Sometimes, all that's left is to laugh...

There are so many jokes flying around in football at the moment.

There’s the one that goes: “Now King Kenny has returned to Liverpool, the odds on them winning the league next season have been slashed to 14/1. If you don’t understand how betting works, it means if you put £10 on, you’ll lose £10.”

Then there’s the one about the ballot for the Olympic tickets. “My credit card has now been debited. I didn’t get the events I wanted in the Olympic Stadium but there were 45,000 tickets available to watch West Ham.”

And then there’s the one about Ryan Giggs. What?

What’s worrying me though, is that beyond all this tomfoolery, the true laughing stocks of the Premier League this season have been us.

The media already take every opportunity they can get to have a dig at the Arsenal. This week’s double-page spread explaining we’re in disarray because Denilson – who has played about five games this year and is shit – wants to leave, was a classic example. Especially when you consider it was bang next to an inch-long story about Tevez, Man City’s actual best player, wanting to leave.

The following day’s story that Arsenal use GPS to track their footballers’ whereabouts, quoting Robin van Persie as saying “We don’t have private lives anymore”, was also classic ‘papers stirring it up’. Because the actual story was that Arsenal fit their players with GPS in training to monitor movement and patterns and, one day, a player had to pop home and forgot to take it off.

So we could really do without giving them extra ammunition to attack us with – namely being spineless, falling away at the end of the title race, never spending any money and all those other terribly predictable things this season has produced.

I didn’t used to care about this stuff. In fact, I quite liked that we were hated by the media. As long as we were winning, it just added to our ‘backs-to-the-wall’ battling mentality, and it made us stronger. I enjoyed sticking two fingers up at them.

But now it’s got a bit embarrassing and I’m tired of Keys and Gray and Collymore and The Sun and the Mail pointing out our frailties, our weaknesses and our softness.

Even Gary Lineker chipped in with a little dig at the end of Match of the Day last night, saying “Try spending some cash, Arsene”.

So when Wenger sits down later this week to consider whether he needs to add some steel and strength to this team, he might do well to observe that this team simply isn’t good enough to recover our reputation on its own next season – and that this club’s fans won’t enjoy being a laughing stock again next year.

It’s bad enough that this year we managed to come fourth in a two-horse race...