Mick Hartley

I wasn’t going to write about this, but somehow I can’t get it out of my mind – especially given some of the press reports.

I count myself as an Arsenal fan, but only of the armchair variety: it’s years since I went to a match. I was following Saturday’s game via the minute by minute updates on the BBC website. After Eduardo’s horrific broken leg in the third minute of the game, and the eight or nine minutes it took to get him off the field, the Arsenal players were clearly traumatised and went in a goal down at half-time. For the second half, though, they came out fired up, got two quick goals, and dominated the rest of the game. Then, in injury time at the end, Birmingham were awarded that penalty, and it ended up 2-2.

Football is, of course, all about disappointments, but for some reason that last-minute equaliser really hurt. It put a downer on the rest of the day – and I wasn’t even there….and I’d come a long way down in any list of Arsenal fans by order of passion. I can normally shrug off stuff like that: ah well, it’s only football…

I think it’s about justice. The match seemed to be heading somehow to its rightful conclusion. The good guys were winning. They’d been rattled, they’d suffered a hammer blow early in the game, but they’d come back to claim the spoils that were rightfully theirs. Only morality and football aren’t always on the same side. In fact I think much of the compulsion of football (and many other sports, no doubt) is the way that partisan passion, morality (the best team winning), and the brute reality of the unarguable final score, all interact. Sometimes they combine, but often enough they don’t. If your team win, and they deserved to win, that’s the best. If they win but didn’t really deserve to – a dodgy penalty perhaps – well OK, you put that in the bank to take out when they lose when they didn’t deserve to. But when you get an emotional start to the game, as we did here, when a player gets his leg smashed by a brutal tackle from the opposition, then the morality somehow imposes itself on the game at a higher level. It’s a time when you really want, more than ever, for the right team – for your team – to win.

That’s how I explain my feelings. How much more so for the Arsenal players on the pitch – especially when that last-minute penalty was, as seems to be now generally admitted, not a penalty at all. I don’t condone William Gallas’s reaction, walking to the other end of the pitch, kicking an advertising hoarding, staying on the pitch for a couple of minutes after the end, head in hands. But I can understand it. Sometimes the cruelty of fate – and of football – is unbearable.

Yet the press reports are seem to be all about Gallas, and Wenger’s hasty call – later retracted – for Taylor to be banned for life. In the Times, for instance:

Nobody can doubt Wenger’s shrewdness, but the aesthete can turn acerbic, as his hyperbolic call for Martin Taylor to be banned for life showed. He also airbrushed away Gallas’s behaviour, suggesting that attention should instead focus on “real problems” — the referee’s errors and Taylor’s tackle — and apparently missing the potential hypocrisy in lambasting Taylor for his uncontrolled aggression while sympathising with Gallas’s fury. Gallas’s actions were certainly the product of passion. Passion channelled not for positive purposes, though, but in a futile gesture of dissent.

Wenger’s underreactions to petulance from his own and his overreactions when opponents cross the line are nothing new. Often tactical, at St Andrew’s they seemed born of emotion. But whatever happens in private, is this the sort of parental indulgence that just invites more ill-discipline? And can Arsenal afford to be anything other than clear-headed as the campaign enters the business end?

You’ll search the article in vain for any criticism of Martin Taylor’s leg-breaking tackle. Indeed overall the reaction seems to have been that Taylor is really is a top-class bloke – buys flowers for his Mum every Mothers Day – who was a bit off with his timing, and shouldn’t even have been sent off (Steve Bruce, David Platt, Birmingham player Steven Kelly – “It was harsh Tiny (Taylor) being sent off. Tiny has gone in and it wasn’t a malicious tackle and the reason the ref has sent him off is because he has seen Eduardo has broken his leg. I don’t think you can send a player off for that” – via Arseblog). Meanwhile Wenger is accused of overreaction when his opponents “cross the line”.

Cross the line??? He broke the man’s leg! He went in with his boot a good foot over the ball! Eduardo may never play football again!

I particularly like the way the Times give player scores out of ten to even Eduardo and Taylor (and what a stupid business that is anyway). Eduardo – on for three minutes, carried off with his leg bent at an angle, and jagged bone, according to some accounts, visible through the skin – gets 5 points. Taylor, meanwhile – also on for three minutes, sent off for smashing someone’s leg and possibly ending his playing career – gets 4 points. What, one has to wonder, would you have to do to get 1 point. Go berserk with an axe and massacre the opposing team?

Anyway, I’ve got that off my chest….