A few thoughts on transfer deadline day
- A midfielder would be nice, a defender no bad thing and an attacker the cherry on the icing on the cake. If Senderos stays, then with a good wind we may be able to get away with none of the above.
- Gunnerblog deserves a headline of the year award for the masterful “Sit down you paedophile, just not there”. Those seven words encapsulate so perfectly Saturday’s absurd sending off.
- The apology from Dean and Probert to Wenger should be personal and public. Arsene Wenger could have done far, far worse than he actually did and still to send him into that crowd with their songs would have been wrong.
- Look back at the replays and I swear you see the briefest of smiles creep across Arsene’s face as he heads for the stand. Legend.
- Any referee who deems Bacary Sagna guilty of dissent and worthy of a yellow card has clearly lost the plot. He doesn’t do dissent. Rooney on the other hand.
- When you watch the Rooney penalty incident again watch his left leg. He starts skidding two yards before arriving at Almunia. It’s a terrible shame Almunia didn’t pull out as Rooney would have been brutally exposed. I saw one Man U site try to use the fact every national newspaper said it was a penalty to defend Rooney. Nobody is saying it wasn’t a penalty, just that Rooney started heading for the turf long before there was any contact. That is beyond dispute.
- Do I think United were “anti-football” as Arsene has suggested? No. Do I think it hard to credit that Darren Fletcher got away with six fouls without being booked? Yes.
And then you add in the penalty, which arguably, if given was a red card offence on it’s own because without Fletcher there, it would be hard to argue that Andrei Arshavin with the ball at his feet 10 yards out does not constitute a clear goalscoring chance.
The point about the six fouls does matter because had he been cautioned after three he’d have been playing the rest of the game on a knife edge – just like half of our team, almost all of whom were booked for a first offence.
- Liverpool’s Lucas has taken a battering for demanding a second yellow card for Bolton’s Sean Davis at the weekend. Now, I’m not saying such behaviour is to be applauded. But there does seem to be a rule in football that if you ask for a second yellow on the pitch, no matter how big a kicking you’ve taken, you are considered scum.
And yet if after the game you call for a player to be banned for diving, that’s perfectly acceptable. Even when players are wrongly accused of diving it feels as if the allegationss are quietly ignored rather than condemned as smears on the unfortunate player.
It is completely inconsistent.