Arsenal ‘social media bubble’ leaves neutrals craving their failure
We start with some praise for Mikel Arteta but then Arsenal get a kicking before there is more talk of Trent and Liverpool fans.
Send your views on any subject – but maybe watch Barcelona – to theeditor@football365.com
What could Arteta do with a better squad?
To open this letter I would like to state that I believe Mikel Arteta is a very promising young manager, in his first top job, with a bright future.
With reference to the Champions League semi-finals, it is undoubtedly the case that the three others are all better and more experienced, yet they all have superior squads and when you consider that bench of subs at Mikel’s disposal v PSG last week you have to ask yourself what he could do with a properly deep squad. Season by season he will improve and hey, may even outgrow Arsenal.
As a bit of end of season fun I’d like to create a ‘poachers’ top twenty of players from the smaller clubs i.e. Palace, Fulham, Brentford, Bournemouth, Wolves, Forest, Brighton where huge slabs of wonga will need to be paid to coax them away.
Murillo, who has just scored, would be in there surely? Wharton in the top three?
Peter (another Clasico this sunday, title decider perhaps. Surely Xabi Alonso will think twice if he is offered the Madrid job), Andalucia
READ: Big Midweek: Mikel Arteta, Barcelona, Bodo/Glimt vs Spurs, Man Utd ‘flop’, EFL play-offs…
Dear Rich…
Rich (AFC) asks have any game defining 50/50 decisions gone Arsenal’s way this season? As a Tottenham fan I don’t watch Arsenal very often so I’m mainly basing my evidence on North London derbies. But even with such a tiny pool of games to pick from I was able to remember a few.
Gabriel scored the only goal of the game away to Tottenham having pushed Romero in the back at a corner.
Arsenal beat Tottenham 2-1 at the Emirates. Tottenham took the lead but Arsenal equalise from a corner wrongly awarded.
The examples are supposed to be from this season but here’s a bonus from last season. Arsenal and Tottenham draw 2-2 at the Emirates. Nketiah gets booked for a foul on Vicario that could easily have been a red.
Google any of these examples and you will find plenty of people arguing the decision should have gone the other way, but they all went Arsenal’s way. So three of the last four North London derbies had big decisions go Arsenal’s way.
Please for the love of god stop going on about decisions going against Arsenal, because there are plenty that go your way too, you just conveniently choose not to remember them.
Robert Pearse
…I’m usually one to indulge the anti-Arsenal refereeing conspiracy theories – they have had some terrible decisions against them in the last year or so, and to be honest it’s quite funny – but the one on Saturday was much of a muchness.
As Rich says, the ball is moving towards Evanilson’s hip/stomach/elbow area. I personal thought it hit him in just under the rib cage, I genuinely think there’s daylight between his arm and the ball, but I can understand why someone would think otherwise, particularly if they support a certain North London team. It just wasn’t clear was it? Sorry Rich. Just because the ball bounces down you can’t infer that it must have come under the elbow, particularly as the ball is spinning and the human stomach is not known to be uniform. I don’t see how the ref can be expected to see that and if that’s not clear and obvious on the VAR then you know what to do…
Rich also suggests Evanilson is being pushed back. Penalty then surely? Would’ve been extremely soft, mind.
I don’t think you’re going mad Rich but take a breath and have a nice summer off football. I suspect your team will sign a decent striker in the summer and only then will they be able to blame the referees for finishing a distant second every season.
Ashmundo
READ: Arsenal’s season has been embarrassing – Champions League exit should be the final straw
…A lot of what gets said in the mailbox is either intentionally misinferred, or straw-manned into nonsense, so I wanted to try and write a specific rebuttal on Rich AFC’s note
Now there’s no way to pitch this other than a ‘but won’t somebody please think of the children’ thing, but I do genuinely mean it.
Rich wrote in a diatribe against both the ref, and Var in the recent Arsenal game. I find it incredibly odd that you can watch your own side make at least multiple basic errors in possession trying to play the ball out only to concede a corner, then at that corner have your captain not at any point even give a cursory look at the ball, but focus-on and wrestle with both hands an opponent to the floor, who’s standing still and waiting for a tap-in, and in that tumult have the ball ricochet directly at your keeper and yet he fumbles it into his own net, and conclude none of a) crikey that’s so poor, or b) bloody hell he could quite easily have given away a penalty and got himself sent off for Liverpool next week in what is the dictionary definition of denying an obvious goal scoring opportunity, but instead conclude: c) if you really spend bloody ages watching that in slow motion on the balance of probabilities it is likely to have hit an elbow, albeit one tucked into his chest as he is being clearly fouled, and even though it is categorically not objectively shown on the camera angles available’
It’s demented. Not as in a shouty accusation or insult. But in describing a mindset that I think is genuinely dangerous and negates an ability for mailbox debate.
In order to have any form of fair and balanced discussion about the volume of decisions for and against Arsenal, I’d say there needs to be a significant change of mindset on what is a 50/50 call. Rather like Chelsea’s ghost goal 20 years ago, if the decision for the authorities is either penalty and red card, or a scientific analysis of frame rates to deduce over time what has occurred, neither options are in your favour, and both are the result of errors from your own players rather than anything a ref has done.
Rich, you are three years into writing in to this mailbox and lamenting referees and in very, very many cases there’s few sharing your perspective.
There is literally nothing that went ‘against’ you in that decision against Bournemouth, in that a foul was obvious and a handball as you actually attest, very difficult to spot.
So not just inaccurate, but I believe the intent behind what you are saying is dangerous. Your tyranny at what you have actually described in the past as “technically correct” decisions “against” Arsenal is underlying why so few people are being encouraged to try refereeing in your all important postcode, and beyond that, are an example of why when refs uphold both the laws and the spirit of the laws, they are repeatedly getting the living shit beat out of them by maniacs who will watch their team be terrible, and yet have a take-away from the game that a referee had too much impact.
We could, as a mailbox, easily tot up examples here and there of Arsenal getting the rub of the green, but you have fundamentally proved you are deaf to them.
You wrote in after the City-Arsenal game and the Trossard sending off, when he’d received a first yellow for deliberate cheating, and then a second yellow following his barging into a player so hard that they ended up sprawled on the floor, having got nowhere near the ball, and then he booted that ball to the moon. Your key take-away from this was apparently how quickly did the ref blow his whistle or how does this compare to Szobozslai kicking the ball away in a game he was losing at the time, not the conclusion that many commentary teams (including the one i watched) thought which was that the second yellow was for the quite blatantly obvious foul also committed. Even beyond that, he did kick the ball away, and arsenal had just been sanctioned on that in the last game; where is the game intelligence?
Or viewing it via a prism of Arsenal literally time-waste on everything; They are amongst the worst in the league and famous for it, and I wonder if that prism influences a refs stance on kicking the ball away? In that game City conceded a goal that they, and i did very much think was a foul on the keeper, and also a goal they felt they had at least a 50/50 right of appeal given that their back four was significantly out of shape due to the ref calling Walker to the halfway line. They are two calls that went in your favour, and one call that no-one thought outside of the norm, and yet you were crying about arsenal being hard done by.
How in any scenario can we compare notes when we are using the same game as tallies in our own respective charts. Certainly if Odegaard scores against Liverpool next weekend there’ll be fans and tedious media click-bait articles wondering why he wasn’t sent off in the game just gone. That’s the first challenge.
The second challenge is then engaging with you on a reasonable dialogue that these things happen to every side, and it is a measure of the emotional stability of the team and their level of performance that they get past them. You have a distorted view of their importance, as a reflection of your team being poor. Notably that for the entirety of Arteta’s 5 year tenure, you cannot rely on Arsenal to score. Arguments about missing Jesus, who didn’t score a goal for a year, and Havertz who tops the charts for aerial duels lost and in the high echelons for missed big chances, is disingenuous.
As a team, you do not score the chances you create, when you have a fully fit squad and when you don’t. LFC have had several red cards overturned on appeal. Or penalties both given and not given. Odd though, that in the vast majority of cases, they got a result anyway. I can recognise that you have ready-to-hand list of ‘injustices’ leading to dropped points; Where I, and City fans, Newcastle, and god knows everyone else can attest, is that our clubs have the same list of injustices, just not the same volume of missed points. You are shouting louder not because you have more examples.
I really do see it as a problem, that your headspace is still to view games with a headspace of ‘blame ref first, discuss team second’. Again reiterating my mail from January this year:
“Serious allegations relating to the assault and attempted assault of match officials in grassroots football last season increased by 32% from 2022-23, according to new data published by the Football Association”
So, not a blanket statement about ‘Arsenal fans’ or something you can straw man into other arguments: Rich, AFC, I think you are a danger. You and specifically the things you have written into the mailbox to say, are part of a culture that is asinine and is resulting in assault. Arsenal have never been good enough, for a period longer than 19 games. Fix that first.
You have a good opportunity against PSG, and they are eminently beatable and getting to the final would be an incredible achievement. But unless you, and the social media bubble of Arsenal changes, we’re all collectively hoping you fall short, despite really liking a number of your players like Rice, Saka etc
Tom G
On Trent…
There was a Monday downpour of coverage surrounding long-awaited but unsurprising confirmation Real Madrid would be signing a Scouse fullback on a Bosman this summer. Amidst all the coverage there was surplus spaff aplenty, and I’m here with a few random if incoherent thoughts.
First, nobody called him Trent because it was some sort of gilded homage to a local lad so extraordinarily down-to-earth he was afforded first-name basis with a city. No, it was simply because hyphenated multi-syllable surnames are unwieldy to speak and a mess to type or text. Pragmatism really.
Most of last year and much of this, many liked to play daft parlor games where one ranked which of Liverpool’s three of Trent, Salah and/or Van Dijk would be most likely to stay and extend, who was most important tactically to retain, whose departure would be more damaging to the side, so on, so forth. To me all along, Trent’s leaving would be the worst optically but the best tactically. On the pitch we suffer greatly next season without Salah or Van Dijk; without Trent we manage, we possibly even improve.
That isn’t to say I wanted him to leave, it’s only to opine that Trent is by some distance the least critical piece of the three in this iteration of the side. Yes it looks worse due the irony of his being Liverpudlian while a Dutchman and an Egyptian stay on, plus the fact he’s considerably younger while Salah and Van Dijk approach their respective autumns. But what Trent offers can be reasonably replicated systemically, perhaps by other more traditional outlets rather than having the whole of the team contort to cover for a marauding right-back who often goes walkabout out of possession and gifts chances.
At Anfield I enjoy the vantage from about halfway up the new Main Stand the most, but several years ago I also sat in one of the front few rows of the Dalglish stand. It was the closest I’d ever been to sat pitchside at Anfield, it was cool going under the massive banners before kickoff and feeling so close to the grass and the action. Anyway that day Trent was having one of his cloud cuckoo defending performances. During a quieter spell of play I shouted at him rather loudly and pointedly, he was near the touchline not twenty yards away. It wasn’t anything incendiary that I’d said, just to defend better really, get stuck in. I wasn’t even sure my solitary voice would carry that far, but it did.
I’ll always remember how he looked up in the stands as if to pick out who it was that yelled at him; we never made eye contact although I wouldn’t have ducked him had we done. His defending didn’t markedly improve that day (shocking, I know) and it might’ve been a more memorable thing for me if magically it had, but we won in spite of his drift.
That slightly unresolved, jagged memory boxes up how I feel about Trent in a nutshell, what I remember of him distilled down to a singular moment in an otherwise forgotten fixture. He hears it, knows it, may or may not heed it. That’s Trent.
Yeah Real Madrid will always have more silverware than us or anyone else for that matter, but I’m not sure they have the class. They’re a club descending into farce, becoming the villain in all the films really. Why would Trent want to join them, why now.
Good luck, Trent. Thanks for some great years. You will never win the Ballon D’or but you’ll have a glittering remainder of a career I’m sure. When they yell at you in Madrid, I hope it’s as fair as my voice allowed those years ago (and I hope it’s in English or you learn some passable Spanglish). And if our clubs do meet in Europe surely we’ll set up to expose your flank, but I don’t think I’d yell anything at you whether pitchside or on the telly. I’ve nothing to say to you that you won’t have heard before.
Eric, Los Angeles CA
MAILBOX: Trent mural could get ‘defaced or disappeared’ as he joins Real ‘cesspit’
…From the mailbox this morning:
“Then again, what irks biased fans (short for fanatics) like myself are players leaving on a free, especially when the club wants to keep them.”
It made me think that players really can’t win. If you sign a long contract and want to leave – a la Harry Kane – fans say: “He signed a 6 year contract! He should honour that. Why did he sign it if he didn’t want to stay?”
If you leave on a free, you get pelters for “running down” your contract, totally ignoring the fact that you have fulfilled your contract, nothing else.
As far as Trent’s concerned, the only thing that makes me sad is an aspect of his motivation. The fact that even part of his thinking is influenced by wanting to be a contender for the Ballon d’Or. I know I might be an old man yelling at a cloud, but when I were a lad, no one was really that interested in the Ballon d’Or. It was a nice award, but actual trophies were what defined legacies. The fact that he said he’d rather win the Ballon d’Or than the World Cup is absolutely tragic to me, but I suspect he may not be that different from the rest of the players in the modern age.
Bring back the old days, jumpers for goalposts etc. But good luck to Trent. He’ll never win the Ballon d’Or, but I hope he does well.
Mike, LFC, London
Why would you care?
TAA leaving Liverpool, and the significantly vocal reaction to this really does highlight the stupidity of football fans.
I have reserved hatred (which in all fairness has dissipated, it was twenty + years ago) for Campbell leaving Spurs for Arsenal, but very few players from any club would get away with that). Every single player who has left, leaves with fondness for what they did when at the club because, and here is the kicker, who really f**king cares? There will always be another player who we tie our flag to the mast for.
I’m old enough to remember McManaman leaving and Liverpool fans going ape about it. I also remember how they responded when Gerrard wanted to leave – and it wasn’t endearingly at all. In fact, of all fan bases, Liverpool’s tends be the most significantly deranged of all.
Perhaps, and there are, I’m sure thousands, who really do love TAA and wish him the best, and maybe grow up a bit.
Dan Mallerman