After a punishing run of games, it looks as if Arsene Wenger has given his squad a couple of days off, which might be just the tonic as we prepare for the final push this season.
Lukas Podolski immediately went to Cologne to watch his old club play; Santi Cazorla Tweeted a picture of a beach somewhere – you would imagine the south of Spain; while Mesut Ozil reportedly went back to Germany.
Who knows where the rest of them are? Probably having a Yahtzee and banana milk marathon round Per’s gaff. Anyway, it’s no bad thing to let them go get football off their minds for a couple of days because once they get back the focus has to be complete.
This does feel a bit like the calm before the storm. The most exciting thing that happened yesterday was a story about Ozil being questioned by police after reportedly hitting a photographer with his car. While I don’t know the circumstances of the incident, if was a paparazzo, trying to take a picture of a man driving his car just in case nobody knew what a man driving a car looks like, then I don’t have any sympathy whatsoever.
Who knows who might have put him up to it? Maybe a chief sports writer for a large newspaper was desperate to show Ozil that he knew what the Arsenal fans were thinking and he’d made a crude pencil drawing of him and sent this photographer to show it to him to get his approval.
Ozil, not approving at all, simply took off in his car to go and get a Friday night take-away but the photographer was the scared the other man would relentlessly badger him on Twitter all day and got bumped in the process. Sure, it sounds a little crazy, but that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
That said, it’s not as crazy as newspapers and websites trying to stir up stuff ahead of the Stoke game this weekend. Aaron Ramsey is in for a hot reception they say, forgetting that he’s not in for a hot reception at all because he’s injured. Those that weren’t stupid enough to forget that pretty salient fact added a bit to their articles which said ‘but the midfielder could still go with the squad to Stoke’, which is, in fact, worse because no he won’t.
They know fine well he won’t yet they still published their stories because far too often the games are merely a side-issue for the wider soap opera that is modern football. It’s not what happens on the pitch that’s most important, it’s the fall-out, the drama, the puerile and infantile, the gossip, the camera photos, the kiss and tell, the disinformation and the mendacity.
There’s a really ‘interesting’ Stoke forum that has been doing the rounds (which I’m not going to link to) and there’s a thread about Aaron Ramsey. He’s not the most popular man in Stoke, it has to be said, and while I have no real intention of digging into that, it makes for fascinating and somewhat disturbing reading.
It’s an illustration of how a collective can get completely carried away with something that’s basically trivial. From time to time a dissenting voices pipes up to say ‘Hey, hang on, this is silly and over the top’, but they’re ignored and/or dismissed and all the while these people are working themselves up into a frenzy. It’s an intruiging insight into the human condition. That so many people can get so wound up, egging each other on, until common sense is lost completely.
Of course it makes for good hits and clicks for the kind of publications that would try and counter this kind of thing, but there’s no point. What is it they say: if you lie down with dogs, you’ll get fleas. Or as George Bernard Shaw said: “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
Aaron Ramsey isn’t going to play on Saturday, he’s not going to be there either, and if Stoke fans hate Arsenal then fine. But that becomes the story. Not the fact that Stoke are battling relegation, or that Arsenal are fighting for the title. The importance of the football game becomes lost to a story which sums up all that’s wrong with the keyboard warrior culture, and people allow themselves to get offended at stupid people being stupid which is a bit like raging at the grass for being green.
Not much else going on so if you want to check out yesterday’s Arsecast Extra, you’ll find it here. On the agenda myself and Gunnerblog discuss Giroud, Rosicky, Sagna’s future, FA Cup keepers and our favourite Dennis Bergkamp goal. And you’ll find this week’s Tactics Column right here – which looks at the impact of Rosicky, Wilshere and Arteta on the 4-1 over Sunderland.
Till tomorrow.
