PGMOL 'NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE' REFFING DESTROYS TITLE RACE
Let's start with a very clear notion in football:
One goal is enough.
You don't need to fish around for problems in this particular game. Arteta coached a win. We scored a great goal when Ethan bounded into the Brighton box and buried a Saka-esque finish. We were in control of a game in which we were missing Kai, Odegaard, Saka, Sterling, and Jurrien Timber. Brighton were not causing us problems, despite having two extra days of rest.
Then it happened again.
One of PGMOL's worst referees decided to step up to the plate and make it totally about himself. A ball pinged up in the box, Saliba and Pedro went for it, heads clashed, and the referee thought briefly about whether he wanted to ruin a Premier League title race... and he decided that the answer was clearly yes.
VAR checked the incident so quickly that when Arteta asked, the fourth official said it was cleared. Do you remember the goal we scored against Fulham where they checked every passage of play and ended up finding Martinelli offside 3 or 4 plays from that actual goal? None of that for a clearly controversial call. Just a glance and a big thumbs up.
I have never seen a penalty given for an accidental clash of heads, certainly not from that close a distance. It was so clearly an absurd decision because the Brighton players weren't even protesting.
When TV started to investigate the incident, as VAR should have, they discovered that Saliba actually put his head on the ball before clashing heads. So it wasn't a foul. We don't even need to debate the absurdity of saying a clash of heads is now a letter-of-the-law incident.
The penalty was scored. The game slipped from Arsenal as the fatigue of a horrendous schedule started to catch up with a depleted squad that was short of bodies and suffering from the after-effects of illness. The boys were dead on their feet, our passing started to get sloppy, and momentum shifted to the team that had extra time off.
It's quite extraordinary that the people who compiled the fixtures can't create an equal playing field through the month of December. It's inexplicable to me that Brighton's last game was on the 30th, the same as Aston Villa's, and both of those teams played today. Why would Arsenal be paired with a team that has had two extra days' rest? Why did that need to happen? Liverpool have had seven days off to prepare for United. Why?
Back to the game.
Arsenal did enough to win. Some of the criticism has been wild. I don't understand how we're now at a point where people are asking why we can't score more goals to counteract acts of god from PGMOL.
I saw this response that perfectly summed up how attrocious the reffing is towards Arsenal.
Simply put, we are not going to ever win the Premier League if the referees stay the same.
City - red card for delaying the start (2 points)
Brighton - red card for delaying the restart (2 points)
Bournemouth - red card for Saliba, after a Liverpool fan in VAR states the forward was making it back before Ben White. The very next day, the same thing happened in the Chelsea game, no red card. Same thing the next week in the Spurs game vs. Palace, no red. That red card meant Saliba missed the Liverpool game. A game I don't think we draw if he's on the pitch at the end when Gabriel goes off injured. (3 points + 2 points)
That's 9 points you have on the table. Add in the 3 from Bournemouth. Halve that number and give it back to Arsenal, and we're in the title race and we’re probably not having spleen bursting conversation about strikers, wingers, and concerns that our variance misses are related to bad coaching.
Now, I understand you want to talk about Newcastle, Fulham, and Everton. Sure, we can discuss that. But we're not discussing those games where we were found wanting through the lens of being 3-5 points off a Liverpool team in inspired form. We're discussing those three games as if they've been the standard this season because we feel like this has been a season where we're 11 points short of Liverpool because all our bad results have been like those games.
Our bad games where we've dropped points because we've not had enough firepower or we've just not shown up are areas of concern, no doubt. Arteta spent a lot of money this summer on a £45m full-back who hasn't looked great. Did we need to spend that much when we had Timber, who could play there, with Zinchenko on the books and MLS looking more than ready? Our left 8 problem last season was mostly that Kai didn't look very creative or a goal threat from that position... so why did we spend £25m on an older left-sided 8 who seems to be good at one thing... duels? How did we exit the summer not signing a winger or a striker AGAIN?
Those are all valid questions. We lack magic, explosive pace, and if we're being real... Ethan Nwaneri was our most dangerous-looking player before he exited the game injured in the 46th minute. He’s 17 and showing up Martinelli who is 5 years older on £170k a week.
All of these points are worth exploring, but I just don't know whether they'd have made a difference in a game like yesterday's. I watched Chelsea, a team that has spent £1.2b on players, draw 1-1 with Palace in a game that could have gone either way. They don't have Champions League, they're not in the League Cup, and they were absolutely cooked... and they've spent more on strikers in 2 seasons than we've spent in 10 years. When you have big injuries, illness, and you're out the back end of a heavy, heavy run... it's hard to find the tools, regardless of how much you want the win.
Arsenal are unbeaten in 12 games since the international break. My biggest lingering issue with Arteta will always remain this: I think he brutalizes his players. We lose too many players to training ground issues. I think the manager trains too hard because our young players breakdown more than Liverpool’s older players. Arteta takes the word of players first and foremost when making selections instead of making the best decisions for the long-term health of the players (Saka in the League Cup games). I still don't think he has truly come to terms with reality: fatigue and the byproduct of not managing it is in his hands. The person most responsible for fitness at Arsenal is him. His machismo view that elite players can train to high intensity and drop 70 games a season is bollocks. But he never learns.
Again, I will repeat: I don't think there's much you can do to counter playing a team with two days' extra rest. But I think December could have been better managed.
So here we are. The league title isn't dead until we're mathematically done, but we're now heading into 11 points behind territory, and I just don't think Liverpool are going to give up that sort of lead. They're too experienced, things are rolling too nicely for them, and it's hard to see how we keep pace considering we don't have any right-sided attackers.
The most positive I can be about this sort of lead is that it’s so big, it could lead to a lack of concentration. Liverpool could get greedy, go all-in on a Champions League double. Now everyone thinks it’s guaranteed. That can sometimes come with its own pressures. But again, that was a thought I had after cooking up some of the purist hopium you’ll ever inject between your toes.
Arsenal have to maintain second... but we're now a cup team. The League Cup can't be a wash. The FA Cup can't be binned. The Champions League now has to be a super focus because we're in great shape and can control our own destiny to a certain degree by finishing high up the league and getting drawn with a low seed in the last 16 that'll start in March.
I'm still thinking about what I think about this season. My angst is with the Premier League for allowing PGMOL to decimate its product like this. We've gone from potentially one of the most exciting title races in years to having to give up watching in January. That's all on one group of people who don't like Arsenal and have decided to officiate us unfairly. How can they allow that? What are they saying in their board meetings? What do their product people say about this? Why isn't there a fix? It's one of the biggest issues in world sport. Howard Webb is allowed to run riot. Sky Sports and big mainstream media journalists go along with it to maintain their perks and privileges. The biggest losers? The fans. It's always the fans. Don't even make me mention the Spurs game... but I actually texted my arch-nemesis Spurs fan Dave to tell him that the goal they conceded was an egregious handball that never should have been allowed to stand. Big Ange could lose his job over that. It's quite incredible how low the standards are with refs and how little urgency there has been over TWENTY YEARS to address the problem. I have put forward better ideas to fix referees in this blog. That's not me celebrating my incredible problem-solving; that's me highlighting how tragic it is that a blogger can conjure up more fixes in two hours than the richest league on the planet has managed in two decades.
OK. Enough from me. See you in the comments. Check out the On The Whistle here. A clip from the episode is below.