Well my beloved team had two important games in four days. Liverpool on Sunday and Spurs yesterday. My stress levels have now gone through the roof. I've waited till now to wrute the blog as now I can be a little more even handed in my review. There's plenty of controversy to keep us all going, so what are we waiting for?
First up Liverpool. Outrage doesn't quite cover it. There's two main points of debate here. Firstly and most importantly: added time. The assistant indicated EIGHT minutes of added time. Arsenal scored a penalty after SEVEN of these minutes. Liverpool got a free kick after NINE minutes which then progressed to TEN. They were awarded a penalty of their own after TWELVE minutes. That's FOUR minutes longer than the game should have been. Now I know what a lot of people say: "oh but the number on the board is a minimum" and that is true. But there wasn't a significant amount of stoppages to justify an added four minutes. The ref doesn't normally add time for literally every single stoppage so why should he here? Also he blew the full time whistle immediately after the second penalty suggesting he was on the verge of doing so before it was awarded.
The second point about the whole debate is: the penalty itself. It wasn't a penalty. This is not bias. It just wasn't. Emmanuel Eboue was running behind Lucas and Lucas stopped right in front of him, he couldn't avoid running into him. Watch it again. There's literally nothing else he could have done. If you look carefully he has his hands up trying to avoid touching Lucas, there's no hint of a push.
Moving on. The game last night. Now we all know the offside rule don't we? If you answered yes, congratualtions you're more qualified than some premier league referees. Robin van Persie had a goal ruled out for offside when he was clearly behind the defensive line and therefore onside. What a nightmare. Apart from that it was a thrilling game, proper end to end stuff which is delightful to watch. Even if we didn't win, I'm very proud to see my boys involved in such an exciting spectacle. The performance was much improved from the weekend and they looked more incisive in attack. The boy Chesney did very well and apart from the one mistake for the penalty looked very strong and in command of his area, the sliding out a la Crazy Jens was a nice little addition to his game. Also dispiriting a s the final score was I found some statistics this morning that made for very interesting reading (thank you football365.) The current unbeaten run (16 games) is our best since 2008/09. We've dropped 13 points from winning positions, Man United have dropped 14. We have produced more shots on target than any other team in the league. And we have the players (Gael Clichy, Superfly Song and Jackie Wilshere) in the top ten for completed passes. Which just goes to show what a good season we've had and how we should all lay off Arsene and the boys once in a while.
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