I love a bit of controversy. As long as it doesn’t involve my football club. So when it happens to none more horrible than Arsenal!!!! it’s like my stars have all aligned. Because no football team in the entire history of the entire game in the entire world, has elevated itself onto the moral high ground more assuredly than Arsenal. Ok, maybe not the players, they’re as scummy as all the rest, they wouldn’t know the ‘moral high ground’ if it fell on them, but the fans. Who like to view themselves as the guardians of propriety for all of football. The ones who ensure correct values at all times. Who do things as they should be done. Thus creating the perfect environment for a sense of not merely entitlement, but an entitlement borne as a justification of their quest for perfection to which no other club can even attempt to aspire.

And then, just when all is going so perfectly, they go to Old Trafford and create…
Cheat-gate! Scum-gate!! Here’s what happened. I make no judgments, just present the facts in a clear and impartial manner so you can decide for yourself the precise level of hatefulness and contempt we need to employ.

Arsenal take a corner. In the goalmouth melee the United keeper, David de Gea, received a horrible blow to his Achilles and went to ground, clutching the wounded part, in the time honoured manner, the rules of which state: “however innocuous and insignificant the contact, and wherever it is, fall to the ground as if shot with a Magnum and clutch your head”. The ball bounced out to Emile Smith Rowe who volleyed it into the net. With the goalie still writhing on the ground.

Foul! Cheat! Bad Sportmanship! Disgusting! Evil! Not in the spirit of Chanukah!! screamed the masses, both at the ground and at their TVs.

But it wasn’t a foul. De Gea was floored by his team-mate in an accidental collision. The referee was watching the ball and was unaware of the goalie’s plight. Smith Rowe did what any footballer should, would, MUST do and try (successfully in this case, rather unfortunately) to score. And score he did.

But… but… BUT… that can’t be a goal, the goalie’s injured. The ball should have been kicked into touch. Yeah, but it wasn’t. It all happened too quickly. The ref should have blown his whistle to stop play for treatment to the injured man. Again, the ball was in the net before the ref blew up. Never mind, we have VAR, which can always find ways to disallow goals, even apparently perfectly good ones. Yet it could find no possible reason within the rules to take the goal away.

The only possible recourse Arsenal could have taken would have been to take the ball to their own goal and kick it in their own net. And who the fuck is ever going to do that? Certainly not Arsenal. ‘Good sportsmanship’ is suspended when the Goons enter Old Trafford anyway.

So we have a genuine ‘accidental goal’. Or, as Arsenal fans call it: ‘a goal’.

And can we hate Arsenal just a little bit more for circumstances almost completely out of their hands? Yes, I not only think we can, but are duty-bound to try.

Yours impartially,

A xxxx