Maguire and Southgate get both barrels as Arteta urged to be ‘less honest’ with Arsenal players

Harry Maguire’s got a ‘brass neck’, Gareth Southgate’s ‘pathetic’ and Mikel Arteta should block his Arsenal players from going on international duty.

Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

Brass neck Maguire
I see Harry Maguire has come out to say he has nothing to prove because he’s somehow convinced some halfwit to give him 50 caps and has scored a few goals.

It must be nice to be so convinced of your own importance or ability in spite of the copious evidence to the contrary.

If, in your 53rd cap, at age 30, you are still unable to make a pass quickly and still think it makes sense instead to:

1/ try to take the ball forwards into congestion

2/ make a terrible pass to the opponent

3/ fail to run back to atone for your mistake that leaves the guy you should be marking to score

you probably need to re-evaluate your sense of where you’re at. He’s like that guy at work who you carry on projects, who makes everyone perform worse but who somehow gets credit for them and gets promoted.

God damn I hate that guy. I can’t even bring myself to respect the sheer brass neck of it. The Peter principle needs renaming. Can’t wait for him to become England manager.
Badwolf

Rodri on Odegaard
Rodri put in an absolutely filthy and very late tackle on Odegaard’s ankle last night in the Spain v Norway game. Astonishing that Odegaard didn’t win a penalty for it and equally astonishing that he wasn’t injured. A cynic wouldn’t be making a huge leap to suggest Rodri knew exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it to knowing he’d be in direct opposition to a crucial member of Arsenal’s title bid. Arteta should be less honest and just pull his players out of the internationals like Haaland and Rashford
Rich, AFC

Over-celebrating pens
Badwolf asked if it was only him who was irritated by over celebrating penalties.  I’m sure it isn’t just him but I still thought it might be useful to point out why his view is not just joyless but wrongheaded as well, starting with some general points then moving onto some specifics, since I think we all know from the rest of the email which penalty upset him so much.

1). Players are expected to score penalties and therefore get blamed when they miss then, so I imagine there is relief as well as not in scoring 2). As has needed to be pointed out a baffling number of times, penalties are still goals, worth the same as any other which links to 3). People celebrate the importance of a goal not just the nature of it.  It’s entirely logical to celebrate a match winning penalty with more vigour than a worldie that turns a 4-0 defeat into a 4-1

So with this is mind, let’s add a couple of other reasons Harry Kane might just have enjoyed the penalty against Italy:

1). I’m sure Badwolf is aware but the last penalty Harry took for England didn’t go to plan.  I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest it might have been quite cathartic to bury one in his next England game 2). It may also have been mentioned but this particular penalty was the 54th goal Kane has scored for England, something the other 1270 players to have been capped by the men’s team (or the 227 for the womes’s team for that matter) haven’t managed.  I think celebrating this might be somewhat understandable.

But of course everything I’ve just written should be completely obvious to any football fan in England.  So you have to wonder if the author started with a different agenda – basically I don’t like Harry Kane and need to find something to moan about.  Why not try celebrating a wonderful footballer and good guy instead?
Phil, London

The trouble with your point about players “over celebrating” scoring a penalty is that it totally misses it.

Every goal to a player which puts the team ahead, draws them level or gets them back in a game has the same meaning. Fans at the game feel the same way and I’m surprised to hear you say you don’t. We don’t care about the quality of the goal, what’s important is its context within the game.

The only time you don’t see players celebrating is when they get 1 back at 4 nil down with 10 mins remaining. It’s because the goal is meaningless.

My advice – forget what the goal looks like and enjoy the feeling of potentially winning a game. Just like the players do.
Anon

Carrolls
1. That mail from Andre reminds me of Derby County in the PL 2007/08. Pretty much pointless yet mildly entertaining.

2. Derby ended on 11 points that season, 3 more that Andre finished with and the same number I have here. They had a GD of -69, to add to the comedic effect.

3. They conceded 89 goals and Roy Carroll (no relation to Andy btw) was in nets, so draw your own conclusions from that.

4. It’s rumoured that Roy Carroll has 4 fingers and a thumb on his hand, akin to Steven Gerrard who seemed to need to check this every time he played against Utd.

5. Yet Roy Carroll has more Premier League medals than Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher put together.

6. The Derby manager at the start of that season was Billy Davies – the Stereophonics had a song called Billy Davy’s Daughter on their debut album. The song was about a (hopefully fictitious) girl jumping off the Severn Bridge; it’s not clear if she was a Derby fan.

6. Speaking of Welsh things, Robbie Savage was in that Derby squad. He retired while at Derby in 2011, but came out of retirement in 2019 to play the last 10 mins of one game for Stockport Town at the age of 45. Nobody seems to have questioned this (if you’re reading this Robbie, do drop us an explanation).

7. Severn sounds a bit like seven. But without the r.

8. Roy Carroll left Derby in 2009 to join Danish side Odense BK (the BK is probably short for Burger King). He won Danish keeper of the year the first year but left the following year (presumably fed-up of eating burgers and building lego).

9. Andy and Roy should open up their own barbershop, given they both have lovely hair, called Carroll Thatchers. Failing that they could seek another two namesakes to form a barbershop quartet called Carroll’s Carols.

10. Loving this International break as much as I would love watching us get hammered severn nil by Liverpool on repeat.

11. Finally, a rhetorical question to ponder whilst we wait for United to recommence our glorious march towards a quadruple minus one – if Andy Carroll and Roy Carroll swapped positions and you had to play one in your team all season, who would you choose? Note Andy can only use his feet and Roy his hands, if that’s any help.
Garey Vance, MUFC

Defending Roy
Replying to BB about defending Roy. Now Roy is a fine manager (maybe nearing good, but nowhere close to excellent) but he has had a fair few disappointing reigns (England, Liverpool, Watford) where he was clearly poor. Now if you have been in management for 47 years versus Patrick Vieira (7 years) you are bound to have a few successes and a few failures. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether the successes or the failures are a fluke.

It is also fine to call the Patrick Vieira sacking a travesty (for points well-articulated already – current 12th place, last 10 fixture difficulty, last season’s position, style of play etc.) while at the same time being fine with Roy’s hiring. You don’t need to hate Roy if you love Patrick and vice-versa. In short, there’s no need to fight for the sake of fighting.

As a neutral, I would like Palace to stay in the league. A little bit less admittedly after they sacked Vieira, but still. They have wonderful players (lol at the guy mocking Olise and Eze – they are exciting), great atmosphere, and they always hire nice-ish managers (no Sherwood, Arteta etc.).
Rohit, Abu Dhabi

Liberal bullsh*t
As a former resident of both Germany and Austria, I am sad to let Ry Ry know that the national broadcasters did insist on the virtue-signalling, liberal bullsh*t, intellectual pretensions of pronouncing people’s names correctly. As a born and bred Briton, I was absolutely disgusted to hear not only Michael Mancienne’s name pronounced as it would have been heard on our native isle, but also hear Franck Ribery’s name pronounced using its French inflections. What’s wrong with a bl**dy German accent? I can’t be 100% sure, but, despite preceding my residency in these countries by around half a decade, I am almost certain that it has something to do with Brexit. In an ideal world we would directly translate the names too. Why invite the grandiose airs and graces of woke commentators with the temptations of Steffan Freund and Sebastien Schweinsteiger and just insist on them being called Steve Friend and Seb Pigclimber from the minute they set foot in Blighty.
Pierrre (Peter) Van (of) Schnuffelhausen (Snufflehouse)