Up For Grabs Now

Eboo-gate has, I think, rumbled on long enough. Enough mud has been slung across these forums and it has again shown the many fractures and rifts which exist across the Arsenal fan-base, and how quickly these come apart. On these, I share many of the excellent thoughts of Goonerholic. Enforcing labels for groups of fans who may be particularly pro-Arsene or otherwise smacks of a perverse tribalism which can only harm the club as a whole.

And you know who’s really to blame for all this? T*ttenham. No, they didn’t infiltrate the stadium to cause tension, nor (believe it or not) are they paying Eboue on an each-time-he-plays-a-delightful-through-ball-for-the-opposition-midfield basis. No, they caused this whole sorry affair by being really really shit for such a long time. If they had even a scrap of quality you’d soon see the Gooners closing ranks, but as they have been crap for such a long time now, we lack a common foe and those Gooners with aggression to vent are increasingly turning on their own.

Unlike Grabber (see yesterday’s post), I still feel the booing was destructive and pointless. I’m not really interested in arguments about whether your season ticket does or does not entitle you to a few throaty grumbles over the season. The main point for me is that the booing doesn’t help the team, of which Eboue is a part, and so it’s probably a bad plan. It pisses the team off, and when you’re having a difficult season it’s made a whole lot more difficult if there is significant beef between the crowd and the team.

Right. Enough on that, I’m drawing a line under it (so to speak).

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Champions’ League Wednesday ahoy! Despite being one of the most universally poorly punctuated leagues in the world – the League belongs to the many Champions from around Europe, so surely UEFA should enforce the apostrophe with greater rigour – we have generously agreed to contest the competition regardless. Calling it the “Champions League” is confusing for all of us and sounds suspiciously like these “Champions” are a corporate sponsor a la “Barclays Premiership”. Maybe they should call it the “League of Champions” or something to clear up the whole sorry saga.

Undaunted by the governing body’s basic grammatical failings, Arsene’s boys have marched to the top of the prestigious Group G and have 2 points on Porto going into the clash tomorrow. Easy-peasy you cry, we duffed them at the Emirates and we’ll jolly well duff them on their own patch. Hurrah! But what’s this? Arsene says he isn’t going to try because he doesn’t give a hoot if we’re first or second:

It makes a difference to win the group because it makes you feel you have done your job better than to finish second. Does it really make a difference in the outcome of the last 16 tie? I do not know. Maybe there is an advantage to play the second game at home, but if you look at all the groups, there is not a big difference between some teams finishing first or second.

Now, is this really true? Firstly, yes there definitely certainly undoubtedly is an advantage in playing the second leg at home. We’ve seen it time and again. Secondly, if we finish top we are likely to be playing someone like Panathanaikos, Sporting, possibly Atletico, Villareal, one of Bayern or Lyon and Real Madrid. If we unleash the Song/Eboue strikeforce and lose to Porto then we’d be more likely to come up against teams of the calibre of Roma, Inter, Barcelona, Juventus and (again) one of Bayern or Lyon.

So on balance, topping the group would surely be an excellent idea. No points for originality, I’ll admit, but it needs to be said.

Other news: Ade says we need more goals and less pretty fannying about. Of course, more goals sounds like an excellent plan to me, though I am partial to a bit of Goonerish fannying about now and again. I also think this really hasn’t been our problem this year. Very rarely have we played a team off the park but not managed to make our chances count, certainly not as much as we used to, say, last season. Against City, for example, the problem wasn’t that our dashing cut and weave brand of Wengerball was cruelly thwarted by our own penalty-box vanity, it was more that we were utterly utterly mince and got shat on by the better team.

Transfer whisper: I note that the repulsive reptile that is the Daily Mail has linked the similarly tough tackling and reptilian Esteban Cambiasso with a 17 million euro move to Man City. My ingenious plan is that he should reject their vulgar overtures and instead sign for us! Cambiasso is an excellent player and the thought of him sitting selflessly in our midfield egging Captain Cesc on to more box-busting forward runs makes me salivate openly. Like the cheeky bloke who ran that headline yesterday about how Arsenal were going to sign Michael Owen I have no grounds whatever for supposing that Arsene is in any way interested. But at least we’ve got hope.

Grabs

So the Eboo-ers have vanished into the night, nowhere to be seen or heard anywhere across the Arsenal blogosphere. Instead, there is a spectrum of opinion which ranges from regret to total embarrassment to real anger that an Arsenal player playing badly should be ridiculed by his own supporters during a game.

No-one will defend Eboue’s performance. It was indefensible. Arseblogger makes the crucial point when he observes that while the rubbishness of his performance was bad enough, what got people really worked up (and this is much less obvious to a TV audience) was that Eboue didn’t seem to care – shrugging and standing hands on hips after disastrously and needlessly throwing away possession yet again. This is bound to get anyone’s goat, and I suppose the best defence for the Ebooers is that if he didn’t care when he was on the pitch then he has no right to care when he is made to leave it.

So a regrettable incident, but one which could have been avoided by Eboue actually appearing to make an effort.

The other defence people are coming up with is that a lot of the booing was actually directed at Arsene Wenger so that’s ok. I’m sorry? It’s not ok to boo a player who doesn’t try, but it is ok to boo the club’s greatest post-war manager? I really struggle to understand how this is justification.

Or else, it was directed at the board, as some kind of bizarrely-timed protest at the lack of transfer activity. Perhaps this was a protest at Wenger’s stubbornness in not immediately signing an over-priced Italian winger we once saw do a trick on YouTube as soon as he saw Eboue was having a stinker? That’s how football works isn’t it?

There’s a great big scapegoating exercise which seems to run through quite a lot of fans’ minds when they don’t like a performance. Blame it on Eboue. Blame it on Song. In extreme cases blame it on Denilson. It’s a very easy way to deal with disappointment, to place all the blame on just one or two players, and the great thing is you don’t even need to watch the game properly, but it never really works as a way of explaining poor performance and other players who make big mistakes or underperform - like Toure, Clichy, Van Persie – their mistakes are always quickly forgotten to allow more time for yelling at whichever player you’ve decided to hate. Of course, football doesn’t work like this.

Song in particular continues to be singled out as the scapegoat. “He’s to blame for yesterday! If it wasn’t for Song we would have won… hold on… we did win? Right. Well I blame Song for the fact that the league chose not to magically turn our 3 points into 14. That was all his fault!”

BREAKING NEWS: Song actually played quite well yesterday. (NB this doesn’t mean I think he is better than Vieira or something).

One blogger yet to wake up and smell the 3 points is Le Grove. What a surprise! Ah, Le Grumble, that helpful support group for the bitter, the insane and the unloved in the Arsenal community. If they’re not complaining about the lack of a mid-season DVD celebrating Arsenal’s autumnal achievements, then they’re pining for the signing of Stewart Downing (as in today’s blubbing, semi-literate instalment). They must be the only group of fans who celebrate a victory by effectively calling for the club’s manager to be sacked. Literally, the only fans anywhere in the world who would see this as reasonable. Astonishing.

Next up it’s Porto away, and a great chance for the boss to try out that Eboue-Song strike partnership we’ve all been crying out for. Only joking! But it could happen, seriously… “I believe if you’re a good player then you can play in any position”…