Today we have the first in a series of blogs on the rise and rise of Aaron Ramsey, which with a bit of luck will see some new bloggers popping their cherries.

I’m not ashamed to say that I wasn’t always Ramsey’s biggest fan. For a long time I quite simply though he was bad. In fact I was positive that he wasn’t good enough. When we discussed the deadwood that needed unloading, I lumped Ramsey in with Park, Djourou, and dare I say it, the great Lord Bendtner. He was a waste of space in my eyes; someone who would hold onto the ball too long in midfield and couldn’t win it back when he lost it. Don’t even get me started on when he played on the wing. There weren’t and still aren’t many footballers that really get my blood boiling. If Arsene bought them they must have something about them. I supported Arshavin for longer than most and was disappointed when both Eduardo and Vela were sold. All of them had shown flashes of brilliance, but dulled for some reason or another; injury, failure to adapt to the Premier League etc. To this day I still believe Arshavin just got too old and lost his fitness. However, something about Aaron just didn’t click with me. I cut him some slack, as I think we all did, after the terrible challenge from the Orc King that could have cleaved Castle Grayskull itself in two. However, by the 2011/2012 season I was frustrated with his lack of progression and felt he would never achieve the heights we had projected for him.

The paragraph you’ve just read was my opinion for about a year. My friends will never let me forget it.

One very important factor in the rise of Rambo is Arsene Wenger. He had potential when signing from Cardiff sure, but potential doesn’t always make a great player. Jay Emmanuel Thomas had potential too. I always saw Jack Wilshere as more talented, and more likely to make it. But Arsene always knew. Before paying 5 million pounds (for a 17 year old from Cardiff that’s nothing to sneeze at) Wenger reportedly flew him out to Switzerland to discuss his future. The boss was commentating at Euro 2008 at the time. Wenger spent over a month watching the best players in Europe and flew Aaron Ramsey out to convince him to join Arsenal. That shows you the belief Wenger had in him right from the beginning. While Ramsey was recovering from injury in 2010, a career threatening double leg break, Wenger signed him to a new long term contract. When others would have abandoned him, Wenger reassured him that he had a future at the club. The following season Jack would have one of his best performances for the club, in the 2-1 win over Barcelona at the Emirates. Aaron who? But Arsene always knew.

We’ve all heard that quote from Wenger: “Once Aaron Ramsey starts scoring he won’t stop”.

And he didn’t.  Right up to the final moment of our last and most important game of the season, Aaron Ramsey didn’t stop scoring. But Ramsey’s rise (I’m enjoying the alliteration here) didn’t start in 2013/2014 season. That was just when he finally reached the top of the mountain. That F.A. Cup final goal sends Aaron Ramsey down in Arsenal history. Aaron Ramsey; Drought-Breaker. But it didn’t start there. In December 2012, Ramsey signed a new contract as part of our so called ‘British core’ along with Jenkinson, the Ox, Wilshere and Gibbs. Another show of faith from the boss. He never looked back. At this point I was still unsure of Ramsey’s future at Arsenal. In my eyes he still held the ball for too long, and tried clever tricks in areas of the pitch where he really shouldn’t have. But I began to see a change. Ramsey became very solid defensively. He didn’t score a mountain of goals in 2012/2013 in fact we only saw 1 premier league goal. What we did see however, was the start of the great Aaron Ramsey Engine. He started 17 of our last 20 matches, having previously started only 12 all season. From January onwards, he was indispensable, next to Arteta in midfield, becoming a true box to box player, running the ball between our defence and attack. This was when Ramsey finally set upon his climb with vigour. More and more I found myself admitting Ramsey had played well, had had a good game, had been man of the match. His rise was gathering pace.

Just before the start of last season we got a glimpse of what Ramsey would do. After a great pre-season, Ramsey topped it off with a lovely run from deep to score against Man City, as well as assisting a great goal from Theo (Oh what could have been). He also scored 3 times against Fenerbahce across two legs. It was something we would get used to. He scored against Fulham, Sunderland, Stoke (delightfully), Swansea and Norwich; 5 goals in the first 7 premier league games. By this point in the season we had already run out of superlatives for him. He didn’t have a part in Arsenal’s goal-of-the-season wonder goal against Norwich, so instead took it upon himself to dribble past the entire Norwich defence and score (leaving half of them on the floor behind him). It was Messi-esque. And yes I just made up that word because there are no words to describe how good Ramsey had become. Clearly my opinion has now completely changed. That’s not me back tracking or denying what I had previously believed. Quite simply I couldn’t be stubborn and ignore what was right in front of me. Despite the signing of Mesut Ozil, Ramsey had become Arsenal’s best player, our talisman, our driving force. I’ve not seen a player play like this in midfield for Arsenal for a long time. Fabregas was great he really was, but Ramsey had resurrected the spirit of Patrick Vieira to play at Arsenal’s heart.

What was Ramsey’s best moment of the 2013/2014 season? The goals against Norwich, Liverpool and Dortmund all stand out in my memory, but surely the F.A. Cup final goal takes the crown. His goals had dried up a little in the final moments of the season but when we were desperate, when we really needed someone to pull us out of a hole, Ramsey was there. I remember sitting right at the top of Wembley stadium and feeling despair when we were 2 nil down. I had been at Birmingham too. Surely this couldn’t happen again. Slowly but surely we clawed our way back. Ramsey didn’t have his best game, far from it, but in typical Ramsey fashion he never gave up. I remember a number of shots from outside the box, going high, going wide but inching closer every time, and I vividly remember turning to my dad saying, “I don’t care if he misses, they should keep giving him the ball. Let him shoot”. It was a massive change from my attitude towards Ramsey 18 months previously, where I would groan whenever he touched the ball.

Shoot he did. And score he did. Aaron Ramsey, after his best ever season, after being the best midfielder in England for 12 months, scored the winning goal to win the F.A. Cup for Arsenal. Drought-Breaker. Ramsey has climbed an Everest of injury, abuse and negativity, lots from his own fans. But he never gave up, and now he’s standing at the highest peak with an F.A. Cup winner’s medal and fistful of names he’s proved wrong, including a certain Dutch ex-captain who wanted him sold. He proved me wrong too. But he wouldn’t gloat because he’s not like that.

Aaron Ramsey has made a humble football fan of me. After his last 18 months I never feel I can write any player off no matter how bad they are. People have consistently written off Jenkinson, but I did the same with Ramsey. People wrote off Giroud, but I did the same with Ramsey. Hell I even don’t feel I can write off Tom Cleverly. Don’t get me wrong, I really think he’s shit. But once upon a time I said this guy wasn’t good enough for Arsenal Football Club and I had to eat my words. His name is Aaron Ramsey; Drought-Breaker.

By Tom Papaloizou @TomPapaloizou

On 20^th December 2013 Luis Suarez signed a new contract with Liverpool that not only raised his wages but purported to keep him on Merseyside until 2018. Twitter was awash with back-slapping Liverpudlians, proudly proclaiming that Christmas had come early, and taking every opportunity to taunt The Arsenal, who had infamously bid for Suarez back in August. It wasn’t just Koppites gleefully asking us what we planned smoking over the festive period, it was also cue for the start of a full-blown media love in about the careful husbandry of Liverpool, of the strength of John Henry, of the ambition of Rodgers and the sublimity of Suarez’s play. Suarez’s breath-taking partnership with Sturridge and Sterling had not only seen Liverpool climb towards the top of the table, but had also seen the UK Media forget all about the sanctimonious attitudes they’d adopted back in March when once again Suarez was persona non grata, not this time for racial abuse, but for baring his teeth at Ivanovic. It was a remarkable Volta-face by the press. Not swayed by any Christmas spirit, Scrooge-like I couldn’t help posting this on Twitter that day.

Clever from Suarez and LFC. He needed a buy-out clause, they couldn’t risk selling below market value. The vultures will circle now.

What I didn’t know then of course was that Suarez’s brilliance would take Liverpool to the very brink of Premier League success, for I thought it likely that Liverpool would probably finish 5^th or 6^th in the table. The memory of our comfortable 2-0 win over them was still fresh in the mind, and their defensive frailties looked enough to keep them out of Champions League contention. What did rankle though was the constant reminder that we had come so close to signing him (we would have been out of sight by New Year’s Day if we had) but also the very real suspicion that had we done so it would have caused a storm of opprobrium that The Arsenal would perhaps never recovered from. For that alone it is worth replaying the events of last summer one last time.

At some stage The Arsenal got wind of the fact that Suarez had a release clause in his contract, and that a bid of £40 million would be enough to secure his services. It seemed likely that those close to the player had whispered the information into a few ears, and it was Arsene Wenger who decided to act on it. This was a fine footballing decision, but a bold move nonetheless. Suarez had been in trouble before and he was in trouble now. He was not yet half-way through a ten match ban, but more importantly his past misdemeanors were regularly paraded by English journalists: at the time Suarez was not a popular figure at all, and I suspect that had he come to The Arsenal he would have remained unpopular, and that the club would have been slated for encouraging racism, for turning a blind eye to any kind of sporting morality, and for having a manager whose very Frenchness guaranteed that he’d never understand the concept of fair play.  Never a universally liked club in the press, I suspect that had Suarez fired The Arsenal to Premier League success we would have become the Millwall of the 21^st Century: nobody likes us and we don’t care. Despite all of this, Wenger knew that Suarez was a player of a lifetime, one of the elite top four (Messi, Ronaldo and Bale are the others) currently playing with the ability to single-handedly change the course of a game – and to do so on a regular basis.

No stranger to unusual transfer fees, having paid the unusual sum in 1975 of £333,333 and 34 pence to Newcastle United for Malcolm Macdonald (the 34 pennies to ensure that the fee was exactly over a third of a million pounds), Arsenal managed to enrage all Liverpool supporters with the cheeky extra pound that would trigger the transfer clause.

Many have suggested that it was that pound that caused John Henry to dig his heels in, but I suspect it more likely that he knew that £40 million was at the very least 30 million less than Suarez was worth, and that sum of money was indeed worth playing hard ball over. Whatever the truth, the saga rumbled on for weeks, before Arsenal finally admitted defeat and realized that they would have to spend one more season without a top, top predatory goal scorer.

It was a shame, but there it was. But what few could have predicted was that it was the fact (and the way) that the Arsenal bid for him that caused the Suarez revisionism among the UK media, and it was this that eventually stuck in the throat. He soon became a reformed character in their eyes, and this was all down to Brendan Rodgers and Stevie Gerrard.

Even more strangely Liverpool were cast in the role of Cinderella club, fighting bravely against impossible odds, and their astonishing run of form after Christmas and through the early Spring became a thing of national celebration. And somehow, every goal that Suarez scored, every point that he helped secure gave someone, somewhere an opportunity to sneer at The Arsenal.

I for one couldn’t stand it: couldn’t stand the way he put us to the sword in that 5-1 trouncing, couldn’t stand it that when Chelsea did much the same thing to us it was somehow the spirit of Suarez that was invoked, couldn’t bear it that all I could hear was Suarez, Suarez, Suarez. The very name mocked all I did, for every time it was uttered by press or pundit it allowed them simultaneously to sneer at Arsene.  And the worst thing of all was that I could see how brilliant he was. Quite simply he is one of the best I have ever seen, a genius footballer who makes the impossible happen on a regular basis, and it galled me beyond belief that I couldn’t enjoy his skill, not because I objected to him as a person but because he wasn’t an Arsenal player and that everything he did diminished us. I had much the same problem with Gareth Bale, but despite his appalling team, the media adulation didn’t bother me nearly as much, and so I found it easier to cope with his successes. I suppose it was because he wasn’t playing for a direct rival really.

Shortly before the England-Uruguay match I said to a friend that I knew Suarez would score the goal that would beat us but that I hoped he did it in such an underhand way it would turn the media against him again (I felt that this would harm Liverpool somehow, such is my inability to see anything except through my Arsenal lens). Well, it didn’t work out quite like that, but in a way I got my wish.

It now seems as if he is off to Spain, just as I suspected he would be back in December. And despite the huge fee that Liverpool will receive from his sale they will be weaker without him, just as Spurs were weaker without Bale. Players like that cannot be replaced: they are that good, they make all the difference, and I hate it when other sides in the Premier League have them and we don’t, if only because it makes me at times resent my own players for not being in that stratospheric class.

So now I can look forward to the coming season knowing that I won’t have to have endure such a sickening medial love-in about a player I had once so shamefully coveted, but that I can also enjoy watching him play again on a regular basis, or at least until we once again face Barcelona in the Champions League.

Today’s  post was by @foreverheady

A post from @foreverheady   

If a week’s a long time in politics then ninety minutes is certainly plenty enough time for football fans to realise that most players are only human after all. I was listening to Darren Gough talking about Lionel Messi on the radio yesterday, and he was very much of the opinion that he hadn’t had the greatest of World Cup tournaments thus far and that his four Man of the Match awards were based more on reputation than actual achievement. In fact, Argentina’s latest game, where they seemed to take forever to dispatch Switzerland, showed another of the game’s greats, the exotically named Angel di Maria to be not so special after all. And yet, as the clock ticked inexorably towards another high stakes penalty shoot-out it was Messi and di Maria who stepped up to win the game. Gliding past two players in trademark style Lionel drew the final defender on to him before slipping the ball to Maria who passed the ball into the net with all the nonchalance of a training ground move, rather than the nerve-jangling coup de grace that would secure a quarter-final spot and, indeed, the promise of far more than that. It was a sublime moment of footballing genius, and future views of highlights and vine clips will ensure that it lives long in the collective footballing consciousness. In short, those few seconds wiped out the ordinariness of the previous two hours, and proved that when it really mattered Messi was the man. If you had only seen the goal you would have thought Dazzler mad.

And yet, despite the almost universal agreement that this has been the greatest and most exciting World Cup ever (at least since the last one) a lot of players have seemingly failed to shine on the greatest stage of all. While reputations may not be completely in tatters, it does seem that many of those who were so eagerly anticipated have struggled to be at their very best, and various reasons have been put forward to explain this. The impossible heat, the makeshift nature of the national teams, the refereeing, the tactical acumen of the opposition managers, the desire that the footballing ‘minnows’ show when pulling on their national strip have been among some of the more popular pieces of punditry, and as with all theories that masquerade as sensible each contain enough truth to be plausible. But I wonder if it isn’t something far more obvious than all of this and that Ronaldo’s feet of clay are just another symptom of the truth so wearily acknowledged each Saturday afternoon by the long suffering denizens of the football League’s terraces. And that truth is, and whisper this quietly or the sponsors will take offence, that football is actually quite a boring game, and that most players, for most of the time, struggle to do anything out of the ordinary; it is sadly true that most sides find it well-nigh impossible to breach a well-organised defence. When explaining goalless performances, managers euphemistically refer to a lack of quality in the final third, when what they actually mean is “none of my players were capable of doing anything unexpected, and my offensive tactics were rendered impotent by my counterpart’s defensive strategy. “ If you watch some games you quite soon begin to wonder if either side will ever be good enough to actually score a goal, so laborious are their efforts. The score-lines give it away, of course: 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, , 2-0, 2-1 are by far the most common, and any tally more than that is a rarity unless the teams are hopelessly mismatched or defensively incontinent.

I am guessing here, but I suspect that the vast majority of football watchers don’t often watch whole games, making do instead with recorded highlights on Match of the Day or various Youtube compilations. When much of the tedious dross is edited out, football comes alive with end to end stuff, goalmouth action a plenty, tantalising and sumptuous moments of artistry and wonder goals repeated endlessly and from all angles. They all look good on the telly, unless of course it is the turn of some hapless defender to have his limitations cruelly exposed by the forensic unpleasantness of a bitter analyst blessed with hindsight, technology and supported by full blown media bias. There will be few regular and actual game-going supporters who haven’t experienced the frustration of seeing their own attackers huff and puff impotently for ninety minutes that afternoon, only to catch Match of the Day later that evening and see a United or City star pirouette on a sixpence before dispatching it venomously into the top corner. And if you have had a couple by then and your reason and your judgment are momentarily suspended, it’s hard not to at least imagine what it would be like to have him leading the line for you next week.  Infidelity, you see, is born out of over-exposure to the commonplace and a momentary glimpse of the exotic.

The problem with this World Cup is that the exotic has become commonplace and the likes of Darren Gough, not to mention many teenage boys, are having to watch whole games in their essentially dull entirety, perhaps for the very first time. Watching Messi being shackled by Johan Djouru for two hours is a little like (and I’m guessing here, Your Honour) watching Linda Lovelace condemned to a perpetual diet of lukewarm and unseasoned Shepherds’ Pie. It is, at best, a disappointment. And I wonder too if this isn’t the problem with people’s perception of Mesut Ozil . When he signed for The Arsenal I wonder how many had watched him play that often, or whether they just remembered flashes of brilliance from Bloemfontein and countless effortless assists in various “Ronaldo’s Greatest Goals” compilations. His first few Arsenal matches were like that too: a beyond brilliant assist for Giroud, a wonder strike against Napoli, a brace to see off Norwich. This was pornography made real and all that golden autumn we were drowning, stingless, in honey- bliss was it indeed  in that dawn to be an Arsenal fan. It didn’t last, of course – or rather, it didn’t last quite like that. The everydayness of things all too soon kicked in, and shamefully the fans got used to his brilliance and no longer noticed when he had done something quite exceptional. Unless every touch turned to gold immediately, he was no longer accorded special status and all too soon he became merely human and nothing like his Youtube alter ego: just another ordinary player, in fact.

Except Mesut Ozil is not just another player, just as Lionel Messi is not having an ordinary tournament. Games are not twenty minutes long (football has yet to go down cricket’s route and pander to today’s short attention spans, although I suspect it is only a matter of time before that happens) and the proof of a player is his contribution over the whole game. It is no surprise that Messi and Ozil made their recent match winning moves deep into injury time, just as it was no coincidence that The Arsenal’s player of the season, Aaron Ramsey, scored the winning goal in the Cup Final long after most had cried enough. Cream rises to the top, they say, and so too do great Sportsmen, and if they think it is worth playing until the final whistle is blown then perhaps the pundits might also try concentrating for long enough to see what is really going on. Not every move they make will come off, not every shot will score, and for much of the time we should expect them to be shackled – after all, it would be almost match-fixingly strange if tactics were not drawn up to nullify the most dangerous players – but rest assured, class will out and they will find a way, and that is why they are, as Arsene would say, top, top quality, and why  I am looking forward to seeing them play again this weekend.

Sports are ubiquitous in the American South. It’s on TV everywhere, all the time. And that’s particularly true in Birmingham, Alabama. We consistently rank at or near the top of ESPN’s ratings – and that’s for almost all sports, not just college football. It’s tough out there if you don’t like sports. You’re going to get left out of a lot of parties. So, I’ve learned over the years to gather just enough knowledge to not be bored silly whenever a sporting event is on the TV. (Except for NASCAR. I refuse to watch NASCAR. It’s just stupid. Sue me.) I was never good at actually playing sports. (Ok, to be fair, I was on the tennis team in high school. But they were desperate.) But I could always feign interest. And then, in my old age, I discovered soccer (Sorry, but I’m American. That’s what we call it.).

Soccer, unsurprisingly, is not on the list of most watched sports here in Alabama. You can expect people to make fun of you if you admit to watching it. And you can expect people to make serious fun of you if you admit to being hooked on an English soccer team, getting up at all manner of ridiculous hours on weekend mornings to watch them play. Your co-workers will buy you gag gifts related to said team for your birthday, to include a squad photo of your favourite player (which you will proceed to put up in your office, because, hey, you’re a good sport). You will become an oddity to your friends. Every time they see you, they will say, “So. How’s Arsenal doing these days?” And you will regale them with the exploits from the most recent match, and they will smile and nod, indulging you in your odd hobby. But sometimes, they actually do become interested. After all, enthusiasm can be infectious.

One of the things I’ve loved the most about becoming a ‘rabid’ soccer fan, is bringing people along with me for the ride. It started at my house, when my husband finally stopped making fun of me and started watching with me. It was at first a case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, but he’s now as big a fan of Arsenal as me. (Well, almost. I still think I win that contest.) I also have a co-worker who actively follows Arsenal now. Another who follows Chelsea. (I tried, really I did. I consider it my biggest failure to date.)  And now, when people stop me in the hallway to ask about the weekend’s games, they often start with “I saw part of the Arsenal game on TV on Saturday.”  Baby steps, people.

All this leads up to my experience with the World Cup this summer. I’m sitting here on Saturday afternoon, surrounded by a house that needs cleaning, laundry that needs doing, dishes that need washing. And I’m planted in front of the TV, watching the World Cup, as I have done almost every day for the last two weeks. If you asked my husband, he would tell you that it doesn’t take much to distract me from housework…Martha Stewart I am not. But almost everything in my life (except work, darn it) has taken a back seat to soccer in the last two weeks. I’ve been to a bar to watch an England game with 200 other people, to a barbecue restaurant to watch a US game with some friends from church, and, on Thursday to a long lunch with 11 co-workers to watch the US play Germany. Now, if I’m honest, I was more interested in Mesut and Lukas and Per than I was in Dempsey and Bradley and Zusi. But it was fun. Everybody was talking about it. Even my daughter watched it. And I know that it has as its roots the patriotic fervour that I normally despise (USA! USA!…please stop…). But I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m just a little excited at the prospect of even a percentage of these folks getting hooked on the game that I’ve come to love so much.  Maybe I won’t get funny looks the next time I ask a bartender to turn the TV over to an Arsenal Champions League match on a Wednesday afternoon.  Hell, maybe when I walk in, it’ll already be on.

Sorry, Skipper, but Tuesday I’m gonna be all “USA! USA!” when we play Belgium. I hope you’ll forgive me

This post is by alabamagooner ( @kmwood02 )

A few years ago I happened across a Coroner’s Report in one of the more respectable UK broadsheets. The subject of the inquest was the untimely death of a middle-age man who’d passed away whilst availing himself of the intimate attentions of an honest lady of the night. Called upon to give evidence, she had this to say (and it was brilliantly quoted verbatim in the paper). “He gave a great sigh, your Honour, and I thought that he’d come, but he’d gorn.” I always imagine Barbara Windsor delivering the line – she’d do it perfectly. I suppose one way or another it all boils down to beginnings and endings, comings and goings, and if that is true of life then it is certainly so of the summer transfer window.

Unfortunately right now there seems precious little to cheer about, but plenty of gloom to keep the doom brigade paradoxically cheerful.

Sagna’s departure was long expected, and although anticipated it still came as a wrench to see him go, especially as he was playing as well as ever.

Although few will have mourned the passing of Bendtner or Chamakh, many are now braced for the imminent departure of Vermaalen, and this will be a sadness. It’s a hard situation for him and the club: he wouldn’t want to sign an extension to play second fiddle to Per and Kos, and much as the club would like him to stay, it seems almost foolish to pass up the chance of a decent transfer fee to keep him as a potentially disaffected bench warmer. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

Although this doesn’t really count, the decision not to sign Fabregas felt like another death, and was certainly mourned as such. Actually, I am wrong there: given that it is never nice to see your own playing for another it was more like a betrayal than a death. Jealousy is a powerful emotion, and predictably enough many turned on the club for seemingly having stood impotently by while a Portuguese lothario exercised his seductive charms.

Given all of that, the rumour recently circulated that Cazorla is on his way found plenty of fertile soil within which to breed and spawn discontent.  So in the space of a month, nay not so long, a little month, The Arsenal had gone from “Trophy winning side ready to embrace bright new future” to “Jaded Arsenal, happy to play second-fiddle Arsenal, congenitally unambitious Arsenal”.

Except, of course, that perception is a long way from the truth. Nothing has actually happened that any reasonably intelligent supporter couldn’t have foreseen. The club has the same players on its books, minus the eleven that have just been released, and it would be hypocrisy of the highest order for some to claim the decision to let Bendtner and Kalstrom go indicated any kind of weakness. We don’t know whether Arteta will ply his trade elsewhere (today’s latest rumour) just as we can’t know the status of any possible transfers, however much they have been touted in the press.

We can put two and two together and surmise that it is likely that we sign a right-back, but we are only guessing if we say with any certainty that we know who it will be. For sometime now it has seemed that Serge Aurier would be Bacary’s replacement, and conveniently he looked similar enough to satisfy all those who don’t really like change, but that rumour has now gone a bit lukewarm, and this, combined with the news that another reported target, Seamus Coleman, has penned a new contract with Everton, has started to cause panic in some of the supporting ranks.

Now throw in a few big money signings by the Manchesters and a home-bred exotic to Liverpool, mix with pictures of AW besporting himself on a Brazilian beach surrounded by bikini-clad babes and you have the makings of a perfect twitter storm. And all this still a few days before the transfer window actually opens, and two weeks before the world’s best players, some of whom you might hope to be genuinely Emirates bound, have done with the compelling side-show that is the World Cup.

In so far as I can know anything, I know that Arsene is keen to strengthen his starting XI and his squad.  I also know that although The Arsenal has a lot of money available it does not have unlimited funds and this will have a bearing on how the club goes about its business.  I think I know that a lot of scouting and a lot of negotiating will already have taken place, and if it has then I suspect at least one deal has already been done, but has yet to be made public. If it is the tradition to announce a new signing with a picture of him proudly holding his new shirt, then it makes sense to wait until he can do so with the blessing of the brand new sponsor, and this, as much as anything, could be the reason why Coleman has pledged himself to Merseyside.

In short, because I believe that the club is ambitious, and because I read between the lines, I remain as confident as ever that the club remains on an upward trajectory and is firmly committed to long term success. However, while it is all very well me thinking all of this it doesn’t do the club much good if a sizeable number feel the opposite, especially if some of those who do so are either influential bloggers or journalists.

In fact, far from it not doing much good, it can do active harm if The Arsenal brand becomes associated with a sense of tentative and parsimonious under-achievement. That is not what sponsors want to buy into, and very much not what the best players in the world want to sign up for. When will there be good news is a legitimate question to ask right now, and given that nature is all too ready to fill a vacuum, I would question how carefully the Public Relations Dept have been taking their responsibilities over the last three weeks.

There was a brief moment after the first round of World Cup group matches when everything seemed possible: Balotelli, fresh from damaging England, was surely ours, Campbell was like a shiny new toy and Aurrier was the newest assist-king on the block. All this, and we hadn’t even begun to decide between Bender or Khedira, Pogba or Vidal. Leaving aside for one moment the actual worth of these players, it was quite clear that Arsene did indeed know, and that once again North London was the sexiest place in the footballing world. It felt good to be a Gooner.

Ten days later, and that impression has faded ever so slightly and that is a pity, if only because I now find myself wasting time reassuring the faint of heart that everything is indeed all right, and feeling slightly irritated that the club doesn’t do more to reach out positively to its supporters. At times, in fact, it is as if it goes out of its way to disappoint and alarm, such is its seemingly blithe lack of concern as to how it is perceived.

I am certainly not suggesting that we should be privy to the intimate details of all our transfer dealings, for that would be absurd, but I do think that now we have heard all about the goings some reassurance that there will be the odd coming to look forward to would be nice. And if it could be Barbara Windsor who could whisper that everything was going to be alright and to just lie back and enjoy the ride, then so much the better.

Today’s post was by @foreverheady.

One of the hotter topics in cricket over the last fifty years or so has been whether a player should walk when he knows he is out, or whether he should wait for the umpire to give him out. However minimal the contact, however faint the edge, a batsman always knows when he has hit the ball.

The professional game used to be divided into “walkers” or “non-walkers” and it was generally accepted that to walk when you knew you were out, even if you suspected that the umpire would have given you the benefit of the doubt, was the highest form of sportsmanship, and showed a high degree of moral rectitude. Because cricket was not only old-fashioned, but also had claims as the quintessentially English game, there was an expectation that an amateur or a gentleman would walk, because that was the “right” thing to do, but that a professional would probably wait for the umpires decision. In short, you could trust a proper chap to do the right thing, whereas someone from the lower classes could not be relied upon to have any moral compass at all.

Except it was seldom quite as simple as that, for I knew a few players who had wonderful reputations and were held to be absolute paragons who would cynically trade on that reputation.  To establish a reputation as someone who would always give yourself out, but to then play on that to hoodwink the official at a critical moment is a pretty advanced form of cheating, but I saw it happen enough times to make me feel that the practice of “walking” should be removed from the game, and that all decisions should be left to the umpire.

If morality could be so easily manipulated, I came to believe that all moral judgements should be removed from sport. I have no time at all for those who claim the moral high-ground by dint of birth, status and schooling only to dissemble and gain advantage by unfair means. The law is the law, and better to stick to the letter rather than the spirit, if those that genuinely try to be honest are disadvantaged by those who don’t.  That is why I am so in favour of technology as it leads to better decision-making, and better decision lead to fairer results.

There is another article to be written about the whole issue of drugs and doping, and I have at times often wondered whether it would be better to just allow a total free for all, but that is for another day. For now though it is enough to say that sportsmen will always try to get away with what they can.

Rugby players learn quickly to play the referee, to work out what transgressions they can get away with, what laws a particular referee will not seek to enforce. So do footballers, and we know from watching The Arsenal how quickly rotational fouling is employed once a side senses they can get away with it. These are not on-the-field snap decisions:  coaches spend plenty of time briefing players on who to foul, where best to stray offside, how off-the-ball runs may be most effectively and invisibly blocked.

I don’t have advanced knowledge of all sports, but would bet my life that all sports have their own nefarious practices: as players we quickly learn the dark arts if we wish to survive, for few things are as competitive as professional sport, and without carefully drawn-up laws and efficient refereeing games soon become a jungle. And that jungle becomes red in tooth and claw if you rely on the players to interpret the laws equally fairly.

Which I suppose brings me quite neatly to that bite, which has caused predictable outrage, and an outpouring of moral relativism not often seen in such magnitude beyond A-level philosophy essays.

It seems to me that if you support Liverpool FC or Uruguay it is perfectly appropriate to claim that there are plenty worse things than a not altogether friendly nip that go unpunished: career-ending tackles and casually swung elbows have been paraded with enthusiasm as justifications for why biting an opponent is not that bad. Equally, if you do not support Liverpool or Uruguay, and especially if you feel that as an English-speaking white man you are the sole guardian of moral rectitude in a dangerously immoral and worryingly foreign world then the bite is seen as a mortal sin and one that can only be adequately punished by eternal banishment.  And I am not certain how those two positions can ever be properly reconciled, because both carry so much baggage with them that it is perhaps just best to acknowledge that sometimes there is no absolute right and wrong

What does interest me rather more is the way that just as most societies have their own set of taboos, so too do most sports and I find it fascinating to see what is and what is not considered to be acceptable. Biting, for example, is not especially frowned on in Rugby Football, and while it is probably best not to know everything that goes on in the scrum, I have seen enough nibbled ears to realise that cannibalism is alive and well in the Home Counties. But should a player stick out a foot to trip up a flying three-quarter then all hell breaks loose in the rugby world. It is just not done, and anyone that maintains such behaviour is soon hounded out.

Likewise in cricket: a bowler may legitimately seek to kill a batsman by bowling short-pitched bouncers , and this is seen as an acceptable and admired part of the game; should the same bowler seek to do so by not pitching the ball at all but aiming it full toss at the head then that is strictly off-limits.

A boxer may rain un-defended blows on his opponent’s head and reduce him to a vegetative state and he will be considered a hero: throw a punch below the belt and he’ll soon be cast as pantomime villain.

Footballers lie and cheat on a regular basis: they claim throw-ins and corners, they dive and simulate injury and this is not only all fine but actively encouraged.  They may seek to break their opponent’s leg, and that is OK too, but they must not punch, gouge or bite, for that is not OK.

Taboo trumps relativism, and societies (and the football society is no different) police those taboos strictly and seriously. However ridiculous and logic defying it might be, anyone that seeks to defend the breaking of a taboo will be seen to be so far at odds with the values of that society that all their opinions will, by extension, be deemed risible.

The point about Louis Suarez is not that what he did was particularly bad, but rather that he was unable to stop himself doing something he knew was considered wrong by the rest of his tribe: that he immediately sought to divert attention from his behaviour by feigning injury was proof enough to me that he realised he had crossed an invisible but all-important line.

Today’s post was given to us by  @foreverhaedy (Ex professional cricketer)