Did you all see it? More importantly did you hear the whistle? If you answered no, you have working ears and mental faculties, if you answered yes then congratulations you have superhuman hearing.
I'm talking about the Arsenal vs Barcelona game of course, but where do I even start?
How about in the first three minutes, like Barcelona did? I'm not talking about the attacking play here either. TWICE in the opening THREE minutes of the game, Barcelona players ended up on the floor. Both times the challenge was innocuous at best. I think they need to attend to the infestation of snipers on the roof of the Nou Camp as soon as possible. This was not confined to the early stages either. Call me bitter if you like, but it seems to me that the Barca squad have a serious attitude problem. Its not just how easy they go down, its how quickly they're protesting after every decision for example Pedro's whining and flapping after the referee had given him a penalty, yes given him a penalty. It's Victor Valdes' childish tapping of his imaginary watch while Jack Wilshere was on the ground after an actual foul. Its Valdes (again) and Abidal getting away with raising hands to Arsenal players in the melee after the Jack Wilshere incident. Its every goddamn thing Dani Alves does. Having said all that though I did enjoy a childish giggle when Samir Nasri and Tomas Rosicky essentially played piggy in the middle with Iniesta, throwing the ball to each other after the ref had stopped play.
These things aren't even the main grievance I have about the game though. This falls to two incidents either side of half time. The first was our own fault. But that's being generous, it was actually just ONE person's fault. Cesc Fabregas. Mr Barcelona, Charlie Big Games himself. On the edge of his own penalty box, attempting a defensive clearance, what does he do? A backheel. A frigging backheel. Straight to Iniesta. I have literally no idea what he thought he was doing. What exactly did he think was going to happen? What on earth was he hoping to accomplish? To his credit, on twitter afterwards he accepted the full blame for the result. Which is only right. It was just that one error that lost us the game, but it started it. If that hadn't happened and we'd gone in at half time with nil-nil, things could have been very different. So I'm glad he accepted blame. Its about time he admitted he's human and not the long lost Barcelona messiah who's too good for regular football. Perhaps I'm a little harsh on him but I think it needs to be said.
The second decisive moment was not our fault. In the second half, Robin van Persie has the ball slipped through to him and in a very very close decision is called offside, he completes his shot but it goes wide, he winces as he had no idea he was offside. How long does this little episode take? Literally one second. They counted it. The referee decides this is timewasting. He books Robin a second time and sends him off. Now at this point I should provide some context. The Nou Camp holds 90,000 people. It was full for the match. The Barca fans have a similar fine attitude to their team. Everytime the opposition gets the ball they whistle. They whistle the entire time the opposing team has the ball. For a start its unbelievably bad sportsmanship and lets face it just plain jerky. But that's beside the point. How in God's name is a person supposed to pick out one whistle in the midst of 90,000. Its an outrage.
The final insult? We had a chance to score the one goal we needed right at the death of the match, one of our strikers was put through by Jack Wilshere with a beautiful pass, it needed one touch. One touch it got. One heavy, clumsy touch. That took into into the keeper. Who had the touch I hear you ask? Nicklas Bendtner.
That is all.
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