Nine Jimmy Rimmers – Arsenal and Football

Never mind that traditional New Year feeling of optimism and hope, the football world seems to have seriously got the hump.  Arsene Wenger is angry with Lee Probert.  Kenny Dalglish is angry with the FA.  Joey Barton is angry with referees conned by players feigning assault by other players (yes really).  Neil Warnock is angry with Robin Van Persie. John Hartson is angry with Arsene Wenger.  The only person having a ball right now is Martin O’Neill.  The way he’s going he’ll turn Nicklas Bendtner into the league’s top scorer. Or perhaps not.

Most of it’s born out of personal frustration of course.  Where Joey Barton gets his ideas from is anyone’s guess.  When will we have the have the first player suing a referee he wonders?

On Twitter yesterday he wrote: ‘I wonder how long it is before a club sues a referee for making a bad decision?  Or a player sues another for playacting.’

Dunno Joey, perhaps it will be when someone is pulled to their feet by the neck and then gets a red card when the person who attacked them falls dramatically to the floor like they’ve been taken out by a sniper.

Or maybe, like Gervinho, you can just take your ban and give the world a break from your banal spin-doctoring over your latest red card.

Another bout of amateur spin-doctoring comes from Liverpool Football Club who claim that the outcome of the Suarez investigation is a complete travesty with no justification whatsoever.  But ahem, by the way, they’re not appealing it.

They’re not appealing it because they wouldn’t have a prayer of success.  Anyone who has an interest in this issue should take the time to read the investigation report here.  To try and cover their retreat, Liverpool throw out a couple of completely spurious attacks.

They attack the outcome as one which only found Suarez to ‘probably’ be guilty.  They are clutching to the word ‘probable’ in the standard of proof required.  They are trying to give the impression that the FA panel has done something unusual and harsh.  Completely ignoring that the standard of proof used by the panel was the standard set out in the FA rules that Liverpool and every other club are signed up to and that this is the standard of proof used in the civil courts across the country everyday of the week.

They also accuse the FA of producing a 115 page report to try and justify their wrong decision.  Liverpool are trying to imply that the length of the document is unusual and signifies that the FA are trying to bury a weak argument.  But actually there is nothing unusual about the length of the report at all.  It is typical of legal documents the world over.  If it were shorter, they would be accused of a cover-up.  Liverpool should either appeal or walk away quietly.

Meanwhile the feverish business of the transfer rumour mill goes on.  The January window is worse than the summer because you get the same level of rumour but less actually happens.

Arsene Wenger was angry with the referee after the game and it’s true that Lee Probert was poor.  But he wasn’t to blame.  We started well with a barrage of attacking play but faded as the game went on.

Yesterday I wondered how much Arsene Wenger would change the team, given that this was the third game in seven days.  The answer was to make just one change from Saturday with Gervinho starting instead of Arshavin.  You have to wonder if that was enough with players flagging as the game went on.  Useless hindsight I guess but some fresher legs might have carried us further.

I’m not saying there was a lack of effort, the likes of Ramsey, Arteta and Koscielny ran all night.  Koscielny narrowly lost out to Coquelin in our match poll.  But as the second half went on we lost the sharpness and passes were failing all over the place.  We were being pegged back even before Djourou got his second yellow.

I don’t think you can blame the referee for the red card.  He didn’t give out a lot of cards and he could have done it on a challenge a few minutes before the one that finally sealed Djourou’s fate.

The lack of fullbacks is definitely hurting us though. Coquelin had a good game but he isn’t the real thing.  He’s a right-sided central midfielder and it shows. Djourou is ok defending, but again, he isn’t a fullback.

The result is first that slower fullbacks means playing deeper and second that we are not moving the ball out down the sides of the pitch.

In the first half, Ramsey and Van Persie were compensating for the first problem by working hard to close down Fulham players high up the pitch and slow their attacks. But as time went on their energy fell and Fulham had more time and space to pick their way forward.

The lack of real fullbacks means we are feeding nearly everything through the middle.  Even the attacks that used Gervinho and Walcott were going via Arteta and Ramsey first.  This made life easier for Dembele and Murphy who were breaking up a big percentage of them.  It meant that their fullbacks could tuck in a bit, which makes threading a through ball even tighter.

Hopefully we can find some fullback cover.  At the moment we are I reckon we are one defensive injury away from undoing our recent progress.