Thursday Cannon Fodder: viral

What makes something go viral? It’s hard to say. A combination of right place, right time, right content. I’m sure that there have been empirical studies of the type, length, and subject matter most likely to go viral, but it still feels like a crapshoot.

One of my TSF tweets yesterday went TSF-viral — that is to say performed better than 98% of all my TSF tweets in terms of likes, replies, and retweets.

Why did this particular tweet blow up? I have no idea. It isn’t topical or timely. It’s just a random thought I had during the day. Per Mertesacker was on my mind because he was pictured with Cătălin Cîrjan, the 19-year old Romanian Hale End product who just signed a professional contract at Arsenal.

For our conversation today, I don’t really care about the “going viral” part (although please feel free to discuss that too — I’m especially open to “remember this thing that went viral” strolls down memory lane).

I’m more interested in which Arsenal players you think were underrated. There are a few different flavors of underrated, too. For example, I think that Santi Cazorla was well-underrated outside of the Arsenal fanbase. It doesn’t feel to me as if the general Premier League fan realized how good he was. For another example, I think that Gooners underrated Theo Walcott. He’s an Arsenal goal centurion but because he didn’t live up to some people’s over-inflated ideas of his potential, they slag him off.