegaard back to the carpet pending a medical, which he has since passed. The internet reacted mostly positively and excitedly about that piece of transfer business.

Later came the news that Arsenal were finally successful in their pursuit of Aaron Ramsdale, agreeing to bring the Sheffield United keeper to the Emirates for £24M + £6M in add-ons. The reactions were decidedly more mixed.

Those two transfers, however, are not the good news and bad news. The good news is that y’all blew up one of TSF’s tweets (and picked a good one based on the content), at least by our usual Twitter standards. The bad news is that I had to tweet out something to that effect in the first place.

Aaron Ramsdale reportedly had to disable comments on his Instagram yesterday after he received an overwhelming influx of hatred and abuse from Arsenal “supporters” when the transfer news broke. I simultaneously continue to be surprised and am not surprised at all by the level of terrible that people continue to consistently display on social media.

You would hope that especially after Bukayo Saka was racially abused following the Euros and how close to home the terribleness of the internet hit home, Gooners would be more sensitive to online abuse.

And judging by the response and interactions with that tweet, at least some of you Gooners are decent people trying to do the right thing. I was buoyed by the response. Plenty of people retweeted it with their own message decrying the hateful people doing stupid things, or commented positively, or dropped a like to show their support.

I’m happy that so many of my fellow Arsenal fans are at least decent human beings. But we’ve got to keep fighting the good fight to make the world a better place.