Up For Grabs Now

Some very strange behaviour around the World Wide Web yesterday. Arsenal FC idiotically drew with relegation-battlers and all-round wankers, Tiny Totts, having played superbly for 89 minutes. This happened in OCTOBER leaving Arsenal in THIRD position, six points behind leaders Liverpool with TWENTY EIGHT games remaining. There’s the context. The reaction of many people claiming to be Arsenal’s “fans”?

A spokesman from a group calling themselves The I-Support-Arsenal-From-My-Darkened-Bedroom-In-Between-Wanks-But-Have-Never-Actually-Been-To-Any-Of-Their-Games Association told me:

“The entire team is hugely over-rated, fat, lazy, slow and French. We must sell them all in January and bring in nice shiny players who we’ve read about twice on tribalfootball like Aquilani and Zapata and Huntelaar and Veloso – I signed him on Footie Manager once and he was wicked! These players never make mistakes because they are so tall and new and expensive. Isn’t that how football works?”

“It is our view that football is essentially a sport in which the winning team is the one whose manager is most impressed by tabloid hype and who makes rushed, expensive signings based on two goals scored against a minor Eastern European nation in any major tournament. Let’s sign him off the telly! The model for our success should be Tottenham, who we must emulate by spending vast sums of money on ugly, over-rated players. This is the only way we can ever hope to improve our performance in the National Press’ predictions each summer, the real test for any team, as you will see from this beautifully written and remarkably prescient piece from August.

“The main thing is to sack Arsene Wenger who, his achievements as the greatest Arsenal manager of all time notwithstanding, has chronically failed in his duties to sign any of the players mentioned in (histrionic and completely unfounded) posts from the august website “CaughtOffside”. Wenger should be paraded through the streets of Islington so that we can vent our righteous indignation at him for not winning everything every year ever, because that just proves that he’s an IDIOT.”

I could go on. 2 minutes online and you have to deal with this kind of drivel. Drawing with Tiny Totts felt SHIT, but I’d like to think that any fan over the age of 12 with half a brain, or even just a bit of loyalty, will know that the season isn’t over and that the team, while obviously having its flaws, is essentially pretty good. What is so frustrating is that it appears to all of us that with a bit of defensive discipline Arsenal would be getting close to footballing perfection. The errors, like Toure’s challenge on Babel or Bendtner’s ‘clearance’ or Gael’s slip the other night, appear to us so easy to eliminate, to edit out of the team’s performance.

But if these errors are painful for us, how pissed off do you think Arsene is about them? He’s done all the work to make the team as good as it is, and (as we can probably all agree and as the press love to moan) he’s one of the worst losers in football. These kind of mistakes must be torture for him and he will be doing everything he can to get rid of them.

Light Relief - Tottenham Stylie: Unveiling plans for their pleasingly optimistically capacitied stadium, (rumoured to be named The Toilet Bowl), Tiny Totts boasted that it would be “at least as good as Arsenal’s Emirates”. Right. Not playing any kind of lets-all-unzip-our-trousers-and-lay-our-stadiums-on-the-table-to-see-who’s-got-the-biggest-one game then? All for sound business reasons? Good. Not even a bit of jealousy? No, good, fine. You do realise that having a stadium like Arsenal’s doesn’t necessarily mean your team will be like them too, don’t you? What? You didn’t? That’s the only reason you got on this road to ruin in the first place? Shit, in that case you’re fucked!

Even better is the inclusion of a “Club Museum” in the plans. Just think about these four words. Tottenham Hotspur. Club Museum. Never has an institution of any kind proposed to spend money on anything as pointless as the Tottenham Hotspur Club Museum. The only way they can possibly carry this off is with a Madame Tussaud’s style Chamber of Horrors in which waxworks of Sergei Rebrov, Helder Postiga, Sol Campbell, Jacques Santini and Juande Ramos leer at you in grotesque positions of humiliating, expensive, hubristic defeat and betrayal. Or what about dedicating a floor  to the infamous Upton Park On-Field Colostomy Disaster of May 2006, featuring a giant lasagne and an-oversized replica of Permaine Penis’ bowels through which young children can slide gleefully into the shitty pool of another abject defeat. I’d go.

Urrrrgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Is the feeling this morning, much as it was the feeling last night, before the twenty five million nerve-calming beers kicked in.

Actually I suppose it’s really ‘Urrrrgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’ followed by ‘ffffuccking spurs’.

A great derby? No, not a great derby. A fat turd of a pain in the arse derby, where the pressure of the night seemed to put our strengths and our weaknesses under a magnifying glass. We were great going forward at times, particularly Robin, and promisingly looked dangerous at set pieces. The way they pushed forward to get back in it after the wind caught the famously twatlike David Bentley’s clearance was good to see.

But on the other hand we were shaky and indecisive at the back, and at time seemed to be playing with that familiar uncertainty where you just know something bad’s going to happen, where it feels almost as if the players are willing the opposition back into the game.

The game reached its nadir in Gael Clichy’s horrible error for their third goal, unfortunate for him because he’d looked good until then, but it was that kind of night, and there was a sense of horrible inevitability when Asbo Lennon arrived to steal the draw.

I’d have preferred it if Eh?Boo-him had made a terrible error, and then he might be dropped, but then I remember that Eh?Boo-him can never be dropped because he knows what Arsene did last summer.

And you might argue that one minute longer and we’d have taken the three points, but it’s those minutes on which title challenges are built. Still, Gael’s a bright chap, and hopefully will learn from it.

Another man who might want to learn from last night is Manuel Almunia, but then again you’d hope that they covered ‘holding onto the ball’ in goalie school a bit earlier in the course, in fact just before the class where you learn especially ‘not to flick the ball back out into the path of onrushing attackers’, and about a term before the Nayim Seminar on how not to concede to random hoofs from the middle of the pitch.

He’s clearly a good shot stopper, and he had a great game midweek, but there was a moment towards the end of the first half last night when he punched a corner out when it would have been easier to catch it which to me summed up what’s not quite there with him: something about him doesn’t inspire confidence, and when your defence is already fragile the last thing you want is to worry about the keeper.

Very frustrating, but anyway. There’s nothing to be done now except hope that the guys can pick themselves up in time to build momentum through the weekend for the Turks and ManUre next week.

I think it’s also legitimate to derive a huge amount of pleasure from quite how happy it made the little Spurs fans at the end after they secured there point to haul them up to, oh wait, bottom place in the league… Mind you, I suppose when you’re locked in a relegation struggle it’s all about hitting that 40 point mark, and every away draw counts…

1. Tiny Totts’ goalkeeper is Hero Gomes, who has so far been much too busy trying to forcibly detach Vedran Corluka’s head from his body to bother doing anything as trivial as making saves for his new “club”. A small conical head and large, sticky-out ears make Hero the likely, erm, hero for Arsenal tonight.
2. a pair, a brace, a couple, dos, zwei, deux: see also, ‘number of points gained by Tiny Totts in opening EIGHT games of season’. Until Sunday they didn’t even have enough points to call a family, let alone start thinking about finding good schools in the area to send all the little points to. Sure, as of Sunday they finally have three shitting infant points on their hands, but several of Arsenal’s 19 point family are so grown up that they have tentatively joined facebook, established a regular bulk order on Kleenex tissues deliverable to their bedroom door, and dabbled in mild narcotics.
3. Delusions of grandeur have ALREADY kicked in at the Lane.  Having won a single game, Redknapp, formerly a man of sound reasoning and fair mindedness, was asked about the ludicrous prospect of Totts ever being as good as Arsenal.

   WARNING: what follows is a series of statements of astonishing stupidity. Readers who are easily offended by the spectacle of seemingly sentient human beings humiliating themselves in public would be best advised to proceed to item 4.

   Contorting his saggy features, Redknapp bawled: “It is going to take time. They have moved away from us this season but with hard work it is a gap that can be closed. They are both major clubs and it is up to us to get Tottenham back to where they should be”.

   Sorry? We finished last season in 3rd, Totts in 11th, a place difference of 8. Today we sit 4th, but Totts are, of course, 20th. How this amounts to US moving away from them, rather than THEM moving away from us is difficult to say. And what exactly does Redknapp mean by “time”? Tottenham becoming as good as Arsenal will “take time” in much the same way as Emmanuel Eboue’s eventual eclipsing of Zinedine Zidane will take time, or as Sarah Palin’s attempts to publish her important thesis on ancient Persian civilisation will take time. The real point to be made here is that Totts’ problems are rooted in such self-delusion and its persistence with Redknapp is good news for Arsenal. Much like Newcastle, the belief that they are a ‘major club’ which somehow deserves to be successful is what makes them sign ludicrously-priced players for the wrong positions and encourages a dressing room attitude of entirely unjustified complacence. They pretend they’re Real Madrid and are surprised when it all goes lasagne-flavoured.

4. Walcott is looking good, isn’t he? Against West Ham he showed that he is about to “explode”, as Arsene might put it. Pretty soon, perhaps even tonight, he’s going to be doing things like this against Totts on a regular basis. Sorry about the bored-sounding commentary. “You can come to me?” Eh?
5. Last time we lost to Totts at home in the league was on 11 May 1993. There is just something really, really shite about Tottenham Hotspur “Football Club”.

Other News: Good that Big Tony has been appointed at Portsmouth. In his interview he appears a bit bewildered by the news, unsurprising since he was evidently intercepted by Portsmouth on his way to a wedding. If you’re any good, we’ll see you in a few years. If not, you can join the rest of The Back Four on the Match of the Day settee. Also good to see Maradona being given the Argentina job. Amazing, the guy is mad as a hatter. Absolutely bananas. Can we please appoint our maddest former player to steer us through the Post-Arsene Depression when it arrives? How about Merson? My money’s on Adebayor for sheer interview potential. Any other candidates?

A very good morning to you all. I keep getting up early because I decided not to change my phone, so I’m being frequently surprised by an extra hour, which sneaks up on me like a ninja playing grandmother’s footsteps.

Things are a little quiet. There seem to be two main reasons for this. Firstly I’m very tired, because I stayed up until two in the morning watching the first series of HBO’s superb television series ‘The Wire’. Everything was going fine until the lesbian cop copped (oooh?) a couple of caps (aaah?) in her ass, and then things went somewhat Pete Tong. I’ll let you know how she gets on.

Anyway the point is there didn’t seem much to link ‘The Wire’ to Arsenal aside from its racially diverse squad. That and the smoking, I suppose, though I suspect we’re going to see a bit of a cutdown on the smoking front after Le Gal was busted.

That said the most disappointing thing about the story was not that he was smoking – I mean he’s a balding thirty-two year old Frenchman, of course he’s going to smoke, but that he wasn’t even inhaling. A nerdy social-smoking balding thirty-two year old Frenchman in charge of us. It’s just so undignified. Can’t see Jean Reno allowing that for too long, can you?

Reno: ‘Allo, Guillame, voulez-vous une Galoise?

Le Gal: Ah, non merci, je ne fume pas.

Reno: A, never mind, I ham just ov to speek wiz zat woman, she look good to me rubs thighs

Le Gal: Oh zut, ok, I weel av a smok. Takes cigarette, sucks on it

Reno: Har har har haugh. You moost liitt eeet fierst Guillame.

Le Gal: Sheet.

Nacer Bazarite wants to come back from Derby to fix his knee more quickly. I’m not sure why it will be better down here, but there you go. Perhaps it’s one of those excuses you make up not to be in Derby. Actually that would make a lot of sense – and we’ve all done it. Perhaps that’s what Arsene means when he looks for a ‘footballing brain’. Still, it would be good to have him back, if nothing else because he has the second best name in the squad after Sanchez Watt, who must be the only footballer in the world to have a name with which you could directly question a Mexican.

Theo reckons the team are up for doing the ‘dirty things’ to win this season, starting against the scum tomorrow. Since he’s only nineteen, I sincerely hope he means getting his knees muddy en route to a hat-trick and a trip to a nice film like Wall-E afterwards, and not something dirty like laying a shit in Darren ‘£16m’ Bent’s Burberry sports bag, picking it up and then zipping it over David Bentley’s head whilst he’s having his half-time facial and shaking his head really fast so that when Eh?Boo-him dives into him on sixty minutes he can’t see from the shit in his eyes and he trips hubristically into a SpecSavers advert. I wouldn’t like to see that kind of dirty at all.

Spurs tomorrow.

ED

Up For Grabs Now was born out of a blogospheric collision between Theo Walcott’s bulging right leg-gun and Emmanuel Eboue’s catastrophic sense of direction. As a result it will be sleek and sharp and fast, but also silly and nasty and directionless. It will speak to Arsenal whether Arsenal wants to be spoken to or not. It will lie, it will cheat, it will swear at the ref, and it will inexplicably try a tame square pass when the goal is at its mercy. On its day, there will be no-one who comes anywhere near it for sheer quality. And it will always, always see the incident.