How to explain that Arsenal had the opportunity to play at home today and face West Ham, in one of the many London derbies that abound and that seemed to be an obstacle, if not easy, tolerable on their way to victory? How to explain that, in addition, if they won, they would climb to first place in the Premier League standings and, in the process, give a slap in the face to the “hammers” in their fight to enter the dispute for a place European cups? How can we understand that first Soucek and then Maprovanos threw the team led by Mikel Arteta into confusion and that West Ham beat them? In what reasonably reasonable way could one process that the defeat left Arsenal in second place in the Premier, two points behind the leader Liverpool (winner in their visit to Burnley) and that all this happened, as in some kind of macabre joke? , December 28, Holy Innocents’ Day. It’s not worth trying to understand. It’s Arsenal.
And Nick Hornby, perhaps their most representative fan, knew how to describe what that suffering of which we have all been victims sometimes means, because no one has enough strength in their hand to throw the stone away: Liverpool had its gray times before of Klopp’s arrival with the trauma of not having won in the Premier format or taking a deep breath when the mind led the fan at Anfield to think about what would have been without Gerrard’s slip against Chelsea, when Brendan Rodgers was the manager who it seemed to end the curse; Not to mention Everton, which since 1987 has only thought about mediocrity and lately in relegation or United, with that taste of euros in its mouth, but with the poor remuneration of its millionaire players that they make mistakes every time they can; or in Tottenham, also accustomed to the fact that achieving results is not their thing, neither with Juande Ramos, nor with Chris Waddle, Klinsmann, or Lineker, nor with Pochettino, who lost a league absurdly against Leicester and then postponed his dream of the Champions League. in a nondescript match against Liverpool…
But let’s go back to Arsenal: last season they once again seemed ready to return to the Olympic lap – which they haven’t achieved since that great team that crowned the league undefeated in the 2002/2003 season – but a postponed match against City ended it. filling its ontological security with kryptonite and falling apart. Something similar happened to him in Europe when Henry, tired of wasting scoring opportunities despite the fact that his club was down to 10 due to Lehmann’s early expulsion, saw how they turned the tables on him in the Champions League final. It was Frank Rijkaard’s Barcelona, knocked out for much of the match, but who struck when he had to and brought Beletti to Olympus as the unexpected hero of that day. Not to mention 2000, the day they had to face Galatasaray from Turkey, a country that until that day had never been able to lift such an important European club trophy. But Arsenal, despite being superior, never managed to solve the psychological Rubik’s cube posed by Fatih Terim or the saves of the already very veteran Claudio Taffarel. These are anecdotes that seem only Arsenal can feature. Nobody else.
And that is why we must return to the great Nick Hornby, a connoisseur of that emotional Russian roulette that he has experienced and that made him very famous for that book that everyone should consider reading at some point. Hornby, in his immense wisdom as a “Gunner” fan, said: “Complaining that football is boring is like complaining that “King Lear” has such a sad ending: it means not having understood anything (…). Football is an alternative universe, as serious and as stressful as work, with the same worries, hopes and disappointments. “I go to football for many reasons, but I don’t go looking for entertainment.”
There is a lot of Premier League left to go and Arsenal has a way to turn the situation around, but there is something true in the writer’s sentence: today Arsenal fans should not be entertained.
2023-12-29 14:26:23
#Arsenal #innocents
