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.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:53 pm
quoting urself? really? inflated opinion time?
October 31st, 2008 at 11:32 pm
You say about having half a brain and loyalty. The arsenal blogging comunity is obviously pretty convinced that there is a problem. Loyalty is a dangerous word to throw around. If a fan is not “loyal” because he is willing to criticise the team then I for one am not a fan. Constructive criticism is the key. people are angry by the same problems causing points to be dropped. Leaking soft goals and wasting chances. I wish everything was easy and we were top of the league but we are not and the gulf in the top 4 is getting bigger and are Arsenal strong enough to be in front of Chavski and Man U?