Despite being frustrated, I’ve learnt through the years of “suffering” to find some positives. There were actually many about this week, once I had a think.
- Away at
TopspurtsHotspurts, Atalanta, Man City in the space of a week and playing on Thursday in Italy…we’ve done pretty well. - All this with no Ødegaard (or Merino for that matter)
- We’ve definitely got in the heads of the blue side of Manchester. I def detect that their crowd knows how good we are. We are on their level, no doubt
- Defended superbly against The Best Team In The World™️ for 55 mins despite the shit interpretation of the laws of the game by the Howard Webb Referee Travelling Roadshow
- Califiori’s banging debut goal
- Timber and Califiori at fullback at the same time. Looked great.
- Trossard only misses the Bolton game, I think
There’s more, but I’ll leave it there. This is so much better than the dark, dark Mustafi days.
COYG
Ooooh, I think Hotspurts is the way to go
Along the thoughts I had this morning too. Tough away game in Italy. Fly back for an away game in Manchester against City about 2 days later. That’s a tough turn around
Does Trossard not miss the PL game? I mean it’s still just Leicester. Ngl I don’t remember how cross-tournament suspensions work.
Red cards carry across domestic competitions, apparently.
Can you imagine when all our injured players return? It’s going to be spicy and delicious.
- Away at
7 minutes was bullshit in the first place, whole bunch of fergie time nonsense.
Same with the 1st half. If the whistle gets called a moment earlier, we still have Trossard.
What does anyone expect? Allowing dirty dirty Arsenal to come and beat poor, poor, Manchester City at their home ground? Perish the thought.
The set piece goal was glorious. The camera was actually tight on Gabriel before the kick, and it showed Walker messing with him, poking him in the ribs. And then it showed Gabriel feinting right, doing a swim move, and getting completely free of Walker before heading the ball in with authority.
What’s amazing is that that camera angle is exactly what you’d expect from a replay. But, in this case they strongly suspected who was going to be scoring, so they were showing him right from the start.
On the plus side, at least Bukayo got a rest. Edit-I hope he’s not injured
So much happened in that game that this one gets lost, but: Rodri!
The guy dives in the first second of the match when Havertz bumps into him. Just a few minutes later he’s punished for that lie by going down with an actual injury from another innocuous collision.
But apparently we’re the ones who use the “dark arts”, fucking cheating CUNTS
Arsenal did use some “dark arts” and I’m glad. If the ref allows them, they shouldn’t just be tools that other teams use against Arsenal.
But, having said that, that Rodri incident was so strange (the first one). Nobody was fooled, it just made him look like an idiot.
Here’s the thing. There’s a reason why, in FM, when you get a red card, the tactics automatically adjust to very defensive.
Not just, but also at the highest level of sport, having an entire man advantage is HUGE. I’m unsure whether people are pretending not to understand or not, but when you go down a man and you’re facing at least somewhat similarly skilled players, you are SCREWED.
Rodri and his knee can go fuck themselves. No one will mention him trying to get Havertz sent off for existing and then his knee auto-imploding a few minutes later, they’d instead prefer to focus on Arsenal timewasting when defending a 2-1 lead with 10 men and how embarrassing that is
ok but playing FM very defensive is for cowards even a man down tbh, the disadvantage is not nearly as large in game as in real life imo.
Oh for sure. But the match engine will automatically ask you if you want to change to defensive, and all I’m saying is that there’s a good reason for that.
This feels like the City game of 2 years ago or so. In a dominant position, but the refs fuck us over with a controversial red card and we conceded late on.
Not to mention we got another controversial red card. Such bullshit yellows can’t be reviewed when they make such a difference in the context of the game.
Correct. It’s exactly the same, the only difference now is that our defense is resolute enough to hold them off, and also we were ahead today. But this has genuinely ruined my entire day. We’re never going to see any accountability because half the league’s fans will just gloat that we got fucked over. AGAIN.
Oliver was the difference. Gifted them a draw. But I’ll take it.
I will never take that. I am furious. It’s fucking 2022 all over again. Surprised they didn’t let the game run until they scored a winner.
Yep. Robbed then and robbed now of the chance to prove you can take down the rotten cheating powerhouse that is Man City.
Twice now this season, twice against City we’ve been robbed of the chance to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME
I’ll take it but seriously what the fuck was that yellow?
I thought it was for the kicking of the ball away after the whistle, despite none of the commentators saying so. I mean, it’s a bullshit call to dish out a red for that in the last minute of the half, but that seems par for the course, doesn’t it?
Well Jon Champion did shed some light and he said the communication he heard between VAR and Oliver was that the card was for the push and not for kicking it the ball. They’re just covering their tracks at this point
Covering the smell emanating from the level of officiating this lot are capable of
I would love for the club to lodge a complaint with the PL, we can afford the £30k fine
1:30a kickoff, so I time-shifted this. I’m both very proud of the performance after getting shafted by the ref, but also fucking frustrated. You could tell that the ManC fans were scared of us.
They have fans?
Good point!
Annoying to lose that lead in extra extra extra time. But honestly, if you have offered me a draw vs Man Cheaty at the Emptihad I would have taken it. Especially when factoring in being down to 10 men for half the match, not having our best playmaker, and with the usual shit officiating.
All the headlines are about us having our hearts broken, but this was a very good result considering all the circumstances. It shows phenomenal character and grit.
You know what though, we are going to win the whole fucking thing. We held our own given our circumstances, our set piece goal was perfect, Richy made his statement, we came to win this shit even without our captain and it was far from a boring game like the previous matches.
We even managed to weaken them by taking out that cunt Rodri 😏
We more than held our own; if you asked any neutral they would agree that we were on track to win with 11 men. I am furious but also so hopeful. We’ve always been the team that crumbles when it gets down to the wire and this is how you undo that label
Oh i was thinking of a draw would probably be most likely, but to lead for most of it made me pretty optimistic moving forward.
Funny it was absolutely the opposite feeling with the women’s team today and we both ended 2-2
Just to add, I stand by my conspiracy theory that we’re getting these bullshit calls because Mikel was a good lawyer and beat his charges.
I think it’s simpler than that - I think this generation of refs grew up chanting “Same old Arsenal, always cheating” as our players were brought down with brutal tackles. We’re slowly rebranding ourselves as a tough, no-nonsense team, but public opinion takes time to catch up and that of referees takes even longer.
On top of all of that, psychologically the team that wins the league is going to get a lot of leeway due to confirmation bias - they won, so they must be a good team, so of course they didn’t mean to snap his ankle or timewaste.
I think it’s even simpler than that: Michael Oliver got paid by Man City’s owners. Publicly. Subconscious or not that’s bias and conflict of interest there.
I really want to say what you’re saying, but I fear being beheaded
I’m not in the UAE. I should hope you’re not, either. Quite frankly, though, as someone from Hong Kong and doesn’t like the government, I’m used to living with the idea that I could be figuratively beheaded at any moment, so the literal beheading doesn’t change much.
Oh, I wasn’t implying you were in the UAE, but yeah, it’s not like authoritarian regimes give a shit about atrocities depending on your location. If I weren’t worried about it, I’d have a lot more choice words for those boys in light blue.
I’m just saying, why are there so many refs from the North and nobody from the South being promoted?
For that I think we need a Brit’s take. I would suggest that there’s a lot of anti-London bias, similar to the way conservative politicians will dog whistle about “coastal elites” (read: Jews) and “inner city thugs” (black people) in America. I wonder whether that sort of mentality is being kept alive by the PGMOL and influencing which refs get promoted.
Oh 100% it is.
115 PGMOL 2-2 ARSENAL
I hope Pep gets asked whether he thought they were lucky to draw.
I’m worrying for our next game tbh, even less midfield.
Bah gawd, is that Nwaneri’s song?!
We’re gonna see him. Given the game is Leicester, he’s good enough to play it.
Yep. For the Moose Cup we’ll definitely see him and MLS…maybe even Kacurri
I just want some consistency, from minute 1, on those cards. But since they aren’t consistent, we keep getting screwed, and everyone else gets off.
A point is a good result. We just have to stop getting cards.
Tbf, look at Chelsea’s match from the other week. Refs are unable to control matches and are giving out yellows like candy. For us to stop getting cards, we’d need to either let the other team walk all over us or hope that the refs officiate fairly.
… So we’ll just hit them back and take our yellows.
Did anybody notice how Partey was playing? In open play he still had a few issues, but I think he was one of the best players once Arsenal was settled into a defensive block. He was tucked in next to Rice but unlike Rice, when the ball got near him he exploded out of his position to put pressure on the opposing player and really hurried them. By contrast, Rice was fine, but he was jogging into position and wasn’t as effective at those pressures.
I honestly didn’t think he had it in him anymore. It makes me wonder if this is something he learned and practiced under Simeone.
I also thought he was great in the second half, I guess because he has a shorter distance to go to intercept/press?
I’m sure the total distance covered is going to be relatively small since Arsenal just stayed in a low block for most of the 2nd half. But, still, those explosive movements do use energy. It was nice to see him doing something so well, when recently he has been one of the weak links in the team.
His explosiveness when it comes to interceptions and tackles were his star power when he first arrived. I hope he can continue to do it in future, though hopefully not because we’re a man down (again).
I think we expected him to be good defensively when he first arrived, after all, we were buying an Atletico Madrid player who trained under Simeone. I think what was surprising and really useful was how good he was in possession. He would relieve pressure when Arsenal was being pressed by clever passes and good dribbling. That’s the part of his game that seems to have disappeared lately. He turns into trouble instead of turning away from it, and his passes are often intercepted in dangerous areas.
Maybe he and Martinelli are experiencing similar funks. I’ve also seen Martinelli pass straight out of touch more times this season than for the entirety of his Arsenal career.
