Arsenal fans should be raging at £100m ‘mismanaged investment’
Arsenal fans like to cry about conspiracies, but maybe they should look a little closer to home for blame for their failure to challenge.
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Liverpool not reffed like Arsenal
I’m a bit late catching up on the weekend’s action. Up here we’ve had -35 temperatures outside, coupled with sick children, and that makes for tough living.
Liverpool do not appear to have it tough. Konate “only has eyes for the ball”, I’ve read. Amazing that. So the rules must say it’s fine to smash someone (while already on a yellow card) so long as you’ve “only got eyes for the ball”?
If that’s Micheal Oliver reffing Gabriel that’s 100% a second yellow. Also, if that’s Michael Oliver reffing Arsenal, I don’t think Konate would be on the pitch for that challenge. For his first yellow, Konate stops a breakaway (one yellow) and then kicks the ball away (second yellow) but the second yellow isn’t given. Why?
This is based on Oliver sending Martinelli off for two offenses inside 10 seconds, against Wolves no less. And no yellow for Jota diving? Why? Liverpool have also been awarded the most pens in the league.
For the record, Liverpool have been the best team this season for many reasons but they have also benefited from a lot of things going their way. I still can’t understand why Havertz winner was disallowed for a good header by Kiwior in our home fixture. And we had Gabriel go off injured. That, coupled with ruthless red cards, and injuries is why Arsenal will fall short, despite what Pooie Griffin says.
I fully expect Liverpool to come through their next three tough fixtures with 6 points, but teams are perhaps starting to figure out this Slot version of Liverpool. It reminds me of Arsenal when Zinchenko first joined, teams took half a season to figure us out, we raced to 50 points, but then finished second after a tough run in.
April run-in Barclay’s is very different from the rest of the season. The margins are so small to win leagues, and Liverpool should have enough to see it through, but if not, Arsenal need to be close enough to make the Anfield match count. Tho they’ll likely wilt under the pressure on the day.
Strevs, Afc, Canada (Thomas charging through the midfield, it’s up for grabs now)
It’s not some new thing where a manager subs off a player on a booking. That your manager has not yet figured this out is his – and your – shortfall, not some super secret cheat code only available to those outside of greater London. Similarly when he made the brilliant logical connection that Arsenal had more players sent off for second yellows than other sides… So close to thinking about the problem, but instead the answer was apparently nothing Arsenal had influence over and must be post codes.
Quite a bloody lot has gone against LFC this year; Connect the dots about the statement you are actually making? A manager is getting yellow cards for losing his mind at some WILD decisions, yet your saying nothing has impacted LFC? The difference being that in the vast majority of those cases LFC have still managed to get a result. Unlike, for nearly half a decade now, where Arsenal have encountered adversity and regularly capitulated.
I’ve written in before to say this, but maybe articulating things a different way may help to get the message across. Try looking at your results in half season increments. 35 points from 19, 34 points from 19, then 50, 34 points, 40 points from 19, 49 points, and now 39 points from 19.
For this Mikel era where you’ve apparently been title challenging, you have, across 3.5 years, amassed points in title winning form twice – and they were 12 months apart. You’ve spent nearly three years now lamenting how it is ref decisions that have robbed you of two points here and three points there, when we as opposing fans would like to point your attention at those vast swathes of middling form across half-season increments where your own performances have not been good enough.
Is dropping 15+ points because you can’t bloody score not more influential than conceding a penalty? Spending 170+ million on just two players and then lamenting a small squad? Toast running far more than the opposition but getting these weird muscle injuries in winter? Laud being physically aggressive and playing Mourinho-esque football and mind games, then be both surprised and angry that you are where you are? Sign a player who’s goals per game in the Premier League is very very comparable to Darwin Nunez who we all know is not good enough, and then rue that you don’t win games you dominate.
Wail at alleged financial doping of the opposition whilst ignoring unlawful interest free loans into Arsenal have funded Zinchenko and Vieira, and none of them could get a game, nor Jesus or Califiori be trusted good enough to start when they’ve been fit. That’s over 100 million of mismanaged investment. Or that you’re paying Chelsea 100k a week for neither of you to play Sterling, and calling that shrewd.
Again, LFC have had quite a lot happen this year that has had fans raging; It’s not been commented on because the squad got through that adversity and won, for the most part. If Liverpool don’t win the league, it won’t be because of a push at Goodison, or a litany of complaints that everyone would find both biased and tedious. It’ll be because the investment in Nunez was a waste when the club needed a striker. It’d be because all of our fullbacks have been poor at various points, and compounded by Trent clearly been unsettled after the Overmars-esque tapping up. That Elliot and Chiesa have offered nothing when they were really needed. That Szobozslai is brilliant but still doesn’t score enough. That the set pieces are crap. It’d be any number of reasons but it’d be due to Liverpool.
A ref can cost you a game, but if you are blaming a ref for a season then you damn well better be accruing points totals better than what you’re regularly getting, otherwise you’re ignoring many of your own more important shortfalls first and foremost. Please bore-off with your conspiracy theory nonsense. If you’d like to understand why Arsenal fans are disliked, check your own sent items. Again, junior refs are getting their heads kicked in.
Tom G
…Good points from Rich. Did you make the same point when on diving when Havertz dived for the penalty against United in the FA Cup?
Or do you [insert thinking lady meme] instead use twisted logic to explain why it wasn’t a dive, as Arsenal fans tend to do when it’s a decision in their favour? Just like how you did for the Odegaard handball against Liverpool last season?
Speaking of last season and bottling it. Like you will remember this season with bad ref calls and a dilapidated squad, well that was Liverpool last season. Spurs match, Arsenal match and City match all had inexplicable game costing decisions. Add to that we were having to start matches with half a team of kids. Not quite bottling it.
As for why the reaction to MLS in the press…well we know why that is and it certainly isn’t a bias towards Liverpool, is something much more insidious. Same reason Rashford going for drink is a scandal, but Grealish?
We’ve a cracker of a League run in and it doesn’t involve City, can we just enjoy it? The hysterical conspiracy that Liverpool are now suddenly PGMOL’s babies needs to stop. It was only a couple of weeks ago we had another bad refereed game but it’s forgotten because we won.
Most Liverpool fans concede we got lucky and the decisions went our way. That’s not something we see that much from Arsenal fans. Suddenly Arsenal fans wholeheartedly agree with the convoluted PGMOL justification for why the ref wasn’t sh*t.
It’s unchecked incompetence that is the problem. The self policing is not working and bad calls are being justified with ridiculous, absurd reasoning. Claiming bias when we had the same sh*t last season gets about as much empathy as we got.
Anyway, I’ll leave with a nice quote, “…they are trying to make the best decisions. We need to understand that mistakes happen.” Arteta, 2023 when asked about the Diaz offside when we played Spurs.
C, Dublin
Social media trickery ahoy
There is a weird trend from social media, where someone will post on Twitter or facebook a league table showing a team (e.g. Liverpool) with a big league and then a caption saying “Guys, Liverpool bottled it from here, lolz). The weird thing is, they have faked the table, and this never happened.
I thought of this when I read Rich’s claim that “last year Liverpool were 5 clear with only 8 games to go and bottled it.” Perhaps he has been looking at such tables, because this never happened.
Last year with 8 games to go (all teams having played 30). Liverpool were 2 points ahead of Arsenal and 3 ahead of City. 2 games earlier, with 10 games to go, Arsenal were actually top. A game later, with 7 games to go, Arsenal were top again. They presumably bottled it too?
Mike, LFC, Dubai
Lies, damned lies and statistics
Yes Tom G… stats are completely misleading. On top of the ridiculous situations you described, my least favourite is shots on target.
I can just accept that a dribbler into the keepers arms can be counted as a shot on target. It would have gone in.
I can just about accept that beating the keeper and hitting the post and staying out can count as shot off target. It did not go in, but was bloody close.
But I cannot accept that a shot that beats the keeper and then gets cleared off the line gets put down as a blocked shot. That is utter twaddle.
Mane vs city went down as a blocked shot. The ball was all but 0.01mm (or thereabouts) across the line. But it’s not a shot on target??? Ridiculous. I also remember being told that the opposition had no shots on target in one game despite very clearly seeing carragher making 2 last ditch goal line clearances (obviously a while ago, think it was Everton).
Somehow a blocked shot from 40 yards and a goal line clearance gets treated the same for stats. Yeah, that’s helpful!!
Stats are only helpful if they drill down into enough detail… and that’s boring as hell. Analysis articles based on stats tend to be flawed because of this. Analyse what you see not what the numbers suggest.
Also, on Jota not getting booked. I think he should have been so what I say next is in general rather than defending him. Just like every bit of contact isn’t a foul, every bit of simulation isn’t a booking. It’s up to the ref to decide if the extent of the dive was enough to warrant a card or if there was a minimal amount of contact. Not enough to be called a foul but enough to not bother with booking for diving? That’s called a grey area. Again, I think this time jota could have been booked, but it’s not black and white like some people seem to think.
And as for Zdravko… what are you on about… far more supporters of other teams wanted ETH to stay and continue. We didn’t want him sacked. We were worried a new manager might help United out of their funk. We needn’t have worried!!
Joe. Lfc (knee jerked against TAA a few weeks back… stand by it still… downhill)
Hold back on Antony
You’d think Will Ford would keep his powder dry on taking the piss out of United because Antony has had three decent games in Spain.
He did the same about Jason Sancho after all, who is now conspicuously not on Will’s list of successful former United players a few weeks later…
I just hope Antony keeps it up for a bit longer than Sancho managed, so there is a bit of a market for him in the summer, though I’m not counting any chickens given he started with goals in his first two United games too. After all, United couldn’t find a club stupid enough to commit to an obligation to buy at the end of the loan on this occasion…
Andy (MUFC)
A Man Utd clear-out? Behave
Some of you Man Utd fans need to catch a wake up call. Yet another poor season and yet more of you calling for a clear-out of players in the summer to be presumably all replaced by superstars. Simple facts and maths just doesn’t support that at all.
When will you learn that you can only get rid of so many players in one window. Someone needs to buy them which is far from easy with the wages our players are on.
Lindelof, Evans and Eriksen are the only players who will be out of contract in the summer so I’d like to assume we’ll get rid of all 3. We’ve then got players like Shaw and Mount who are perma-crocked that we’re stuck with, Casemiro who doesn’t seem quite up for it and possibly happy to stay. The rest of the squad are contracted and either just about good enough to stay or not quite bad enough to get rid of at a cut price only to be replaced by someone more expensive and at the same level.
It’s pretty obvious that Utd will chase an elite central defender and an elite striker in the summer as we always do with a pretty low chance of any elite players wanting to play in the bottom half of the table (assuming we actually remain in the Premier league).
Again, realistically we will sign 3 to 4 players in the transfer window as usually happens. Those 3 or 4 would have to be damn good to raise the bar at Utd and we’d likely need some youth coming through to supplement that. We’ve had more than 10 years of steady decline, that isn’t going to get fixed in one window. The only way Utd start to claw back is by investing in the right level of players to get us moving in the right direction and that isn’t by buying Real Madrid and cos cast offs like we usually do. We need to build with a core of young hungry players and have a long term plan which Ratcliffe alluded to but is showing no signs of actually having one..
Jon, Cape Town (And those that say we weren’t that bad against Spurs. Maybe, but they were about the worst form team in the league, not anymore, that’s us now).
READ: Ruben Amorim needs way more than ‘two or three transfer windows’ to fix Man Utd
Mission 40
Welcome to the United crisis center, where we embark on the greatest challenge of our time: Mission 40—the desperate, humiliating scramble to hit 40 points and narrowly avoid the kind of historic disaster that would make the club’s history books for all the wrong reasons.
On current form, our esteemed leader, Mr. Amorim, appears to have succumbed to space madness—a rare condition where one insists on deploying horrendous formations, baffling tactics, and players who look like they’ve just discovered football exists. The first confirmed symptom? Playing Casemiro in midfield like it’s still 2022, selling off all our attackers (who weren’t scoring anyway, but still), and treating the academy like it’s a forbidden relic from the past. The result? A footballing philosophy best described as “make everyone watching question their life choices.”
This week, we face David Moyes—once unceremoniously ejected from Old Trafford in a coup, now undoubtedly licking his lips at the chance to twist the knife. Will we reach 40 points? Possibly. Will it be a nightmare of suffering, confusion, and existential dread? Without a doubt.
But we press on. Not because we believe, but because hope is the only thing we have left. One day, maybe, we’ll hit that magic 40 and dare to dream again. Until then, buckle up and prepare for impact.
We ride at dawn.
Aman
PS: Written in jest, but the celebration when we hit 40 points will be real.
Where’s the Hammers news?
I was searching for some Hammers news on your site and seemed to see nothing but Man U and City etc. So, sadly, I decided to record the name of the club each article covered in your stories. Here they are:
ManU, ManU, Man City, Arsenal, Arsenal, ManU, Spurs, Livepool, ManCity, ManCity, Liverpool, ManU, ManU, ManU, Liverpool, ManU, ManU, ManU etc
Now, I know diversity is less popular nowadays but I ask you…Who is your website designed for? A mixture of the myriad of fans who are interested in the game or a perhaps the remote ones from around the world who only care about the big four?
I guess advertisers pay by clicks, but please – don’t publish any articles bemoaning the way fans are treated and claim some moral high ground. Perhaps take a look in the mirror instead?
Love and kisses
IronsMan
PS It didn’t used to be like this, did it? You guy used to love us all!
(I agree with you that we don’t cover other clubs as we should but it really is simple economics. We are not the BBC – we have a small staff – and we simply cannot cover all clubs thoroughly so we have to concentrate largely on the most popular clubs. West Ham fans (and Everton fans and Wolves fans etc) have lots of club-specific sources for their news and we have to remain more general. We are like a small corner shop; we can’t stock kumquats. Truly sorry but we would not still be in publishing if we spread our content evenly across Premier League clubs – Ed)
Somebody still likes us
Ignore all the moaning that you’ve suddenly become an Anti Spurs site somehow due to a (superb) Spurs supporting writer writing articles about how shite they’ve been or Will Ford’s supposed (probably genuine) bias against Liverpool.
I’ve been reading the site for 22 years and the Bernard and the Genie reference in Mediawatch was the greatest thing ever
Keep up the good work.
Rhysie
