Just a general point, because I Imagine everything’s been said (probably including this). Arsenal are a good team, better than last year, and it’s merely childish not to recognise it. Yes, they seemed to come for a point, but there’s nothing wrong with that from their point of view. And by the way, they were distinctly more threatening than us on the break, especially in the first half. They’d have happily taken the three.
No. It’s about something else. When a team as good as that resorts to dropping like flies all over the pitch faking injury, when their keeper takes as long as he possibly can, from early in the first half (not just in the last fifteen minutes of the game), fucking around with the placing of the ball, then changing his mind, and asking his full back — who was “injured and in agony” by the way not forty-five seconds before — to take it, when their players never back off as they are required to do from free kicks. Well, when a team as good as Arsenal do it I am genuinely shocked. If Luton do it, if Forest do it, no disrespect, but I kind of expect it. But a title challenger? Fuckin Ada!
If that is what modern football has become, then I’m out. I mean it. If City ever start doing that (which I don’t remember seeing, thank Christ), then I am out. After fifty five years, I am not going to go to the stadium, I’m not going to pay my money through the turnstile, I am not going to give it my full voice and my emotional energy, for that shit (and I won’t even begin on the nightmarish conditions to get to London from platform 13, the tube was closed when we got into St Pancras, and I was fucked if I was paying an Uber or a cab, so I walked home across London for about an hour, but hey, that‘s by the by, and nothing to do with football).
But if that’s what the football that I grew up with has come to, then I’m definitely out of love with the game, and it’s time for a divorce. Thank God City haven’t started doing it.
