Tag Archives: FA

Well, the FA have screwed Arsenal over yet again…

15 Replies

I’m not referring to an overlooked penalty-shout, a red card, or a goal scored against us that should have been disallowed. We’re not after anything quite so dramatic. Instead, we’re looking at something much more mundane: train schedules. Monday night’s match at Sheffield United kicks off at 7:30 GMT, which means that the last direct train back to London will have departed Sheffield long before the final whistle. The last, best chance at getting home will be a 10:10 GMT train that would involve a 20-minute walk from Bramall Lane and an arrival at King’s Cross at around 1:14 am. What gives?

Continue reading →

The FA can take a flyin' leap. That's it. That's the post's title.

Leave a reply

My memory’s a little fuzzy, but I do seem to remember a time from a byone era when Arsenal were criticised for being too soft, for lacking passion, for being too easy to kick around. We were the effete ones, the soft, chardonnay-sipping ones who couldn’t handle the gristle and rough-and-tumble of British football. To beat the Arsenal, all one had to do was go in for a bone-crunching tackle
or two (or three), unsettle them, and let the dust settle where it may, while, all the while, Wenger and his prim and proper pussy-footers cast their eyes down and crumbled. 

Nice of them to tweet out a different colour scheme.

Those days, my friends, are long gone. This squad under Arteta are a fiestier lot made of sterner, more-passionate stuff. Cross us at your own peril. Well, “peril” may be too strong a word given how hard the FA are working at sanctioning us for rational behavior. For the second time inside of a week, across two competitions, and for a third time in this campaign, the FA has issued us a stern “Regulation and Discipline Update” for failing to “ensure that [our] players conducted themselves in an orderly fashion”. 

In each instance, we had a legitimate if not blatant penalty shout, one against Newcastle and the other against Oxford. I’ll grant that it’s a bit much for the squad currently atop the Prem to erupt despite a fairly clear handball in the box against a squad midtable in League One during the FA Cup. It’s a bit unseemly but not inappropriate. By contrast, an uncalled handball in the box against a squad elbowing its way into the Prem’s top three feels, I don’t know, appropriate.

For the first, the uncalled handball against Oxford, we should maybe just take it on the chin. We really shouldn’t have to appeal to the referee to help us out given the gulf in class and finances and whatever else. Still, the handball was clear enough to justify some protest. That said, our players probably took it too far.

For the second, we stood on more-solid ground. By the time our lads made their stoppage-time appeal for handball in the box, Newcastle had escaped at least two other borderline penalty calls, and I’m being generous when I describe “pulling an opponent’s shirt all the way around his torso” as borderline.

In each instance, a half-dozen of our players gesticulated and crowded around the referee. I’ve yet to do my research, but I can state unequivocally and with complete certainty that this has never happened in the history of the sport. Never in the annals of history has any player, much less a committee of them, swarmed the referee to appeal for any kind of sanction against an opponent. It would be unsportsmanlike. Unbecoming. And so on.

Look. I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. I don’t think the FA or PGMOL harbor some kind of vendetta against this club. Having said that, it gets a little hard to resist putting on the tinfoil cap when we see this kind of behavior. No other club has been as forewarned. To date, no club has actually been sanctioned. However, to have been forewarned twice within a week suggests that the FA might actually—brace yourselves, get the smelling salts, and stand by the fainting couch—do something. The idea that they might sanction us and not financial dopers like Man City, Chelsea, or Man U; or that they might overlook the countless times when players from any other club swarmed the referee and badgered and bullied him to get their way; well, that? That would begger belief.

Long story short? I’m sure that we can count on the FA to arrive at a sensible, sound conclusion regarding our players’ histrionics. If you believe that, well, have I got the investment opportunity for you. All I’ll need is…

Dear José Mourinho: Cram it with walnuts.

2 Replies
Dear José—
We went into the international break enjoying your club’s best imitation of used toothpaste swirling the drain. I thought that an extra two weeks of seeing you and Chelsea flirting with relegation would be enjoyment enough. However, we then enjoyed an international break in which our lads escaped injury, and we saw Alexis, Cazorla, Giroud, Ramsey, Ox, Walcott, Akpom, Gnabry, and Campbell score (oh, and van Persie albeit against his own country), and Alexis and Özil tallied assists. Now, it seems, we now get to sit back and watch you implode to an even more-embarrassing degree. Just when Diego Costa is set to return from his three-match ban, you might soon serve one of your own. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

To be clear, you face the looming threat of a “suspended one-match stadium ban”, which would be “immediately invoked should [you] be found by an Independent Regulatory Commission to have committed a further breach of FA Rule E3 for any comment or statement to or through the media before 13 October 2016.” Phew. That’s a lot of words and, what’s more, a lot of syllables. I’ll try to distill it down to the basics: basically, if you continue to complain as you so often do, you won’t be allowed to enter any stadium in which Chelsea are playing for the duration of the match.

In other words, José, you have to at least pretend to play nice for a little while. You’ve now been fined more than £100,000 since returning to Chelsea, and this marks your fifth FA sanction. You might point out that Arsène has escaped similar sanctions despite pushing you at Stamford Bridge just about a year ago and again for calling Mike Dean “naive” and “weak” just a few weeks ago. Here’s a key difference, and one that might escape you because it does involve subtle nuances that frequently escape the megalomanical, the paranoid, the narcissistic: Arsène had a point. He may even have been in the right. Moments before Arsène pushed you, Alexis suffered a harsh tackle from Cahill, the kind that can hyperextend a knee or worse. Unlike you, José, we at Arsenal are not used to buying and discarding players like Kleenex, and so Arsène was a bit miffed at Alexis’s treatment by Cahill.

As to Arsène’s comments regarding Mike Dean’s performance at Stamford Bridge a few weeks ago, well, we know how that turned out. Costa’s provocations were blatant enough to earn him a retroactive three-match ban, all but confirming Arsène’s accusations that Dean was in fact naive and weak for overlooking Costa’s slaps, elbows, scratches, and chest-bumps (head-butts?) on Koscielny and Gabriel and for sending Gabriel off for his reactions to Costa’s provocations.

When you then accuse that you are being “punished” because you were not awarded a penalty against Southampton (who might rightly respond by suggesting that there were two more-blatant penalty shouts that they could make…), even you have to admit that you’re squealing louder than a stuck-pig. The hyperbole is intentional, José, because few managers in the history of football have glutted themselves at the trough of sugar-daddy owners as you have. You’re a flat-track bully, José, and like any bully, you bray like a donkey when confronted with proof of your own cowardice.

None of this restores the three points we lost a few weeks ago or those we lost last year (when Hazard went to ground faster than, well, he went to ground so fast that I can’t compare to anything that does so faster), but it does suggest that there’s something for us all to consider. Your methods—the mind-games, the financial doping, the passive-aggressive machinations—might pay off in the short-term. Let’s be honest: in the short term, they do pay off. However, in the long term, those same methods are exposed for what they really are.

So Southampton got away with might have been a penalty awarded to Chelsea? Have you noticed the gulf in class between your squad and theirs? They’re polar opposites. Southampton sell and sell and sell again in the hopes of reloading from their academy. Chelsea buy and buy and buy in the desperate fear that they can cow their opponents into submission. When it fails, José, you look like you’ve lost a game of strip-poker to The Emperor Who Wears No Clothes. It’s unseemly. It’s unsightly. No one wants to see it. In fact, the less the Prem sees of you, the better-off we’ll all be.

Avenging Angel Gabriel's ban rescinded by FA

2 Replies
To the satisfaction of Gooners, Gabriel’s three-match suspension for violent conduct has been withdrawn in the FA’s own words “with immediate effect.” He is still “subject to a separate FA charge of improper conduct in relation to Saturday’s game and has until 6pm on Thursday [24 September 2015] to reply.

Amazingly, this confirms what many of us suspected knew, namely, that Mike Dean doesn’t know his head from his arse (although the latter may be more require a bit more waxing, sugaring, or plucking).  What a week. Arsène gets away with criticising a referee, calling Mike Dean “weak”, the FA overrules a ref while simultaneously getting something right, and we get a red-card rescinded. About the only element missing here is retrospective action on Diego Costa’s thuggery and Mike Dean’s imcompetenc-cum-bias.

The FA has charged Costa with “an alleged act of violent conduct,” and he has until 6pm Tuesday (today) to reply. A panel of three former elite referees ould then decide whether to book Costa, which would lead to a retroactive three-match ban. While none of this would change the outcome of Saturday’s match, we at Arsenal can at least start to feel like there’s some degree of justice, however delayed, in these proceedings.

Wilshere faces a three-match ban for being a bit confused…

6 Replies
After winning the FA Cup for a second consecutive time and record-setting twelfth time overall, Arsenal midfielder Jack Wilshere was momentarily confused and in need of clarification. Apparently, he was unsure of the current status of a certain North London rival, seeing as how they had once again, for the 20th consecutive season. Against that history, it would be easy to see how one might lost track of key details, which tend to disappear in the annals of history. Having won three pieces of silverware in just over 12 months, Wilshere sought insight into the matter from the crowd assembled to celebrate the most recent piece won. For his uncertainty, the FA has levelled charges against him that could result in a three-match ban, starting with the Community Shield against Chelsea.

Oy, Jack, can I bum a square?

Wilshere’s crime? He was uncertain what we think of Tottenham. Therefore, he asked, seeking only to verify, nothing more, Tottenham’s reputation. I’m sure, in his mind, that he felt that he was asking an honest and open question. “What do we think of Tottenham?” is, after all, a legitimate question, one that may Gooners probably have to wrestle with instead of providing a knee-jerk, Pavlovian response. For all of them to shout back, spontaneously and in unison, “sh*te!” merely provides the inherent truth of the statement.

However, Wilshere, having established his confusion by first saying, “we’ve gone one question, and one question only” only to posit a second question, sought clarification and nothing more. By this point, it’s clear that the man’s brain, addled by having experienced so many seasons in a row finishing above Tottenham, seemed unsure of what he had just been told. Like a tourist seeking to confirm what he had just heard in order to avoid taking a wrong turn, the man asked, “what do we think of sh*te?” Again, the spontaneous response, “Tottenham”, proves that the two terms are in fact interchangeable. Having ascertained the reality of the situation, Wilshere thanked those in attendance.

However, the FA have stepped in, accusing Wilshere of the following:

It is alleged his conduct in making and/or inciting certain comments during the club’s open bus trophy tour was improper and/or brought the game into disrepute.

Cute phrasing, that: “it is alleged.” Who’s doing the alleging, FA? Feh. From this point forward, there’s really only one conclusion to draw if the FA does follow through on its threat to sanction Wilshere: any action or statement by any player that provokes fans to shout profanities shall result in that player being banned or fined in the same manner that Wilshere will have been. Consistency is, after all, one of the FA’s strong-suits. Therefore, I look forward to how this will play out in the upcoming Prem season after Fellaini concusses someone with his elbow, Adams strangles an opponent, or Hazard flops in the box to earn a penalty.

Alternately, the FA might have to open a parallel investigation into the allegations made by the crowd. If it is in fact true that Tottenham are sh*te and vice-versa, and these terms are in fact synonymous, well, it only stands to reason that each player in the Tottenham squad will have to be banned, perhaps for as many as three matches per appearance made. I doubt that those in attendance at White Hart Lane would notice any significant change in the squad’s performance.

A key difference between this and the parade is that only one of them is an officially sanctioned FA event. If the FA is going to start poking its nose into business that, frankly, really isn’t its business, maybe they could find some time to look into Sepp Blatter and his crew have been up to. After all, last I checked, there were some dodgy decisions regarding England and the FA Cup shortly after Blatter was first elected. Talk about bringing the game into disrepute. I’m not suggesting that Alex Ferguson or Man U engaged in any of the financial hanky-panky that Blatter and his kleptocracy are now in hot water for. I’m only suggesting that, if the FA are so concerned about the game’s reputation, they’d do well to look beyond a couple of chants at a parade. Maybe the quality of the refereeing?

Ah, well. Something tells me I’m whistlin’ Dixie. Before you go, though, weigh in below the fold. Thanks!