Mails: An Arsenal fan defends Fabregas…

Matt Stead

Send all your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

 

We all do
I bloody love Juan Mata, I really do.
Harry The Manc.

 

Pogba complaint
Paul, nice strike, we knew there was a half decent player in there somewhere, but please, PLEASE, sort that celebration out. You dancy like a cross between Disco Stu and a Poodle with diarrhea and frankly English football deserves better. Thanks.
Pete (Specialists in 7th) in Brum

 

Wenger was right
I was wrong to ask for a Shawcross

Some time back I and many Gooners rightly complained about Arsen Wenger’s lack of activity in the transfer market because he was taking too long to buy a defender to strengthen our defense which was very shaky back then. His excuse was there was no quality in the market. He finally did buy Mustafi and I have to say now I understand why I am only a fan and he is the manager at Arsenal. He finally delivered the quality he was talking about. While I do not put Mustafi in the ‘BBC’ class he is just what we need at the Emirates – a ball-playing defender whose basic instinct is not to send the ball to row-Z but to make an intelligent pass to a team-mate. In the last 3 matches Mustafi has come very close to grabbing himself an assist – not from a cross as you would expect from a defender but an Ozil kind of assist (from the middle) His discipline is impeccable as he is yet to be booked in an Arsenal shirt and has already been a MotM. Meanwhile theShawcross I suggested we buy has picked himself 3 yellow cards this far and we all know how Stoke City are doing!
Joram Kioko, AFC, Nairobi, Kenya

 

Oh, Timmy
So it would seem that the ‘should Carrick play all the time’ discussion is back. I always think that is a debate that will never be settled – it’s always “he played really well, pinged some lovely passes” versus “but he’s getting on a bit and the opposition were shite and didn’t close him down properly”. Lo and behold, he played some lovely passes and clearly brought some calm to the United midfield last night, but it was against a terrible, terrible Fenerbahce side who didn’t close him down. He’s also 35 by the way, so he’s getting on a bit.

Step forward Tim Sherwood. On ITV’s highlights show last night, Tim suggested (nay, insisted) that in a Premier League Best XI Carrick would be the first on the team sheet. Not Sergio Aguero, not Alexis Sanchez nor David de Gea. Carrick. Sorry Mesut Ozil, it’s not you. Riyad Mahrez, I know you’ve had a good couple of seasons but what choice does Tim have when Michael Carrick is available.

Thank goodness he is here to settle debates.
Richard, Brighton

 

Gunners thoughts
Having a read through some of the comments on your article regarding Arsenal having their strongest team ever (debatable) and some of the contributions to the later Mailbox on Thursday, it feels like a lot of people are missing the point of the discussion about this squad.

Most of the comments are ”it was only Ludogrets for f*ck’s sake!” or ”it was only Hull City, for crying out loud!”.

I don’t think Football365 or any Arsenal fan is going out and saying we are now going to be challenging for silverware and probably winning it. The argument is that Arsenal have the strongest squad in over a decade. Which is 100% true. They have the quality and the depth to win the top honours. Whether they achieve that or not is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion.

I’m an Arsenal fan and I will admit that I do not see us being as consistent as I would like. I’ve been let down by one too many squads over the last few years. But if I was ever to put my faith in one, this would be it as it is undeniably the best squad we have had in a long time. Saying otherwise is ludicrous.

Now; can they win the league? That’s a different beast altogether. But they definitely have the capability to do so.
Malcolm, AFC

 

Defending Arsenal’s version of Cesc
How harsh from Graham Simons (is the Norf London thing an attempt to be authentic?).

His review of Cesc is devoid of any historical context. Somehow Vieira is a god and Cesc is a bottler. Both flirted with other clubs quite blatantly, personally Paddy was the biggest sinner for me given he left a winning club to go to the highest bidder. Graham does not stop to think about who they had to play with. Paddy had Henry, Dennis and Pires in 2004. A very young Cesc had Ade, Nasri and Hleb in the infamous 2008 campaign, a league campaign where Cesc was magnificent but appallingly relied upon for such a young player. Can you spot the difference in the supporting cast Graham?! Any bearing on your ratings?!

2 other things.

Have a close look at Cesc’s post Arsenal career. Ups and downs, perhaps a la Rooney he suffered from early burn out but saw plenty of ups for club and country. Only 2 seasons ago he again was pivotal for a title winning side. He has basically been a top class footballer for his entire career.

Lastly please never ever listen to a Catalan taxi driver. I remember well in the early 90s one telling me that Maradona was never good enough to play for Barca and how Napoli were mugs paying his wages. Perhaps he was the Catalan version of you with oddly distorted views on players? Barca fans are a funny bunch. Some of them have always been weirdly entitled. I’d ignore most of them if I was you!

MORAL HIGH GROUND (Cesc was unlucky in his timing with us, that’s my honest read of a great shift he put in as captain and to be honest he was our best player for at least 3 seasons by an absolute mile).
Paul

 

Another weekend preview
Manchester City-Southampton. The Saints have marched up the table, but against weak opposition: Swansea, West Ham, Burnley. Claude Puel believes in passing football, but can they pass their way through the City press? The side aren’t exceptionally fast on the counterattack, which is where City are most vulnerable. And although the defense has been outstanding lately, they haven’t faced a striker who can pull them out of position like Sergio Aguero. Plus how will backup fullbacks Cuco Martina and Sam McQueen cope with Pep’s wide men? After their exertions in Barcelona, City may rest a starter or two; Southampton rested their players in the loss to Inter, and should be at full strength.

Stat: Nathan Redmond’s 89.9% passing percentage is highest in the league among attacking players.

Burnley-Everton. All Burnley’s points have come at Turf Moor, and the Clarets need to be brave here. Everton were thrown off their game at Middlesbrough by a high press, and there’s no reason it can’t happen again. Sam Vokes will go up against a central defense no better than average in the air. Stephen Ward looks an improved defender this year, and a matchup with Yannick Bolasie will tell us how far he’s come. But Ben Mee has been in indifferent form, and Romelu Lukaku is a good bet to take advantage. Still, the Toffees haven’t been that sharp the past few weeks — they could easily have been embarrassed by Manchester City — and in what looks like a low-scoring game, might find the going harder than expected.

Stat: Burnley have held their opponents to only 7.5% shot conversion, third in the league behind Tottenham (4.1%) and Everton (6.9%).

Bournemouth-Tottenham. The Cherries are [insert silly pun here], with only one loss in their last six games, and that at Manchester City. But last season this fixture wound up 1-5, even though Spurs were coming off a midweek Europa League defeat. Harry Arter was unavailable for that match, and his presence here may help Bournemouth counter the physical side of Spurs’ game. It’ll be a worthy tactical matchup in any case, since the Cherries use the wings more than any other team, and Spurs are strongest in the center. Much will depend on how quickly Andrew Surman can get the ball wide. Assuming Danny Rose is fit, his runs forward will tend to limit the damage Junior Stanislas can do.

Stat: Bournemouth are allowing more shots on target per game than last year (5.0 to 4.1), but Artur Boruc’s save percentage has improved significantly (69.2% to 61.9%), so they’ve allowed fewer goals per game (1.57 to 1.76).
Peter G, Pennsylvania, USA

 

Colourful opinions
Regarding Steven Chicken’s article and other mails on coloured boots, I noticed as I squinted past the seagulls in the Australia v Japan game recently that Japan’s left back Tomoaki Makino was wearing one black boot and one red boot.  I spent much of the second half trying to work out why, and my strongest theory was that “black” has an L in it and therefore helps him remember that it should go on his left foot, while “red” starts with R, as does “right”.

But then I thought, well, Japanese people often struggle with the difference between L and R, so perhaps that wouldn’t actually help him at all.  And then I realised that actually he might not even speak English.

My conclusion was that he matched the shape of the boots to the shape of his feet when he wanted to put them on, and that the colour thing was just to try to look cool.

Regards,
James T, Kanazawa, Japan

 

Maybe I was the only one to see this TV program but on RTE there was a show about Irish Rugby players and there was a study into the effectiveness of coloured boots. The “science” behind the boots was that the more colourful the boots were the more distracting they are to the opposition.

The test to prove this was done with Tommy Bowe doing a virtual tackle test. He wore a head set and had to “tackle” virtual players who were running at him. Tommy noted that most tacklers would look at an opponent’s feet to try and determine what direction the player would turn or jink. The test proved that he missed more tackles when the player running at him wore colourful boots.

The theory behind it was that the bright boots distracted the opponent  ever so slightly which gave the attacker the advantage. So maybe that’s why wingers and strikers are more likely to wear bright boots as a lot of defender will be looking at their feet in trying to guess which way the attacker will run and they are hoping to get that extra millisecond of time that looking like a tw*t will afford them.

Anyway that’s my two cents worth and I hope that it might go towards answering the question of “why the f**K is your man wearing those boots”?
Micko

 

Guess who (cockney accent required)…

“He’s a good old-fashioned player with good old-fashioned values. The other day we were out training and I’ve got players wearing red, purple, yellow, white and green boots. And out comes ­Parker in a good old pair of black boots. Old school – he carries that on to the pitch.”

Yep, Harry Redknapp himself: the original PFM. If there is a better argument for brightly coloured boots, I’d love to hear it.
Alex G, THFC

 

Dembele of the week
With regards to Dembele of the week do you think family Sodje look at that and think wistfully “what could have been…”

Yours,
Peter DRFC in Suffolk

 

Straightsplaining
I’d just like to commend Daniel Storey on his very good piece about the prospect of the first footballer gay footballer opening up to the media.

We had a recent example here in Ireland in our own sport, hurling. One of the most well known players and personalities, Donal Og Cusack, a goalkeeper for Cork, came out as gay a number of years ago. I must admit that the reaction to his ‘coming out’ was really mature. I think there were a few interviews on late night talk shows and radio talk shows for the first few weeks, but they weren’t sports shows, they were topical shows that dealt with the topic at hand in a very mature manner. Donal Og has since gone on to coach a major hurling team, he is a pundit on the biggest GAA show on Irish television and he is more widely known for the fact that he tries to throw in funny one-liners, waves a pen about in a needless manner and generally tries to look like a 19 year old despite being near 40. I’m not sure if anyone looks at him and thinks ‘oh he’s gay’. I’ve worked with him on numerous occasions and have never really let his sexuality become any part of our working relationship. There wasn’t even any backlash from the more backward folk in Ireland once he came out; basically nobody brandished him a ‘queer’.

As regards to English football, it’s impossible to say how fans would react. There is certainly more of a ton culture in English soccer than there is in GAA. There would certainly be some vile chants from the stand and I would say it would take stewards to enforce policies in the same way they try to stamp out racism to ensure it doesn’t become a problem.

In a way I’m surprised that I have written a relatively long mail on the topic. It wouldn’t be something that is especially close to my heart, though I would never like to see someone abused because of their sexual orientation. I actually quite dislike many of the LGBTA groups because they regularly come across as quite pushy and self-congratulatory.

I think that homophobia is gradually being stamped out, but because it is seeped in our culture it may be a few years until it can become something that isn’t a topic of discussion anymore and people can just get on with it.
Paddy(Dundalk are currently beating f#&%*!g Zenit) Ireland

 

First off, excellent writing from Mr. Storey. It made me consider a side of the issue that I hadn’t before, that positive pressure is still pressure and probably just as unwelcome as any other kind of unnecessary pressure.

However, implying that you only need to get ‘mostly white’ people together and it’s inevitable that some of them will start the homophobic abuse is just not helpful to anyone. At all.

It’s just not true, is my initial gripe with it. I acknowledge that Storey openly claims it’s a minority of ‘mostly white’ people who would launch this abuse, but why did the word white have to be included at all? Focusing the issue onto and implying the blame for any social abuse lies ‘mostly’ with white people is not the present in the UK. If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty world of apportioning blame for homophobic abuse to anyone specifically, the fact is homophobia and abuse of gay people is more prevalent in Black-British and British-Asian communities than it is in White British communities. According to the NHS there is a ‘widespread assumption that being gay is a phenomenon of white people’ which causes large numbers of mental health problems within non-white communities, and Black and Minority Ethnic LGB people are more likely to experience physical abuse, more likely to experience harassment from a stranger and are equally likely to have experienced verbal abuse as their White British LGB counterparts.

My point is that football is, or should be, for everyone, and people from every possible community follows it, and implying that unacceptable abuse of any sort, directed at any individual or group is likely to be ‘mostly’ because of members (however few) of one group in particular is unhelpful in the extreme, whether it’s actually true or not. Storey’s article could have simply said ‘get groups of people together, and a minority will act like morons’ and lost precisely none of its truth, eloquence or power to make someone think about their own attitudes. Needlessly apportioning blame just guarantees that a certain percentage of readers, and certainly some who need to really hear the message behind pieces like Storey’s as often as possible, tune out automatically.

That said, more like that piece please. I like being made to think in new ways about important things. Well done, overall.
Anonymous.

 

I am neither gay, nor a professional footballer but felt the need non the less to write in and share my observations on your very important article in gay footballers and “straightsplaining”, as you coined the phrase.

First of all, I want to pull you up on something – using the following sentence is not helpful or illustrative : “Get groups of largely male, largely white people together and a minority will act like morons; true in football, true in life”. Delete the words the words “largely male” and “largely white” do not need to be present here and could easily be replaced with “people of either gender” and “people of any race” – there is no evidence to suggest that group think, herd mentality or downright idiocy is restricted to white males and to contribute to a meaningful discussion on an issue as important as homophobia in football, you really need to be extremely careful with your choice of words and how you structure your argument as sentences like this suggest you have a wider agenda or see one group in particular as being perpetrators of the problem. In reality homophobia is much, much larger than some idiotic white males and has roots across society, skin colours, religions and world views.

With that said, you do make some incredibly valid points on the both the cause and perpetuation of the issue, and I wanted to build on those while challenging your conclusions.

I assume that where we want to get to is a point where either a) a footballer comes out as gay and there is a collective shrug of the shoulders or b) no footballers feel the need to come out as gay at all, as it is such a non-event as to barely be warranted. I no more care who a footballer is dating than I do of their sexual orientation. If we assume we want to get here, the approach has to be three fold.

1.       Normalise it : that is, help people understand that being gay is fine normal. Sadly, many people seem to think it is strange, religiously intolerable or morally corrupting

2.       Do not tolerate abuse : in some respects, you have to allow people to express themselves and then when they express opinions abhorrent, idiotic or offensive, call them out on it, Re-educate them and use them as examples to illustrate why they think the way they do

3.       Collectively educate : that is, take the time to educate people, particularly children, on sexuality

Yes, the media are idiotic and yes, footballers in the media and the FA get it wrong and it is unpalatable when you hear phrases like “be a gay hero” being spoken about Joey Barton, but sometimes there is a role for football to play in this space and role models help.

In many respects, having someone with a high profile come out as gay would, whether we like it or not, bring the issue to the forefront of a massively popular sport and give the issue a platform on which to be discussed. The elephant in the room would cease to exist and, I would hope, team mates would come out saying “so-what, we don’t care” or “we’ve known for issues and it is not a big deal”. Were this to happen, you would have the further steps towards being gay being normalised and accepted in society.

The same goes for abuse – as soon as people make fun of said person, ban them from games, show that abuse will not be tolerated.  Sanction clubs and so on. This sends a very clear message to many people who may not be reached otherwise. Finally, it give someone an opportunity to talk openly and honestly about being gay and, you never know, many people may listen.

We may not like that it has come to this, but actually, just maybe, it would really bloody help if someone did do it. Yes, it would be a pain- yes they would become a figurehead for equality, but imagine the impact if every time someone asked him to talk about he shrugged and said “yeah, so what? None of my team mates care, none of my friends care and none of the fans of my club care I’m gay”. That could be incredibly powerful in help deliver the message that none of us should care whether your gay or not.

Football is so culturally pervasive that this person would have a rare opportunity to help influence the thinking of lots of young people and be an overwhelmingly positive influence. “Minorities” and people who feel at risk of persecution in society need advocates and rolemodels to lead the fight to change peoples thinking

Thanks – great site, great articles and I always respect your informed opinion pieces.

Best,
Lee

 

Why stop there?
Great article by Daniel Storey regarding the discrimination against gay footballers and where are the role models? Basically, as he implies, most of us have moved on and don’t care about people’s sexuality; but there are a minority of people who will never grow up!

On a similar topic through, as I have suffered from epilepsy since I was twelve and was always one of the first names on the team sheet throughout my playing days (although I suffered horrible abuse from certain opponents when having seizures on the pitch!) I have to ask: why are there no role models playing top notch football with my neurological condition (when you consider it’s the most common neurological disorder in the World!).

I’m not just talking about epilepsy but what about other s medical conditions ? All I can remember is Asa Hartford getting a pat on the back for having a hole in is heart and the odd asthma sufferers.

I have brought this up with 365 since following it since it was launched with no response. Now you’re a little more sensitive to certain situations regarding player’s sexual nature, how about considering why there’s not more focus on player’s medical conditions (using my example, players with epilepsy). Are there any playing top flight football or did get bullied out of it or ignored by clubs because of the hassle it would cause to the employer ?

If you’re going to fight the gay corner (quite rightly!), fight the other players who are potentially discriminated against.
Christopher, John, Patrick, Wrightson