Morning all.
If the top of the Premier League looks pretty healthy from an Arsenal perspective, the bottom of it looks borderline hilarious. I watched Sp*rs game against Crystal Palace last night, and boy oh boy are they in trouble.
It looked like Palace had gone ahead, but the goal was ruled out because a man had a face. Honestly. Here’s the graphic:
I mean, we get it. Offside is offside. It’s a toe, or a shoulder, or any part of the body you can score with, but is this not just absolutely absurd? On the freeze frame on the TV coverage, his feet looked clearly behind the ball, but because he’s leaning forward to try and stay onside, his face has crossed this arbitrary line and thus a goal, that most precious commodity in football, is ruled out.
It seems more and more clear that the current rules are incompatible with the increased use of technology. We can talk about the letter of the law, but do we not also have to think about the spirit of the game? If people want to talk about how football isn’t as entertaining these days, and if they’re really serious about that, they ought to stop focusing on one team scoring a couple of more goals from corners than anyone else and painting them as the biggest problem the game has, and turn their attention to stuff like this.
I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: VAR was introduced as a technology to try and help officials get more decisions right. What it has become is a tool to try and find any way at all to disallow a goal. Yes, that creates its own kind of drama, which I suppose could be classified as entertainment, but it’s certainly not what those purists bemoan as Gabriel heads another one in from a brilliant Bukayo Saka delivery. They want the free-flowing, don’t bother defending, just attack, attack, attack football that they have imagined was the way it used to be, when actually they grew up in an era when the goalkeeper used to pick up a back pass, bounce the ball 50 times, before hoofing it a mile in the air down a pitch that looked like a World War 1 battlefield as a toothless striker smashed into a centre-half with a nose like a prize-fighter at the end of his career.
The beautiful game, eh?
Anyway, despite that offside, and despite Sp*rs going 1-0 up moments later, Palace ended up winning the game 3-1. Less than 5 minutes after going ahead, their captain Mickey van der Mickey, got sent off for denying a goalscoring opportunity, and it was 1-1 from the spot. After which they fell apart at the seams. Honestly, if you want some good comedy to watch this weekend, minute 38 until the half-time whistle will fulfill all your needs in that regard.
In the second half, Palace took their foot off the gas, which is a bit unlike Oliver Glasner, and that’s how it finished, but the bottom of the table now looks like this:
The most interesting part of the second half was the fact there was another interminable delay because the referee’s audio equipment wasn’t working. Another absurdity, particularly after what happened in our game there, but another example of how the increasing dependence on technology is impacting the game in a negative way. I suppose we should just be thankful that they haven’t yet outsourced it all to one of the big Ai companies, so that when they draw the lines on the offside images the player is nude and the process of creating that image uses enough power to destroy a trillion trees or something.
At the end, the TV coverage produced a genuinely tremendous montage of the home fans who were left in the stadium. They panned from one downcast face to another, and just when you thought ‘Well, that is the saddest person on earth’, they’d find someone even more mournful looking. On the one hand there’s part of me that thinks attending a game of football shouldn’t be tacit acceptance of becoming an Internet meme if the camera catches you looking disconsolate after your team loses and you have to face up to the reality which is a very real battle against relegation. On the other hand though, it’s Sp*rs so it’s really quite funny.
Obviously, my focus this season is on Arsenal’s success. I wouldn’t swap a single bit of what we could potentially achieve for the failure of anyone else. But, why not both? Afterwards, their boss Igor Tudor sounded a positive note, saying, “I need to choose the right guys because the boat is going in the direction that I want to go.”
I say get on that boat, my friend. It’s that big one over there with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on it. Good luck!
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Right, that’s your lot for this morning. For some extra reading, Tim’s excellent column this week is here. And if you haven’t had a chance to listen to the Arsecast yet it’s a bumper edition with lots of post-Brighton chat with Tom Canton, a chance to win a St Totteringham’s Day print (use code SPURSY at check-out for 15% off) and a lovely cameo from Ian Wright as we talk about the title race and much more.
Listen below, and if Phil Costa can pass a fitness test this morning, we’ll have an episode of The 30 for you over on Patreon later. Have a good one.
