Away Daze - Who Are Yer?
Author: thebish / Date: Monday 25 January 2010
The Bish has calmed down and is striking with great vengance on Wenger.
It can't be avoided anymore - deadline day for this report has come and gone and threatening PMs have been sent and noted. As many of the Arsenal squad might say, "La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid" and it has taken me a couple of days for my brain to cool to such a temperature as is allowed for rational thought and reflection.
I went to the game, as usual, in the company of my gorgeous and witty Gooner-friend who has recently introduced herself on this forum, and roused several forummers out of their torpid stupor at the thought of an actual girl breezing through the fusty TW corridors. CAPS was so excited he almost missed his afternoon nap...
I missed the first five minutes on account of stopping for one more lager and the train deciding to crawl for nine stops. Arriving at the ground - jogging along (well, walking fast-ish!) so as to get there as soon as possible - I was amazed to see hundreds of Arsenal fans outside the ground - clearly in no hurry at all to get in - taking photos of one another by the shop, straddling a cannon, in the giant Arsenal letters or with a long-suffering policeman by a turnstile. Some were still queuing to get into the shop - others were emerging laden with bags, and it struck me that most of them were actually tourists, and even I have been to the Emirates many more times than they have. This explains why the stadium is dead - most of the fans simply are not really fans at all - they are sports tourists.
Anyway - the game. I scoured the pitch for Klasnic - no sign - only one pair of yellow boots, and that was obviosuly Lee. Bugger! Is that Mark Davies? Really? Starting a game away from home? But before I could put my eyes back into my head the ball bobbles about in the Arsenal box and Cahill smacks it into the corner. Startled silence from the Gooners - this wasn't in the script - the Arsenal Christmas Annual they got in their stockings (with free pull out poster of Theo Walcott!) had assured them that Arsenal were way better than Bolton United and they had all the best players in the world. A mass look of puzzled amazement and confused outrage crept around the ground countered only by the open-mouthed look of shock and disbelief on the faces of the travelling Wanderers faithful.
Bolton fans soon snapped out of it and muttered sagely - "Way too early - how stupid is that? To score against Arsenal so early - in the eighth crapping minute - bloody suicidal - how the stuff are we going to hold out for 82 minutes - tell me that Mr Clever-Clogs-Coyle?"
But - bugger me - we score another - and before we do it, we spend a bit of time in the Arsenal half of the pitch - bloody typically miles away from the Bolton fans - but we could all tell it was a nailed on penalty. And blow me down, Matty-I-can't-hit-a-fecking-barn-door-Taylor smacks it home and it's 2-0.
Still, the Wanderers fans are not stupid, they know deep down that we will lose 4-2, but it is nice to be ahead for a little while and shirts are removed to reveal wobbling moobs, the Gooners are aghast, they haven't seen anything like this in Major League Soccer - it's all a bit scary and they want their mummies - nobody told them that other teams were allowed to score at the Emirates. Struggling to come up with a song at the best of times - being 0-0 or (worse) losing, renders the entire 59,757 of them mute - they struggle to comprehend fans who sing "We're shit and we're beating you!" and are puzzled witless by fans who sing "ohhhh wanky wanky, wanky wanky wanky wanky wanky Wanderers!" Aren't we supposed to say bad things about Boltington Wednesday? Help - I don't know what to do!
Bolton fans settle down into a reasonably happy but resigned daze - knowing it can't last - but thinking they might as well enjoy the moment. "Coyle Coyle, give us a wave" - and he does - what a hero.
Meanwhile - in a clever ploy to jinx any Arsenal attack I have been muttering to my gorgeous and witty Gooner-friend at every Arsenal attack "here it comes - you're gonna score now" - until ultimately she snaps and says - "stop that, I know why you're doing it" - and Rosicky scores from a tight angle past an inexplicably helpless looking Jussi who surely should have had that covered, as he is not usually beaten from that kind of angle. It wasn't as if he was unsighted or there was a deflection - it was just a bit poor.
And it's half time - and the Bolton fans know that we are now doomed. Outside the bogs I bump into my old friend Simon Maddy-Mad Maddrell who is desperately trying to phone his Dad. he explains to me that every time he has phoned his Dad at half time when we were ahead - we have gone on to win. But he is having difficulty getting through (Wenger is in the board room with his world-domination mobile phone blocking software - and because of that - we really are doomed...)
Second half and we wait for the inevitable - and it arrives. Gallas slides in over the ball and crushes Mark Davies' ankle. From the distance we were away - intentional? - who knows - but it was immediately obvious Davies was hurt. Here's the acid test. A player goes down and rolls around screaming and waving his arms at the ref - the chances are he is not badly hurt. But if a player lies stock still - unmoving - chances are it is serious. I said immediately that it was serious - and I was miles away.
What next? Arsenal score. Wenger is right - it is not incumbent upon attacking teams to stop play whenever someone goes down - that would be ludicrous and would encourage play-acting every week. BUT - the player who picks the ball up and sets up the move that leads to the goal is none other than GALLAS - the one who knows full well what he has just done - and the one who knows (since the Eduardo incident) just what is possible and how sickening it can be - HE is the one who picks up the ball and sets up the move that leads to the goal. If he has an OUNCE of respect or fairplay (as we are so often told is the hallmark of the way Arsenal play) - he SHOULD have put that ball out of play.
And even if he didn't, Alan Wiley, right in front of whose eyes the whole thing happened, should have at the very least given us a free kick and at the most - sent Gallas off. Of course we would still have lost - but we would have gone down fighting.
Watching Arsenal gleefully score and celebrate effusively as a player lay stock still, obviously badly injured was sickening enough, but as the minutes ticked by and it became increasingly obvious that Davies was hurt, the Arsenal fans began to celebrate - and those moments were the loudest they had sung or were to sing all night. As the stretcher came on they cheered all the louder and as he was carried off, they jeered and waved.
I can take defeat to Arsenal - after all I have tasted defeat at the Emirates several times. They are a better team than us - 99 times out if 100 they will win. But those moments soured the entire game and my entire evening. Those fans really proved to me that whatever they pretend to be, Arsenal will always epitomise smug clueless classless sports tourists who haven't the faintest idea what it might be to support a team in your blood regardless of trophies and winning and that insidious word 'entertainment' (of course there are exceptions - and some of them I know and respect - if you are reading this you know who you are - but amongst the 60,000 they are a precious small minority and it is no wonder that amongst other clubs, your majority is how you are known, and it is why - despite your fanciful idea that you are "everyone's second team" because of your tedious Wengerball - you are not, you never were, and you never will be) .
For the rest of the game, any joy was gone. Arsenal scored a couple more - as was always inevitable - and their fans took to singing "who are you?" Of all the cluess tosspot things to sing - Arsenal fans singing this to Bolton fans takes the trophy. When sung to a local rival who has some longstanding claim to be 'better' then it makes sense, but for Arsenal to sing it at Bolton is a bit like Mike Tyson punching Woody Allen to the floor and then dancing about over his prone body chanting "who are you?" "Who are you?" is a taunting underdog song - a song that punctures a supposed or real superiority. Do Arsenal fans see any supposed or real superiority in Bolton? Clueless muppets - the lot of 'em.
To be honest I was quite glad to miss the first five minutes - it meant I missed the reading of the Arsenal teamsheet - where they read out the first names and the crowd has to guess the surnames - like a kind of quiz for the tourists. Well they do this for the goals too. "And the Arsenal scorer is.......... Andrey......" (pause while 60,000 tourists thumb to the back of their matchday programmes.) "ARSHAVIN". Anouncer: well done - have a gold star!
They don't do this for the opposing teams goals though - which I think is jolly poor form.
Conclusion? A beating - they were better than us - big surprise, it's only what we expected. But lasting impression? Final proof that however hard they try and however pretty they play and however successful they become, Arsenal fans (with a precious few excepted) will always be the achilles heel of the club, not that they care, and why should they, we're only little old Bolton after all and we don't really deserve to breathe the same air.
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