I don’t know how many of you subscribe to the Arsenal TV thing on the official site. Those of you that don’t really ought to, even just for a day, to watch Arsene Wenger’s press conference yesterday. It was a masterclass. For me Wenger’s press conferences are always interesting but yesterday’s was a real classic.
It began not long after news emerged that UEFA were charging Eduardo with diving, leaving the Crozilian facing an unprecedented two match ban. Wenger said:
I find it a complete disgrace and unacceptable. It singles out a player to be a cheat and that is not acceptable. We will not accept the way Uefa has treated this.
His ire is understandable. Players have dived time and time again, often in cases where it’s had a much more significant effect on the result, yet nothing has been done. Why now? Why Eduardo? I thought Gunnerblog made a couple of good points yesterday via his Twitter. One is that the SFA’s decision to get involved distracts very nicely from the fact that one of Scotland’s top clubs could barely compete with a top four English club, the gulf in class apparent over the two legs.
The second is that it allows Platini to promote his five referees plan, using this one incident as evidence that it’s needed. We know the kind of regard in which Platini holds English clubs, we know he’s got his own opinions about Arsene Wenger, and that has to be a factor in this (and if you need further proof that Platini is little more than a smarmy politician take a look at his lauding Roman Abramovich as a ‘football person‘ this week. What bullshit. How can anybody take him seriously after that?).
The difficulty is, of course, that if UEFA are going to punish Eduardo then they have to punish every player that dives. And that is going to be an administrative nightmare, I’m sure. Will banning Eduardo act as a deterrent to players who think about taking a tumble in the box? Only if every player is banned. And then you get into the nuts and bolts of it and you see how difficult this is going to be for UEFA.
As Wenger pointed out yesterday the charge is ‘deceiving the referee with intent’. How do you prove intent? It’s long been the argument that UEFA and the FA have used against longer bans for players who seriously injure an opponent. Intent is practically impossible to prove. The boss asked the journalists at the press conference about defenders who pull an attacker’s shirt. That’s not in the rules, they’re doing it to gain an advantage, to deceive the officials, are these incidents going to be punished as well? If not, why not?
Let’s step back a bit and think about what would be happening if Eduardo’s dive took place outside the area or in midfield. It would have been a free kick to Arsenal, would any of this fuss be going on? If the issue is the diving it shouldn’t matter if it’s because it won a penalty or won a free kick in a less dangerous area. Are we going to highlight every instance of a player going down to easily to win a free kick? What about a player who jumps out of the way of a tackle, who anticipates the challenge? It’s easy how quickly the lines get blurred.
Wenger said:
Now the existing rules of football have been changed just for one case so we will from now on challenge every single decision that is made in Europe by the referees. This is the first time since I’ve been in football that the judgement made by the referee is not accepted by the football bodies. UEFA have opened a very dangerous door.
And there’s no doubt it is dangerous. Arsenal fans are looking at Ashley Young’s dive in the UEFA Cup the other night which won a penalty for Villa yet not a word has been said about it, not by UEFA, certainly not in the media. So already we can see that consistency is going to be unlikely. If the offence is the same the punishment should be the same but it’s not. And why not? Wenger has the answer:
This case has been ruled by the media and emotionally by Scotland, by the Scottish FA and by Scottish people working at Uefa.
Damn right. And to me that’s the crux of the matter. It was a high profile game, it was never a contest, and the ‘Battle of Britain’ they all wanted turned out to be a damp squib. How much copy do you get out of Arsenal dominating Celtic? Not much. How much do you get out of labeling a player a cheat, as if he were the worst in the world? Loads. As you can see. Wenger did not hold back either. He told the journalists at the press conference:
We have been victims of dives in the past from players, some English players, and they have never been treated like that. So you have to answer a case as well, the media and the press to treat every case exactly the same.
So the next time Steven Gerrard takes one of his falls let us please see him called a cheat and a disgrace. Let’s have idiot fans call for his legs to be broken. You’re either totally against diving, whoever does it, or you’re a fucking hypocrite and there are far, far too many of the latter in the media. Those who will castigate the foreigner and turn a blind eye when it’s one of their own.
From the start I’ve said Eduardo took a dive, I’ve said it was wrong and he should not have done it. I have not heard one Arsenal fan defend Eduardo’s dive. I said I would happily accept a punishment if it was a case that the same rules were applied across the board. But Arsene is absolutely right in that he is being made a scapegoat. This is a witch hunt. Eduardo is now regarded across Europe as a diver because of what’s happened, which is absolutely unfair. He dived, that doesn’t make him a diver.
So the club will defend him as far as they can and they’re right to do so. The treatment of this case by the media and the press has been appalling and they can go suck one as well. But to me there’s something positive out of all this. It has begun to foster a real sense of them and us which has been missing at Arsenal for the last few years.
Remember all the red cards? Them and us. When Vieira did something wrong? Them and us. When Wenger didn’t see things? Them and us. And when it was them and us there were these lovely silver things arriving at the club on a fairly regular basis. Every team needs something that strengthens the bonds beyond the norm. And this, I hope, will do exactly that. Because the Arsenal players know they’ve been victims of far worse than Eduardo’s midweek incident yet nothing is said. There’s nothing like a bit of perceived injustice to fire you up.
If they ban him for two games then fine. Let them open that can of worms. On a footballing level we can cope and the best we can hope for then is that punishments are handed out to all and sundry whenever something similar happens. We can hope that the media highlight the dives of other players the same way. We can hope but we won’t hold our breath.
Anyway, all this has detracted from the fact there’s a rather important game of football today. We go to Old Trafford for the first really big game of the season. Unfortunately we go without captain Cesc Fabregas whose hamstring injury hasn’t cleared up enough for him to take part (and hopefully it will mean his withdrawal from the Spanish squad). In that case you have to imagine it’ll be the midfield trio that started in midweek, with van Persie returning up front with, I’d imagine, Arshavin and Bendtner flanking him. The rest of the team picks itself.
There’s a tremendous history between the two clubs, the rivalry might have softened over the last few years as we haven’t been perceived as a real threat to them, and I found it funny that the managers were expecting a more respectful kind of game than the ones we used to see. Keane v Vieira was often the catalyst for ructions and looking at the teams now that head to head is not obvious on either side. If only somebody would light the touch-paper.
Step forward Patrice Evra. You know, I look at the Spanish papers during the summer to see if there’s anything going on and on the AS website if you search for Arsenal the stories are displayed first by ‘relevance’. The first story for most of the summer was:
EVRA: Fue hombres contra niños.
It was men against boys. Evra’s crowing after the Champions League semi-finals. That annoyed me every single time I looked at it. There’s no escaping the fact United were much better than us in those two games. We might have had a bit of bad luck but they deserved their win. All the same Evra’s comments were disrespectful, that there might have been a hint of truth in them made then hurt even more. Evra’s words did not go down well in the Arsenal dressing room. At Old Trafford, in the league game, he got a bit of a kicking from some of the Arsenal lads and it was good to see. He deserved a bit of treatment for his arrogance. You poke a hornet’s nest don’t complain when you get stung.
Today he has opened his big fat mouth again, labelling Arsenals’ behaviour that day ‘shameful‘. Remember as well his comments about Cesc when he spoke about meeting him off the pitch one day to get revenge for one of those tackles. He is, unquestionably, the most dislikable of all the players in the United squad. For me he’s up there with van Nistelrooy such is his cuntitude. And I hope all our players have seen his latest comments.
One man who remembers well is Alex Song who speaks to the Telegraph today. About Evra’s comments he said:
We will never forget that. When we go there, everyone wants to show him we are not kids. We will see, but we are confident. We are different to the team that played in May.
The old cliché about putting those comments up on the dressing room wall to act as motivation would seem to apply here. Not that their motivation should be revenge on Evra, but revenge against a United team who beat us in the Champions League semi-final last season. The atmopshere at the Grove for the second leg was spectacular … for ten minutes. Then it was over. The players need to take the hurt and turn it into something positive.
Today is a huge test, no doubt about it. You can say United are weaker, and I think they are, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. They’re the champions for the last three years and they’re an experienced, quality side. Yet we’re improving. Today is a big chance to show how much. We need to carry on the momentum we’ve built up but we’ll need to work harder than any other game this season if we want a result.
It’s Vermaelen’s first real test. United’s attack, Rooney in particular, will prove much sterner opponents than anything he’s faced so far. The midfield three need to show that they can cope without Cesc. In this system the work they do, the pressing and closing down when United have the ball, is absolutely vital and we need to see the Diaby who has worked extra hard this summer, not the guy who coasts through games. The front three have got to take their chances and both van Persie and Bendtner could do with a goal to kick start their seasons.
All in all though, it’s exciting. We’re going there in good shape, in good spirits and, I’m sure, determined to show United that it’s no longer men against boys. I mean, we all know that anyway. It was never men against boys.
It was us against cunts.
So it was, so it shall be, cunts without end.
COME. ON. YOU. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONERS.
