Arseblogger sensationally escaped death this morning despite waking up with what appears to be the beginning of a cold.
The Arsenal blogger (39) was at the centre of a life and death incident when he found himself to be a bit sneezy and needed to blow his nose a couple of times.
An Everton player, who asked not to be named, said “Arseblogger got up and was feeling ever so slightly less well than he did yesterday. He was walking around the kitchen, making coffee, saying ‘urgh’ and ‘bleee’. It’s amazing that he didn’t slip into a coma there and then and end up dead due to the serious nature of his illness’.
Arseblogger himself played down the seriousness of the incident by saying “I have respect for all minor ailments. I woke up with the beginnings of a common cold which I felt was offside. Of course I’m going to be upset”.
This is not the first time ‘blogger’ has been in hot water. Just last night there was the whole ‘Calling Gary Neville a cunt on Twitter‘ incident which led to furious rebuttals from Manchester United fans who, for some reason, are following an Arsenal blog, and Terrygate, in which he attempted to have John Terry impaled on a farm gate.
Honestly, have you ever read such a load of old bollocks in all your life? So, a player, upset at a ridiculous goal and a performance from the referee that had every Arsenal fan questioning the ability, parentage and incorruptibility of Lee Mason, expresses those sentiments out loud. Is this really what David Moyes couldn’t bring himself to repeat in the TV interview afterwards? Really? Is this what Everton have had to leak to the press because the referee, the man at the centre of this ‘shocking’ allegation, didn’t consider it serious enough to include in his match report?
I am disappointed, I have to say. You know me, I like a good swear, and I had come to the conclusion that Cesc had found a combination of filthy language that had shocked somebody who had been in football their entire life. A tough as old boots Scotsman who has lived most of his life in dressing rooms, a place not usually filled with romantic poetry and erudite PG-rated conversation. What supreme level of obscenity had he reached?
Instead it turns out Cesc said something aloud that I’m sure hundreds of players will shout about the referee in their respective games this weekend. From council pitches to the Grove, questioning how much the opposition are paying the ref when a contentious decision goes against you is as part and parcel of football as anything else. When you see journalists throw the word ‘bribed’ around it makes it even more stupid.
Does anyone really think for one second that Cesc believed that the ref had taken a bung from Everton? They haven’t got the fucking money in the first place and secondly it’s 100% heat of the moment stuff. Should you say it? No, probably not, but players say worse to referees game in, game out, and get away with it. Here’s the thing, what happened on Tuesday night happened in the tunnel and far worse than that goes on in tunnels every week.
And unless some Phil Brown-esque manager is trying to shift the focus from his team’s failures onto something else, what happens in the tunnel generally stays in the tunnel. David Moyes comes out of this far worse than Cesc Fabregas, in my opinion, a whinging, sore-losing crybaby, yet where’s outrage that a manager has broken one of the unwritten rules of the game?
I was not witness to the character assassination of Cesc that went on yesterday. Talkshite the worst culprits. Mrs Blogs listened for a while and reported something like:
Talkshite Radio: “Is Cesc Fabregas fit to be Arsenal captain?”
Listener/Jack Wilshere: “Cesc is a great captain…”
Talkshite Radio: “We are not questioning his captaincy …”
Which just about sums up how stupid it all is. Cesc himself has released a statement saying he respects all officials, setting himself apart from most football fans in the country, regardless of who they support, and that should be about that. Attempts to sully his reputation, from outfits that really should be better than that, are frankly pathetic.
If the best they can come up is an incident involving Phil Brown, from which he was cleared, a remark to Mark Hughes as a 19 year old, for which he apologised, and a total misrepresentation of the ‘rugby’ comments about Ipswich then they really shouldn’t have wasted their time. Save the hatchet jobs for the £35m flash in the pan who punches his girlfriend in the face, the morally bankrupt England superstar who holds his club to ransom to double his wages after going 6 months with just one goal, the drunk drivers, drug takers, serial cheats, dangerous tacklers or indeed anyone who might actually deserve it.
There’s something rather unseemly about the way the English press have gone to town on Cesc over this. Some comments in the tunnel at half-time and we get this kind of coverage? Imagine if he actually did something worthy of such media saturation. Oh, maybe he might come onto the pitch again wearing the kind of jacket has HAS A HOOD! OMFG! Maybe he’ll turn down a request from 10 Huddersfield players for his shirt, or maybe, once again he’ll find himself the focus of attention simply for that heinous crime of not being English.
The undercurrent of xenophobia from some journalists is all too apparent and speaks more to them than it does about Cesc Fabregas. Arsenal are going well, Cesc is playing well, leading the team brilliantly, and they can’t wait to stick the knife in, speculating about the manager’s reluctance to ‘discipline’ him. Boring and utterly lame. Anything that might help fuel another summer of transfer drama. Are we to assume that the next time John Terry or Wayne Rooney gets in the face of a referee and calls him a ‘fucking bastard’ or a ‘fucking cunt’, in clear view of the TV cameras, they’ll get the same treatment? I won’t hold my breath.
This whole thing is the ultimate storm in a tea-cup. I love that Cesc is competitive, I love that he wants to win, I love that he’s got an edge to him and his game, and honestly, I love that this annoys so many people. No matter what level you play football at unless you have those sort of characters in your team you don’t win anything. To my mind Cesc is doing a great job as captain and that’s the only thing that should matter to Arsenal fans. The rest, quite honestly, is irrelevant.
Not much else going on really. There’s been a little more regarding Lukasz Fabianski and the fear that he might miss the rest of the season with his shoulder injury but I suppose we’re better off waiting for confirmation of that from the club. Early team news ahead of Saturday’s game is that Alex Song is out with a dead leg – he might miss more than the one game too – and apart from that everyone seems to be ok.
Right, that’ll do. Here’s to another day of hysterical, shrieking, overreaction, the very cornerstone of UK football journalism these days.
Till tomorrow.
