Had no intention of watching Arsenal vs Man City yesterday, but as I was laid up with a bad back and could do nothing but lie around all day, I had nothing better to do.
Man City lost the game before referee Martin Atkinson blew the whistle. Traumatised by Man Utd’s 2-0 victory over QPR earlier in the day, they looked bizarrely unmotivated; like a team that had completely given up.
The game was awful, full of gamesmanship and bad football. Vincent Kompany, Joleon Lescott, Alex Song and Mikael Arteta were the only men on the pitch.
Mario Balotelli is a disgrace to the sport; a farce of a footballer. The poster child for everything wrong in the game and how it has created a litany of selfish, egotistical greed merchants.
Overpaid and overrated, he’s a walking, talking million pound note.
The Premier League is better off without him; football is better off without him. He’s a tabloid newspaper’s dream, but football’s nightmare. Everyone knows Mancini took a gamble buying Balotelli, but nobody could imagine it would backfire this badly.
How any one individual can be allowed to walk on a football pitch and demand attention in the way Balotelli does is beyond me. Some might say Balotelli and Man City are made for each other, but even that group of mercenaries don’t deserve him.
His team mates might pretend to like him, but you can bet – to a man - they think he’s a colossal arsehole.
Balotelli won’t play for Man City again unless their owners prefer to sack Mancini. If Balotelli leaves, I hope no other Premier League club buys him. Tottenham might, but Balotelli makes lazy, dressing room sulkers like Adebayor and Rafael Van Der Vaart look like saints.
I wasn’t impressed with Arsenal either; Van Persie kept going down too easily and Sagna’s play acting whenever Balotelli went near him was embarrassing.
The game was full of petulance, arguing, moaning and complaining – and hardly any football.
English football is crap and has been ruined by money and this match confirmed it.
Alex Ferguson, the best manager the English game has ever seen will win the title at a canter with the most ordinary squad Manchester United have ever won a competition with. They could win the Premier League with a total of 97 points, which is an insult to the competitiveness of the Premier League.
Wenger’s Invincibles only got 90 points, and Jose Mourinho’s powerhouse Chelsea side got 95, but this Man Utd team is not fit to lace their boots. Nevertheless they’ve won it through experience and good management and can only beat what’s placed in front of them. Paul Scholes has come out of retirement at 37 to pick up another league title; he could have done it on one leg.
Arsenal are ordinary, and if Van Persie leaves they'll be a headless corpse. It was confirmed for the 100th time last week when they lost to QPR that Wenger cannot motivate his players anymore, they motivate themselves. No matter how many times Wenger tells them not to become lazy and unfocused, they still do it because they stopped listening to him in 2008.
Pat Rice also looks like he’s fed up listening to Wenger and probably can’t wait to retire; the pair had an argument on the bench yesterday and it doesn’t take much to figure out why. On Rice’s part, that public spat was probably 15 years of pent up frustration.
Who would want to be Wenger’s number two? As Sol Campbell said only the other day, “Arsène is a single-minded leader who does not like to have anyone around who could threaten his authority, either by challenging his decisions or by being the person that will eventually take his job.”
Will Boro Primorac move down to the bench alongside Wenger? Seems plausible.
I had to laugh when Wenger replaced Benayoun with Ramsey yesterday. Heavily criticised for starting Ramsey on the left wing in recent games, Wenger was desperate to find a way of putting Ramsey on in that position just to make a point.
That’s Wenger in a nutshell.
Wenger cares more about himself than Arsenal and most of the players care more about themselves than Arsenal too. Most of them are completely deluded. Szczesny says Arsenal will catch Man City – deluded. Walcott says Arsenal will have had a fantastic season if they finish third – deluded. Song, who had a good game yesterday, almost spoiled it by trying to chip long balls over the defence to Van Persie every ten minutes – deluded.
A good player on his day, he reads the papers too much. They all do; they believe the hype too much, love themselves too much. They stink of arrogance, because Wenger has thrown riches at them and mo(u)lded them into miniature versions of him. They’re complacent because he’s complacent.
Arsenal were not complacent yesterday, but they could be against Wolves on Wednesday. Arsenal could as much lose 2-1 to Wolves on Wednesday night as win 7-0.
In the aftermath of a game that Arsenal fully deserved to win, but almost denied themselves the pleasure due to a bit of bad luck and some bad finishing, Wenger and the fans were graceless in victory. Full of snide remarks for Manchester City, they seem to forget that Arsenal’s season has been pitiful, and Man City are still 10 points clear of the Gunners.
Arsenal supporters usually have a bit more class about them; but after another stinker of a season they’re desperate to turn it into something it isn’t.
If Alex Ferguson fancies winning yet another title in 2012/13, Man Utd will do it. The next five years could belong to a young Man Utd side already winning titles 2-3 years before they were supposed to be ready. That could bring English football to its knees in the first signs that Sky’s monster cash machine has peaked and is about to landslide. Ferguson doesn’t do “complacent” so Sky need him to retire.
