‘Arsenal this week…who’s next?’ It’s just a game…

Sarah Winterburn

“Honestly, I’ve never seen somebody so happy to receive so many abusive tweets…”

Happy? Craig Burley was positively gleeful about the abuse he had received in the wake of calling Arsenal fans “spineless” and “mentally weak”. He begged the ESPN presenter to hear nastier and nastier insults, like a high-powered businessman in a gimp mask visiting a retired schoolteacher in her home for ‘instruction’.

“Listen…it’s part of the job,” he replied. Is it? It’s part of your job as an ex-footballer and pundit to drop an incendiary device in a crowded marketplace and then sit back and wait for the fall-out? It’s part of your job to fire childish insults at a rather large group of people and watch as your Twitter mentions go through the roof and #burleyisafattwat starts trending?

There are people for whom receiving abuse is genuinely part of their job – traffic wardens, job centre employees, police officers – but, unless they really are utter bell-ends, they generally refrain from standing up with a big grin on their face and shouting ‘come on then…bring it on’. And they generally refrain from, well…

Only an idiot gets annoyed by an emoji but I really am that idiot, because with that little fishing rod, Burley made it clear that it was all just a game; he took his tackle to one of those artificially populated fishing lakes for people who can’t really fish and cast off, safe in the knowledge that he would land a whopper. Easy.

Whether Craig Burley truly believes that Arsenal fans are “spineless” and “mentally weak”, we will never know, because Craig Burley is not in the business of telling us what he thinks, but what he knows will get a reaction. We will generously assume that Burley does not believe that Arsenal fans are one amorphous mass who all think and act with one brain and speak with one voice; he is far from stupid.

Which kind of makes it worse, because a video sold as a ‘Boiling Point’ is really nothing of the sort. It is not an off-the-cuff reaction of an increasingly angry man but something manufactured, something designed. And any chemist will tell you that sturdy plastics can typically hold boiling water.

“Arsenal this week…who’s next?” said Burley when discussing the ‘blowback’ from his original video, and that’s what sets him apart from Gary Neville despite attempts this week to conflate the two into some kind of ‘pundits telling fans what to do’ narrative. Neville called one man holding a banner an ‘idiot’ and said it was “embarrassing” to watch ArsenalFanTV; it was an honestly-held opinion and very specific to those particular people. Burley was just on the wind-up and it worked, so he is delighted.

And if you’re wondering about the word ‘blowback’, the dictionary tells us that in US vernacular, it means ‘the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation’. Unintended? This was anything but.

And yes, I do realise that getting annoyed makes me just another fish on the end of Burley’s rod. And that is the kind of mental image that is going to give all of us sleepless nights…

Sarah Winterburn