When Arsenal’s social media team trolled a Daily Mail journalist after their 2-0 win over Tottenham on Saturday, they probably weren’t expecting their innocuous tweet to send a bunch of sports writers into a prolonged meltdown.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

On 16 November, two days before the North London Derby, Daily Mail journo Adam Crafton picked an all-Tottenham north London XI and predicted that the Lilywhites would crush Arsene Wenger’s side. It was a bit silly but not particularly nasty. And Arsenal’s 2-0 win made him look even more foolish.

This prompted Arsenal’s social media team to reply – not retweet – to the piece, which he had shared on Twitter himself, with a winky emoji, a gif of Mesut Ozil drinking tea and a red circle. That’s it.

https://twitter.com/Arsenal/status/931895814720548864

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This one action, however, caused Arsenal fans to descend on the unsuspecting journo, who later claimed to have received death threats, as well as homophobic and anti-Semitic abuse.

This resulted in several journos labeling the club as ‘crass’ and insisting that other big teams don’t do this, while former players have stepped in to condemn the actions of the minority and defend Arsenal’s right to have a bit of banter with a journalist.

It should be noted, that after looking through Crafton’s mentions, no one can appear to find any of these threats or abuse.

I found someone to tell him to ‘go drying’ – not ‘go die’ – and others saying the piece itself was crap, but he’s a journo, surely that’s nothing?

Of course, if Crafton did indeed get abuse, that should and has been condemned by the club. However, all I can see is people having a laugh at the journalist, who wrote a silly article… as they often tend to do.

Despite this, Henry Winter from the Times insisted that Arsenal need to be held accountable for the apparent abuse Crafton received. Basically, his argument that such a large club with a considerable following should have known what replying to his tweet was going to do.

You know, because Arsenal’s social media team are the ones we should be focusing on, not the irate keyboard warriors that allegedly took it upon themselves to threaten another human’s life because they didn’t like the article he wrote.

Shockingly – and I say that sarcastically – the vast majority of the people who seem to agree with Winter are fellow journalists, who now give the impression that they can dish it out but can’t take it. As Ian Wright implied, if they can’t stand the heat, perhaps they should get out of the kitchen.

I want to take a moment to pounce on Winter’s point that other big teams don’t troll on social media as this was something he repeated several times during his Twitter exploits on Sunday afternoon.

When Arsenal played Chelsea in September, their Twitter account took the rather classless step of tweeting out the video of Hector Bellerin getting knocked out at Stamford Bridge as Marcos Alonso scored last time we played there.

While the tweet received backlash from Gooners and was objectively covered by lesser-known outlets, journos didn’t seem too bothered despite that post being genuinely nasty compared to Arsenal’s joke. None of them tweeted from their personal accounts condemning such behaviour.

Bayern Munich, arguably one of the biggest teams in the world, also trolled Arsenal when they beat us 10-2 on aggregate last season. It sucked but it was banter.

https://twitter.com/FCBayernEN/status/839231688706248704

Still, no journos slated Bayern for being ‘crass’ or ‘arrogant’.

Just to put things back into perspective, Arsenal replied with a gif of Ozil drinking a cup of TEA to a journalist that slated them ahead of the North London Derby. There was no foul language, the club weren’t abusive themselves and they didn’t directly encourage anyone to go and threaten Crafton’s life. If anything, they probably realised that while he might receive some digs from Gooners, his original piece’s hits would also go through the roof.

To hold Arsenal to this bizarre new standard, overshadowing what was the best performance from Wenger’s side that we’ve seen in a long time and a huge win for the club, is disturbingly typical.

It deflects from the fact that most of these journos predicted that the Gunners would be hung out to dry by Pochettino’s men and they’re probably feeling a bit exposed and silly.

What’s more, the Daily Mail itself isn’t exactly known for being a fair outlet that refrains from targetting individuals. Are they claiming that they don’t write articles with the sole purpose of inciting hate? And, if they see ANY abuse going on in their comments sections, they would condemn it instantly… right?

Wrong.

This fiasco is just another example of journalists being unable to hack criticism after they dish it out and throwing their toys out of the pram when the shoe’s on the other foot.

There should be an inquest? It’s harassment? What on earth is going on.

There’s no excuse for death threats and abuse, granted, but that’s not Arsenal’s problem.

By that logic, the Daily Mail shouldn’t have published such a piece in the first place because they knew it was going to get a reaction.

In fact, I’d say they were banking on it.

And now they think they can sit in their office pretending to be the Little Guy, watching the clicks roll in on that lazily-written article designed to wind up Gooners, while feigning pseudo-outrage after those big Arsenal bullies tweeted them a .gif of Ozil drinking a cup of tea.

Some more tweets from journalists and pundits:

From the Daily Mail Sports Editor

Miguel Delaney was particularly fun (the whole thread and his account around that time are well worth checking out.) If you go back just a few hours, to a time when he was talking to some United fans, he actually says

That was just a few hours before he started policing what Arsenal replied with on Twitter…

He blocked us after we called him an embarassment

But some, thankfully, had sense

 

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