Morning all.
Fun stuff at the end of the Atletico Madrid v Man City tie in the Champions League last night. Shenanigans. Aggro. Handbags. Pious commentary that leads to pantomime reaction from everyone watching.
“Oh we don’t want to see that.”
“OH YES WE DO!”
That’s one of the things about football we don’t see enough of, if you ask me. Sure, give me a great game, a full-blooded 90 minutes, two good teams going head to head producing moments of high quality at both ends of the pitch, cracking goals, brilliant defending, astonishing saves, and a nail-biting finish. We all love that. Of course we do.
But from time to time you just want some pushing and shoving, kicking, scratching, hair pulling, eye-gouging, biting, slapping, whacking, thwacking, and cracking. You want mayhem on the touchline. A fracas. Ructions. A good old fashioned Donnybrook. Coaching staff and warming-up subs in a tussle, a free-for-all, a melee, an ultra-violence jamboree.
Scenes that you know are just the tip of the iceberg because when everyone heads towards the dressing room they kick off again. There’s a scuffle, some brouhaha, a few sly digs thrown and they think nobody will ever see it but they have forgotten TUNNEL CAM LIVE©® which has broadcast the footage everywhere within seconds. Magic.
Phil Foden getting fouled, kicked, then rolling onto the pitch to infuriate the Atletico players was hilarious. It reminded of Jose Antonio Reyes in the Bernebeu in 2006 when he did exactly the same and the Real Madrid fans went absolutely crazy in the stadium that night. Grealish and Savic, the world’s easiest lip-reading experiment. Atletico doing this nonsense right at the end of a game when they needed a goal, then almost getting that goal. Diego Simeone winding up the crowd. Pep letting some Atletico player know he was ‘so, so, so not happy’ with him. Glorious stuff for the neutral.
I’m not sure we’ll see similar in the semi-finals (Man City v Real Madrid and Liverpool v Villarreal), but I’m going to keep fingers crossed all the same. Francis Coquelin steaming in late on Sadio Mane to spark a battle-royale on the sidelines which ends up with Jurgen Klopp revealing his true form as a beast from the depths of Hades, consuming Unai Emery like some kind of giant snake man or when Shaggy from Scooby-Doo ate a quintuple-decker sandwich in one bite and you could see it going down his neck. We can but hope.
Elsewhere, I watched the Granit Xhaka video that he did with the Players Tribune and I have to say I enjoyed it. The written article covers many of the points but the film itself is well worth a watch.
He is always going to be a divisive figure among Arsenal fans, for reasons we’re all well aware of, and while he has frustrated me more than once during his time here, I can’t help but like him. It’s not that I don’t see how our midfield can be improved, but I like his no bullshit approach. The way he talks about his work and his commitment to it is admirable. Personally speaking, I prefer a guy who ‘cares too much’, even if that’s sometimes misplaced, than a waster who can barely be bothered going through the motions on and off the pitch. It’s also easy to see why he’s popular with his teammates, and the managers who always pick him.
He doesn’t always get it right, but I don’t think he gets it wrong quite as often as people suggest – it’s just that there’s a high-profile element to those moments. This season his partnership with Thomas Partey has been important, and while the Ghanaian has rightly been given the plaudits for the best form of his Arsenal career so far, I think it’s reasonable to acknowledge that Xhaka’s presence in midfield alongside him has played a part in that.
There was something he mentioned I thought was really interesting though. When speaking about his relationship with the fans and how he’d like it to be better, he said:
We never meet them. We never have a conversation with them. They only see us on the pitch for 90 minutes, then goodbye.
They don’t know how you feel, they don’t know if you have problems with your family, they don’t know … a lot of points.
Some will say that players could use social media to engage more with fans, but when you see the way some fans ‘engage’, why on earth would you be bothered with that? It’s entirely unrelated, but when the Arsenal Twitter account sent a Tweet the other night to applaud the fact the Arsenal Vision fundraiser had gone over the £100,000 mark to provide vital funds for Save The Children for goodness sake, the replies were an absolute mess, filled with idiots who you wouldn’t spend tuppence on, let alone give them any time. So why would any footballer inflict that kind of nonsense on themselves deliberately?
The other thing to say, and it’s something Xhaka mentions too, is that social media interactions are very different from real life ones. It’s easy to call someone names from distance, not so much directly to their face. And this isn’t to say footballers should be exempt from criticism because that is part and parcel of the job, but I do think his point about never meeting the fans is an interesting one.
I think this is true of most football clubs these days, but they are over-protective of players and their media interactions because they are afraid that something might go off-piste and cause some headlines. But so what? I know there are Premier League clubs that barely allow their own in-house content teams access to their players, so if those barriers exist internally, imagine how great they are externally. Sometimes we get a player interview that everyone raves about, but 9 times out of 10 it’s just a guy being somewhat open and honest rather than sticking to the buzzword bingo media-training script they’re given.
It’s not always easy, circumstances can play a part but surely it’s something worth exploring. As this season has shown, when you’ve got a connection between the team and the fans it can be a powerful thing. It works both ways: performances elicit support and backing, but it comes back to you when things aren’t great either. Effort is applauded even if the result isn’t great.
I don’t know exactly how you go about it improving matters, but what is absolutely true is that if, for the most part, you present players as highly-paid privileged sports stars, that will be reflected in how they’re viewed. Lean into the human element more, improve communication etc, and there are benefits. I’m not saying Arsenal don’t do that, Members Days etc are a way to break down some of those barriers, but maybe there’s something bigger to think about too.
Right, I’ll leave it there for today. Have a good one, back tomorrow with a brand new Arsecast too. Until then.