Sat 13th March 2010 17:30, KC Stadium
Archive for Pundit Diatribe
In yesterday’s article, I laid out the first part of a coherent argument against what I feel ails English football.
Read: Anti-football, Anti-Arsenalism And The Misguided Self Preservation Of English Football – Part I.
In today’s final instalment, I want to address the role played by different parties in perpetuating this insalubrious culture of thuggery disguised as commitment, grit and steel.
3. It’s Not Just a Hill Of Beans, It’s a Very Big Deal
3.1 The Role Of Players
I mentioned yesterday that when it comes to players, there are two key underlying factors that have contributed to this decay:
- The issue of technically inferior players substituting technique with excessive aggression and thinking that this caveman approach to football is acceptable.
- The culture and environment that these players have been brought up in and continue to work in. It’s a culture that promotes the virtues of English football as being that of the physical ”blood and thunder, leg breaking, gut busting, full contact aggression” – that is typical of the ancient ‘Chuck Norris and Van Damme’ one man hero mentality that conquers all.
When these players cross that white line and get on the pitch, they are wired to unleash the cocktail of systematic violence as a deliberate strategy to slow down the opposing team – whether by physical or psychological means.
The horrific injury to Aaron Ramsey has left a bitter taste in the mouths of Arsenal fans and football enthusiasts ALIKE. Predictably, an unsavoury side of the English football establishment bore its ugly head for all to see.
Bear with me as I address what I feel are the key issues around the related themes of Anti-football, Anti-Arsenalism, and the misguided defence of the ugly side of English football that has no place in the modern game.
Before I lay my case out in this 2 part article, there is a very relevant sub-context to this topic that I’ve comprehensively covered in another 3 part article series Called ”How ‘English’ is the English Premier league”. If you have the time, check out:
- How ‘English’ Is The English Premier League? – Part I
- How ‘English Is The English Premier League? – Part II
- How ‘English’ Is The English Premier League? – Part III
I’ve covered a lot in the above series relating to the impact and necessity of foreign influence in the EPL – and I believe it’s very relevant as it already answers some of the questions that this two part article on ‘Anti-football’ will pose.
You can also read Part II of this article here.
Arsenal midfielder Aaron Ramsey in action
1. The Systematic Targeting Of Arsenal
1.1 The Context: Technique vs Physicality
It has now become widely acceptable that for some teams, the only way to stop Arsenal is to kick the hell out of them. There are teams that with all due respect, will never be able to match the technical superiority of Arsenal.
It has become urban legend that the only way to play Arsenal is to throw them off their stride with an overly physical game that involves a combination of rotational fouling and a more coherent strategy of ’hard tackles’ to take Arsenal’s creative players out of the picture.
Is Anti-Arsenalism A Reality Or A Myth
Posted by: | CommentsLike many Arsenal supporters out there, I suffer from an acute case of Arsenalitis. It’s a disease characterized by a deep emotional attachment to anything that has to do with Arsenal football club.
Some of the symptoms include chronic insomnia when the Gunners lose games or draw games we should have won; and frequent bouts of hypertension and anxiety attacks when we feel the club is unfairly being misrepresented in the media.
Despite the responsible thing of managing one’s own health and well-being say by not watching or listening to diatribe – you can’t help but notice the blatant cases of bias against Arsenal.
So is this anti-Arsenalism really a myth, or shall we stop beating around the bush and call it what it is – blatant bias and xenophobia by the establishment towards Arsenal?
Years ago, my Liverpool loving friend Dean asked me why I love Arsenal so much. You see, Dean and I grew up together and we’ve been really close friends for just shy of 30 years.
When we were kids, we played our own leagues in the council estates and equivalents of Hackney Marshes. This was in the early to mid 80s when Liverpool were flying and many of the local neighbourhood teams adopted the names of big clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United, despite the fact that we were lucky to even watch a televised match once a month in our part of the world.
The funny thing is that we knew more about the team we supported and the players of the time, than we did about school work and the local curriculum. Prozone would have been proud of us at the time.
Dean was the local Liverpool’s star. Their Graham Souness, the guy who made them tick. He’s the only footballer who I know will nutmeg you and dribble past 3 players, turn towards you with that impish ”gotcha” smile, before smuggling the ball into the goal from a ridiculously impossible angle.
So I wasn’t the least bit surprised about his allegiance to Liverpool. His question to me about the roots of my allegiance to Arsenal did make me think though.
I suppose the biggest driving factor for me is to do with what Arsenal as a club represents. Victoria Concordia Crescit says it all, but it’s much more than that. It’s about the club’s values and philosophy of openness and opportunity. About the clubs desire to go about things in the right and fair way, and about the clubs patience and determination to develop an ambitious vision, stick to it and work hard at realising it.
There are many aspects of Arsenal’s journey over the last 2 decades that are a reflection of my own journey in life. In the last 18 years in particular I’ve identified more with the Gunners than any other development in my life I guess.
Friends tell me in a way that I’m lucky that my wife is also crazy about football. The down side though is that she’s a diehard Chelsea supporter (yeah! I know) – but I guess we all make sacrifices in life and have to live with the consequences.
Perhaps these are the reasons why I feel more sensitive and aggrieved about the open bias towards Arsenal that I encounter every day from the English football establishment. And it’s not paranoia. I know paranoia, believe me.
I’ll give you 4 examples (and there’s loads more) to illustrate my point.
1. Broadcasting of Arsenal Games on TV or radio
I’ll cite the group stages of the champions league. Out of 6 match days, there’s 24 opportunities that 2 radio stations have to broadcast the commentary for the games involving the 4 English sides.
I’ve used radio as an example because on the specific Tuesday and Wednesday nights of the Champions league match days, I was working and where I was , we can only listen to radio.
Out of the 24 opportunities that both radio stations had, only one Arsenal game – the match day 1 game between Standard Liege and Arsenal was broadcast. In a fair world, you’d expect that more than 1 out of 24 Arsenal games would get air time. In most cases, both stations broadcast the same match involving either Chelsea, Man United or Liverpool.
Don’t even get me started on the debacle of the Sky vs. ITV split that sees Arsenal relegated into broadcasting wilderness.
2. Anally Retentive Commentators.
It’ was refreshing that in his last webcast to Arsenal supporters, Wenger confessed that he rarely watches Arsenal games on TV with the volume on. The outright bias and diatribe the commentators have against Arsenal can drive you loco.
It’s almost like it’s a scripted attempt to brainwash Arsenal fans with negativity. Whether it’s constantly referring to Gallas’s drama at St. Andrews in February 2008, or the application of selective amnesia that blanks out any virtues of the Arsenal game and amplifies Arsenal’s shortcomings; some commentators need to be lynched.
In many cases, commentators have publicly referred to the opposing team as ”our”. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they’re on the opposing team’s payroll, but to be fair, such commentators are just thick.
3. Xenophobia towards Arsenal’s colourful squad
The constant references to Arsenal’s supposed lack of English players is mind numbing and bang out of order. They serve to reinforce stereotypes that promote the dislike of the unknown and the misunderstood, and essentially fuel xenophobia.
The way the non-English mantra is latched on to suggests that there is something inherently wrong with not being English. An argument has been made that the English premier league is actually English in an attempt to justify the xenophobia.
Frankly speaking, in the 21st century, that’s an argument that needs to be filed right between shit and syphilis. There’s no room for that level of ignorance and arrogance for that matter in a game that is prostituted around the world as the best league competition on the planet.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the Premier League is only popular in the world because of the myriad of international players and managers in the game. If it was still quintessentially English, the league would still be in the wilderness of the mid 80s to early 90s following the 5 year UEFA ban caused by hooliganism.
Furthermore, the billions of pounds Sky and other TV broadcasters pump into the game is only made possible by the ability to sell broadcasting rights all over the world. The English premier league can’t be a reality without non-English participation.
Inevitably, Arsenal is the whipping boy of this ”you’re not English enough” band wagon. It’s a shame that no one takes notice of the composition of the Arsenal youth and reserves team, and Arsenal’s stellar work in bringing through talented English players for the future.
4. Misguided truths or convenient lies about Arsenal
Take your pick:
- Arsenal don’t have strength and depth
- Arsenal need an English spine to win the EPL
- Arsenal must play ugly to win
- Arsenal can’t hack it if you bully them or kick them off the park
- It’s OK to actually kick them weak and brittle Arsenal players
- Arsenal are broke and there are a poor man’s imitation of the big 2 clubs
- If Arsenal don’t win a trophy this season then Wenger must go
- Wenger is a tight fisted egomaniac who refuses to spend money for big name transfers
- Arsenal are a selling team
You get the picture…
Basically a narrative has been building for several years now to serve the purpose of pigeon holing Arsenal into an also-rans outfit. There will always be a negative edge pursued on any Arsenal story.
A good example is when Andrey Arshavin said that Arsenal needed a miracle to have all their first team players available at the same time. This was swiftly rehashed and reported as “Arshavin says Arsenal need a miracle to win the title”
What is also noticeable is the contempt and disdain that Arsenal and Wenger are held in by the I-Zombies (pundits and hacks) in football. Most of them find it really hard to hide their contempt for all things Arsenal. It’s so pathetic to watch them pretend to be impartial.
It’s true what they say though. If they hate you this much, you must be doing something right. Is choosing to win by playing beautiful football such a bad thing?
Watch The Grave Digging Pundits Squirm About Arsenal’s Title Challenge
Posted by: | CommentsIf there’s one thing the football punditry establishment is good at, it’s the ability to constantly show breath-taking incompetence when it comes to learning lessons on humility and reasoned arguments. Let me give you an example that illustrates my point.
In 2002, Arsene Wenger was laughed out of TV and radio studios and scorned in the back pages for suggesting that his Arsenal team can go a whole season without losing a single game.
Arsenal Manager, Arsene Wenger
Granted, it took the old man another year to achieve that monumental and historic feat, but there in lay a very big lesson about the folly of jumping band wagons, lazy journalism and frankly speaking, the innate prejudice that has riddled the punditry establishment from top to bottom.
Even before a ball was kicked this season, Arsenal were completely written off by pretty much everyone in the establishment, save for a handful of brave souls who were prepared to be ridiculed through the season. The intransigence shown by the hard core of pundits and hacks in cementing their hardline positions on Arsenal’s fall from grace was so tangible, that it choked anyone who would say otherwise.
One of the interesting features of the internet though, is it’s uncanny ability to retain what pundits and hacks put on record in black and white, and also on video and audio. The pre-season predictions about Arsenal’s chances of winning the EPL as so shockingly off base, if they weren’t funny, they’d be tragic.
Some of the authors of such predictions need to pray that their editors don’t review their work if and when their employer has to make job cuts, because they’d have to go. And we’re only half way through the season.
Just for the record, I’ll get off the fence here and publicly declare that I am confident Arsenal can win the title. I’ve even put my reasons on record in the weekly column I write on ACLF, where I outlined the 8 reasons why Arsenal can win the title this season.
The funny thing about human nature is that many are not wired to climb down from hardline positions. It’s not that these hardline positions against Arsenal’s chances to win the title were based on considered reason – my belief is that there’s more to this.
Arsenal defies convention and stereotype in more than one way. The clubs vision, ethos and ambition, as well as it’s defiance and determination to win with beautiful football, however long it takes, is a path that many pundits and hacks find hard to fathom. It’s almost easier to dismiss it with lazy cliché’s and baseless sweeping statements about the club and it’s performances.
The thing is this though – the league table doesn’t lie. It’s not that there’s an expectation now that the hardliners who wrote Arsenal off at the beginning of the season will eat humble pie. Far from that, the humble pie is still being baked at London Colney and when the time comes, it will be appropriately dished out.
What’s more funny and enjoyable right now is watching the plethora of pundits and hacks try to undig the graves that they dug for themselves. You’d think that they would start by not digging any further than they already are – but clearly, the situation Arsenal find themselves in is not one any of them were prepared for.
There are those who talk in ’3rd person speak’. They’d come up with statements like ”Many pundits wrote Arsenal off but the Gunners are really showing a lot of character”. I like the ’many pundits’ label – as if they weren’t one of those.
Others use a twisted form of defensive pessimism by constantly looking for perceived holes and flaws to point out. ”Arsenal don’t have enough strength and depth”, or ”Arsenal still need an out and out goal scorer” not withstanding that Arsenal is still the most lethal team in the league, or ”Arsenal still need one or two new signings to make it”, or ”When it comes to the crunch, Arsenal won’t make it” You get the picture.
Then there are those who are seriously shifting positions in readiness for them to stake their claim as reasonable pundits. This lot totally ignore their hardline stance even as recently as a few weeks ago, and come up with tactics that are designed to deflect people away from their previous positions. On radio and in newspaper columns, they’ve started asking questions like ”Is this Arsenal’s year? Can they do it? What will it take for them to do it?”. You’ll also find them starting debates as to whether now Wenger needs to stop being ’stubborn’ and buy a striker in order to give Arsenal the best chance to win the league.
I think the most insulting pundits and hacks are the ones who now pretend that they have always believed in Arsenal and the promise of this young team is now showing. They’re pretending to praise Arsene Wenger’s vision and praising the young Arsenal side that has shown maturity and is now coming to fruition.
They claim that they always knew this team would deliver and maybe this is their year. They claim that there’s no justice in football if Arsenal’s scintillating and sexy brand of football is not rewarded with trophies. They feign frustration as if to empathise with frustrated Arsenal fans that the team seems so near and yet Wenger refuses (allegedly I might add) to ’buy’ that additional player that will make Arsenal the finished article.
My point is simple. The league table is undisputable and it doesn’t lie. The assumption and position taken by the punditry establishment is that Arsenal will fall off the cliff and Moneybags City from Middle Eastlands will ride into town and take over from Arsenal as the 4th force of English football.
Sky Sports even had the audacity to front a branding and marketing campaign of their ’Sky 4’ – Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City. These were going to be their Big 4 for the season.
The montage and imagery for this campaign was painfully obvious in illustrating the fact that they’d written off Arsenal even to make the top 4 in the EPL. They even had a specific advert for Sky Sports shown regularly with a clip of Manchester United’s 3rd goal in the Champions League semi-final last year at the Emirates stadium, as if to remind folks why Arsenal should be written off.
That humble pie being baked will be a mouthful for sure when it’s ready to serve. Meanwhile, we can enjoy the squirming as they try to undig their graves.
Guess Who’s Coming To Arsenal…
Posted by: | CommentsThat seems to be the game being played up and down Fleet Street and on air waves. Some people actually make a living from speculating and rumour mongering when it comes to the transfer window. But let’s face it, for the most part, it’s all bull shit designed to sell papers and bring in the listeners so as to sell advertising.
I was bemused over the weekend when a particular sports radio show proclaimed that they had an ’expert’ in the studio who was clued up on the January transfer window. They were asking people to call in so that their ’expert’ could confirm or deny the transfer rumours for their club. I don’t know what was more tragic – the self proclamation of expertise in transfer rumour mongering, or the fact that the said expert worked for the News of the World.
It’s like a whole new industry designed to peddle hogwash has been unleashed on us, and right on cue, you find Arsenal supporters (in fairness, supporters of other clubs too), lining up to masticate over falsehoods that have been concocted by lazy journalists who have no clue about what cuts.
I laugh when I read stories like ”Player X has been linked to Arsenal”, or ”Player Y is the sort of player that Arsenal need for their midfield”
The question I’d like to ask is “who linked the player with Arsenal?”, If it isn’t a journalist sitting down his local pub on a Tuesday morning racking his brain on how to meet the copy deadline that evening?
”I know what! That kid is tall, he looks like an Adebayor, he’s African and can speak French – wouldn’t it be funny if we linked him to Arsenal”
And
There starts a story about how we’re going to sign the new Adebayor. What then follows is the trail of lazy uncorroborated copy and pasting that gives a non-story a life of its own.
Take the Patrick Vieira to Arsenal story over the summer. I know for a fact because I was listening on the radio on the way home, when Ian Wright, almost in exasperation that Wenger was not going to sign a so called world class defensive midfielder, plucked a thought from the air in the mould of ”What Arsenal really need is a ‘Vieira’ type player who will stamp their authority in the midfield”. Very few people at the time believed that Arsenal had the solutions within. Wright then innocuously suggested “wouldn’t it be nice if Arsenal does bring Vieira back for a season just to provide some leadership and presence within the dressing room and play a few difficult matches”.
Believe it or not, the next day there was an unconfirmed report in a tabloid that proclaimed that sources inside Arsenal suggest that Wenger is looking to re-sign Patrick Vieira to bolster his midfield. This was accompanied with the usual waffle of how Vieira is Mr Arsenal and how he will be a good fit for the inexperienced Arsenal midfield.
Sky Sports news, The gospel according to St. Murdoch included it in their news roundup session – where they essentially read all the sports tabloid headlines without regard to journalistic integrity and in effect giving some of the nonsense credibility.
The Vieira story then started feeding itself like a hungry beast with Italian newswires picking it up as fact because English tabloids had written about a romantic return for Vieira to Arsenal and Sky Sports News reported it. The English papers then quoted the Italian press as more proof of the credibility of the story and the Italian press further obliged by quoting the English press who quoted them in a vicious cycle that forces the story to have an uncontrollable life of its own.
The next thing you know, Wenger has to respond to a question about re-signing Vieira in one of his press conferences, and because Wenger doesn’t want to be blunt, he says he hasn’t thought about it, but just by mentioning it, the story then becomes ”Wenger is thinking about re-signing Vieira”.
You catch my drift, right? And all because a lazy journalist was listening in a pub when he heard Ian Wright romancing about what Ian Wright thought Arsenal needed.
Just thinking about this January transfer window, there seems to be this misguided notion that Arsenal (or any other team for that matter) have to buy and spend big money to give them a chance at whatever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against improving the squad by bringing in new players. I’ve been vocal about this. What I have a problem with is buying for the sake of buying or because there’s undue pressure from outside. If there’s a player out there who can add value to this Arsenal squad, a player who is better than who we already have, then I’m all for it. No one can argue that our last 3 signings, Vermaelen, Arshavin and Nasri haven’t added significant value to this squad. The core of players being developed at Arsenal can greatly benefit from such a value signing.
It’s this thoughtless ’cheque book’ style of management that has landed many a club with unmanageable debts. Perhaps more teams should consider that solutions for some of their deficiencies so far lie within the club if they could get more of their players fit or playing better. Perhaps its a tactical change for some that will work, or maybe just players actually playing to their true form. It’s folly to think that buying reinforcements is the only solution. I believe it’s one of the solutions, but not the only one – but more importantly, the player being brought in has to be the right fit for the club.
My sense is that if there’s a player out there who can fit our style of play and hit the ground running by playing Wengerball, then our scouting system will find that player and Arsenal will buy such a player. I think it’s wrong to buy a player because of market pressure and to have to change your system of play to fit that new big money acquisition. For the long term health of the team, this is one case where the tail should never be allowed to wag the dog.
Also, I just thought I’d mention a new section of Stone Cold Arsenal, the Stone Cold Article Series. This new section provides a more straightforward way of accessing related articles that cover a similar theme or topic area. The article series can also be accessed from the main menu.
Double Standards let Stevie Godiver off the hook
Posted by: | CommentsSince no one (I’ve tried finding someone who does) is going to talk about this issue, I’ve decided to be a one man crusader.
At the beginning of the season, Wenger was royally slated for defending Eduardo Da Silva from a media witch hunt that baffled the footballing establishment around the world. Except in England (and Scotland for that matter), everyone else around the world pretty much wondered what the hell the furore was about Eduardo ‘diving’. If the referee thought for any reason that he was conned, it was a straight yellow card offence and life would move on.
Eduardo experienced the worst nightmare any player would want from the English media witch hunt that followed. Guillame Balague, a famous Spanish and European football pundit even dared to tell his English colleagues to move from the caveman Neolithic age and take football for what it is now.
Arsenal to its credit, didn’t back down at all and challenged UEFA who had no option but to back down – a move that had English journalists and pundits spitting fire and brimstone all over the air waves and on news columns. Eduardo and Arsene Wenger were pretty much labelled the footballing Anti-Christs’ for their blatant cheating. We were told that cheating had no place in English football and all these foreigners better leave their ’dirty’ tricks out there because we don’t do that sort of thing in England.
The English media portrayed the English game as being whiter than white with their superstars St. Terry and St. Rooney committing the monumental cardinal sin by standing in front of a camera and professing to the world that ”we English lads are ‘onest and we don’t do that sort of cheating”. This despite the form that various prominent England players had for cheating including Rooney himself.
I can accept that Eduardo dived, whatever his motive was. We can’t get into his head, but he has the right to make that decision based on how he sees the game. If he transgressed, it’s no more than a yellow card. However, I found the media demonization of Eduardo so painful because it unfairly and arbitrarily targeted him while many others in the game continued with the same crime against association football (for that was what it was being portrayed as).
Fast forward to the World cup qualifiers, and we have Arsenal and Arsene Wenger being blamed (by the English and not the Irish media mind you) for Ireland being kicked out of the World cup – notwithstanding the fact that Ireland benefitted from an equally deplorable crime against association football when they got past Georgia in February. Where were the cries for Ireland to be punished then?…but I digress.
It was almost second nature to blame Arsenal for Thierry Henry’s transgressions despite the fact that he was a Barcelona player and had been for over 2 seasons. My take is that I don’t even blame Henry for doing an instinctive thing that any player in the world would have done under the same circumstances. Again, if caught, this was only a yellow card offense and nothing more. It’s the media witch hunt that follows that eternally pisses me off.
So when I scan the news wires for the last 48 hours looking for any acknowledgement of the blatant cheating that Steven ‘Godiver’ Gerrard did by shamelessly diving in the game against Blackburn to try and win a penalty, and find none – you can understand why the double standards irk the hell out of me. For one, Gerrard has form against Sheffield Utd and against Standard Liege just to mention a few.
Career journalists like Adrian Durham even had the audacity to suggest that because Gerrard never appealed the penalty, he wasn’t a diver and he had slipped because of the wet weather yada yada yada. Durham even went as far as saying that if Gerrard or any other England player dived in the World cup and got a result – he’d take it.
This is the same journalist who for weeks on end led the crusade and witch hunt against Eduardo for cheating. There are many others – most of who could only muster a “Gerrard was trying to be clever there to win a penalty” – yet it is so obvious that the Liverpool captain tried to gain advantage by deceiving the referee – and was outrightly embarrassed, he was too ashamed to even claim anything.
In late January, I wrote about Steven Gerard’s trial which in my view was a complete white wash simply because of who Gerrard is. If it was anyone else on the street who admitted the offence and the police had CCTV to go with the admission – they’d be serving a jail term right now. The notion of self defence put forward in the case is laughable at best and insulting at worst.
But at least we now know how two faced and biased the English Sports media are.
Drog Day Afternoon as Arsenal Sink to the Blues
Posted by: | CommentsYou know, every time Didier Drogba has played for Chelsea against Arsenal and scored, we’ve never won the said match. Yesterday was one of them days you looked blankly around with morale and self pride so shattered, that if the expression on your face could talk, it would ask – ”Who let the Drog out?”
The Sky Sports match day director was clearly on an incentive or bonus programme measured by sensationalism when he sanctioned the HD close-up of Wenger’s devastated face at the end of the match. They would call zooming into Wenger’s eyes at such a critical point good entertainment value, but I would argue that such cinematography stunts test the boundaries of humiliation and show poor judgement.
Hundreds of thousands of Arsenal fans around the world are waking up to a very bitter morning – a morning where they have to confront the demons of facing their peers at work or wherever they meet, to try and explain their way out of yesterday’s resounding defeat to Chelsea. It’s a painful process that no self respecting football fan wants to experience week in week out, and thankfully, I don’t have to face that. I would argue though that the fact I’m married to a Chelsea fan gives me enough drama than I’d particularly want to deal with at this time – but I’m made to understand some decisions we take in life are for better or worse.
From what I’ve scanned on the news wires and on Arsenal blogs this morning, the feeling is reminiscent of early May this year when we lost heavily to Man Utd on the second leg of the Champions League semi-final. If you thought yesterday was bad, spare a thought for the family of this Kenyan Arsenal supporter who committed suicide following that loss to Man Utd. Whilst it’s commendable to show passion, I would suggest that perspective is a great healer in times of doubt, and I hope we don’t experience another one of these.
The headlines and the analysis of both the match and of Arsenal prospects by the establishment will be unforgiving and will make uncomfortable reading for many an Arsenal fan. They will have their day and they will ruthlessly dissect this team and find enough fodder to keep the indictment of ‘Wenger’s youth project’ on the airwaves and news columns. What the news media don’t do, the Chelsea fans carrying the bragging rights back to the Kings road (at least until February 6th next year) will do by shoving yesterday’s victory down our collective throats. The doom and gloom however, will not be complete without Arsenal’s own resident D&G brigades who will hit the airwaves and blogosphere with all manner of negativity and dummy spitting just for good measure.
But once the cold light of day has passed, and we’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff, we can’t hide away from several issues.
- Generally, we didn’t play badly, but the better team won. We shouldn’t have any complaints about that. Chelsea had few chances on goal, but they took them and they took them well.
- We had a team capable of winning that match. I don’t buy the argument that Chelsea are a physical side who overwhelmed us. We didn’t play to our strengths particularly in the final third, and they played to their’s. We can’t make excuses for that and we were beaten fair and square.
- Yesterday’s defeat does not spell the end of our campaign for the premier league. In fact, the loss to Sunderland on the 21st of November was more costly to us – if you consider the mathematical game needed to win the EPL by beating the teams lower then you on the table. Chelsea will be reigned in with time, and there’s enough time in the EPL to experience more twists and turns.
- We have the personnel in the team to resolve the issues that have lost us games so far this season. Quality is not our issue, our issue as a team is mental strength. Something has to give as we’re quickly surrendering our share of acceptable losses for the season and are running out of pitch if you will.
- For too long, we’ve spent time slating our ’scapegoats du jour’ – whether it be Almunia, Alex Song, Denilson, Diaby, or Eboue. Yesterday was another day where we saw the big names in our team go missing for huge periods of the match – and I’ll cite Arshavin and Fabregas for this. We had a good enough team performance with only one or two notable solid performances from Denilson and Song, and in my view, Traore had a good enough game. However, this was the sort of game where our big players had to stand up and be counted as they would have grabbed the game by the scruff of the neck and made a difference. We need to stop our sometimes devastating favouritism and focus on supporting and encouraging the team as a collective to improve.
I think my most disappointing moment from yesterday was watching scores of so called Arsenal fans stream out of the stadium before the end of the game. It made me ask these questions:
- Do we have stadium attending fans who are just interested when Arsenal are winning and playing ecstatic football?
- Do fans appreciate their role in the collective effort of the team, and specifically the need for them to lift up the team during difficult times?
- Is there any way of shipping out the core of fickle ’Johnny come lately’ glory hunting fans? There’s hundreds of thousands of true fans who will support this club through thick and thin and who would die for the opportunity to be at the Emirates week in week out.
We actually didn’t play badly at all – the better team on the day won because they took their chances and we didn’t. There is no excuse for abandoning the team like it happened yesterday. I think the bigger problem and poison within this team is the section of fans who don’t understand the concept of supporting their team through difficult times.
The forth-coming trips to Eastlands and Anfield, as well as the home visit by Stoke should give the team enough opportunity to remedy the situation. The team have to find a way of arresting any further slide down the table, and I’m more than confident they will. I’m not suggesting that unqualified support is the order of the day, but I’m sure those whose job it is to rectify the situation with the team will do so because it’s not a mystery.
And as you go through the week and try to recover from yesterday’s defeat, I’ll leave you with Never Say Die: An Ode to my Beloved Arsenal to lift your spirits.
