Robin Van Persie is a ball-faced liar - pun intended.
In the post-game press conference, Van Persie said that he didn't hear the referee's offside whistle. The audacity of that statement is only matched by it's mendacity. Maybe his lame excuse would fly in the age of radio, but anyone with half an eye and one firing synapse can see as clear as HD that he was having a go.
As you well know by now, the controversy started in the 56th minute of Tuesday night's Champions League clash between Arsenal and Barcelona, when Van Persie received a perfectly weighted pass from Fabregas that split the middle of Barcelona's defensive right at the edge of the penalty box. The referee whistled Van Persie offside before the ball even touched the striker's foot.
Upon receiving the ball a second later, Van Persie ingnored the whistle, stopped short, and whipped a hard (but lazy) shot into the side netting - with guilt and frustration written all over his body like a tattoo.
The strange thing is that instead of moving forward to challenge the goalie, Van Persie stops short (as though he'd heard the whistle) and fires a hard but half-assed shot into the side netting.
See the clip below.
Guilty say I, because under normal circumstances, a centre forward of his calibre - who really hadn't heard the referee's whistle - would have challenged the goalie with more ardor, and dribbled himself into a more accommodating shooting angle - rather than squandering the opportunity as he did. And it's a good thing that he was in fact offside, if not, such a feeble attempt on goal in such an important match would surely have been worthy of a throttling from the head coach.
To tell the honest truth, when I saw the event live, I was struck by the insolence of the gesture and the utter disregard for the whistle that it indicated. Whether or not it was harsh expulsion is debatable. And it was a harsh. But what isn't debatable is the fact that Arsenal where roundly outplayed in the match.
The stats don't lie:
Barcelona enjoyed 68% of possession of the ball to Arsenals 32%
Barcelona had at total of 17 shots on goal, whereas Arsenal had none.
Here is a mind blowing stat:
Out of the 1295 sides to have played in the Champions League, this Arsenal side is the only one not to have recorded a single shot on goal during the match. In fact, Arsenal were gifted their only goal of the match courtesy of Busquets' own goal in the 53rd minute.
Those are the numbers, but if we must moan about referees, it could be argued that Arsenal, not Barcelona, benefitted from the lion's share of poor calls by the refs - in both legs! The Catalans had a legitimate goal disallowed in the first leg, and an OBVIOUS penalty disallowed in the first half of the second leg.
Would that Arsenal showed as much fight in the game as they did in their post-game interviews and tweets. The gunners were listless and lacking in ambition during most of the match. And Wenger erodes his credibility and stature as a coach every time he cries conspiracy when his team fails to deliver the goods: losing to Birmingham in the Carling Cup Final, failing to put away Leyton Orient in the FA cup, failure to beat Sunderland over the weekend to creep within 1 point of Manchester united, and the list goes on and on....as do Wenger's excuses.
A word of advice for Mr. Wenger (from one sore looser to another) on the proper etiquette of losing poorly: The next time your team loses due to a bad call by the ref, Keep your mouth shut. Nobody wants to hear it. Or at the very least, do what i do:
1- Give fulsome praise to the opposing team i.e. catalogue and recite, in exhaustive detail, every single positive play, gesture and respiration performed by the opposing team.
2- Ask for permission to moan about the referee.
3- If permission is granted, then proceed.
Conversely, if your team wins the match due to the ref's poor call, do the following:
1- Praise the performance of the opposing team.
2- Allow the interlocutor to vent at their frustrations at the referee's decision
3- Agree with your interlocutor (while defending the quality your own teams performance). Because admitting that the opposing coach was right, doesn't change the result now does it?
This is a fool proof way of saving face after a bad loss. You're so likely to be riled up over the bad call that torpedoed your own squad that you'll be blind to the myriad bad calls that affected the opposition during he match...and the thousands of other bad calls that have affected all of the sides in every other match dating back from big bang to the present day...
Bad calls are a part of the game and the best insurance policy against them is to perform well.
Friday 11 March 2011
Tuesday 8 March 2011
Charlie Sheen: TV's 24 Hour Golden Shower
Ok. Let's be honest. The past few weeks have been absolute torture for some TV heads. I mean having to endure a ceaseless stream of 24 hour news cycles chronicling the sex & drug fuelled implosion of one of Tinseltown's most talentless tools is enough to make any viewer's ears and eyes bleed (those persons more intimately involved may complain of bleeding from other orifices!). Having said that, as a piece of smutty sur-reality tv, Charlie Spleen's traveling circus of tiger blood and strookers has been hoot!
We love it when the freak precedes the show and we love it even more when one of our paid clowns slips and busts his crown one of his own guilded turds. The response from most professional pundits has been predictable, and they have been quick to condemn Charlie Sheen's behaviour as depraved and immoral, branding him a lunatic and a menace to those close to everyone within earshot.
But are the pundits right in their rush to judgment? Are we really diagnosing the situation correctly? Or are we performing the autopsy before the body is even dead, killing the patient in the process? Self-aggrandizing pronouncements and malevolent tone aside (yeah, i'm rolling my eyes too), I've been struck by the lucidity and wit of Charlie Sheen's dope-box rants.
Given the conservative tone that pervades in most of what passes for pop culture in America today, it's certainly possible that Charlie Sheen is being misrepresented in his own words in the media. Maybe we are so caught up in the spectacle of the morbid exhibitionism that we might actually be three monkeys (deaf dumb mute) to what Charlie Sheen is trying to say.
If Sheen's epic attempts to BOTH fulfil AND justify his ambition to snort and fuck himself out of existence, aren't worthy our admiration/envy/awe - then MAYBE at least it is worthy of a closer look. I mean the man may be putting his sack on the line for what may be one of the best self-reflexive pieces of performance art since Andy Kaufman implosion in the 70s. Or maybe not. Who knows? Sometimes the best way to the bottom of a sticky question like this, is to ask a ton more questions. So here are a series of questions that we hope are as loaded as Charlie is.
LOADED QUESTIONS
• Is Charlie Sheen really a maybe-not-so-unwitting post-modern moralist, self consciously regurgitating the very same tepid TV pap that's been accumulating in our collective guts for the past decade - like some 6 year old tv-addled sugar junkie reciting lines from his favourite sitcoms and commercials to show mommy and daddy that tv does make you smart? In other words aren't half-baked catch phrases like Tiger Blood - Adonis Gene - Drug Called Charlie Sheen - already Naked Lunch on the Pop Cult menu.
• Or is Charlie Sheen basically holding up a wobbly coke smeared mirror, reflecting our own depraved dependency on that daily fix of salacious celebrity smack, and morbid media trash that permeates the airwaves, effectively exposing the codependent relationship between his addictions and our own…and vice versa? And If so, does our gawking at the spectacle validate his view that we'd all be doing what he's doing if we had his resources and (ahem) 'Adonis Blood'. After all, ideas are the mother of all actions, are they not?
• Or is this Lenny Bruce-like meltdown some kind of entropic one man po-mo sideshow designed to remind us that it takes two to do the TV town tango and that the inevitable consequence of outsourcing our dreams to Hollywood is that you often receive dreck in equal proportion to the dreams?
• Or is Sheen like some coked-up stunt double of his previous bad boy self, ripping through the hollywood landscape like a ball of fire, blowing up bridges, blazing up 3 oz crack rocks, battering starlets, and biting the hand that signs his checks, all while putting a bullet in every foot in sight except his own?
• Or is Charlie Sheen just the latest in a long line of sociopathic hollywood gas sacks bloated with a hot dose of crack vapours and a sense of entitlement, spewing his toxic tirades into the airwaves like some atavistic cult leader fresh out of the cryogenic deep freeze and trying to con us into swallowing the same lethal dose of laissez-faire libertarianism and ubermensch twiddle twaddle that his kids wife ex-wife and strookers seem lap up like cool aid?
What do you guys think? I look forward to hearing your comments on this.
We love it when the freak precedes the show and we love it even more when one of our paid clowns slips and busts his crown one of his own guilded turds. The response from most professional pundits has been predictable, and they have been quick to condemn Charlie Sheen's behaviour as depraved and immoral, branding him a lunatic and a menace to those close to everyone within earshot.
But are the pundits right in their rush to judgment? Are we really diagnosing the situation correctly? Or are we performing the autopsy before the body is even dead, killing the patient in the process? Self-aggrandizing pronouncements and malevolent tone aside (yeah, i'm rolling my eyes too), I've been struck by the lucidity and wit of Charlie Sheen's dope-box rants.
Given the conservative tone that pervades in most of what passes for pop culture in America today, it's certainly possible that Charlie Sheen is being misrepresented in his own words in the media. Maybe we are so caught up in the spectacle of the morbid exhibitionism that we might actually be three monkeys (deaf dumb mute) to what Charlie Sheen is trying to say.
If Sheen's epic attempts to BOTH fulfil AND justify his ambition to snort and fuck himself out of existence, aren't worthy our admiration/envy/awe - then MAYBE at least it is worthy of a closer look. I mean the man may be putting his sack on the line for what may be one of the best self-reflexive pieces of performance art since Andy Kaufman implosion in the 70s. Or maybe not. Who knows? Sometimes the best way to the bottom of a sticky question like this, is to ask a ton more questions. So here are a series of questions that we hope are as loaded as Charlie is.
LOADED QUESTIONS
• Is Charlie Sheen really a maybe-not-so-unwitting post-modern moralist, self consciously regurgitating the very same tepid TV pap that's been accumulating in our collective guts for the past decade - like some 6 year old tv-addled sugar junkie reciting lines from his favourite sitcoms and commercials to show mommy and daddy that tv does make you smart? In other words aren't half-baked catch phrases like Tiger Blood - Adonis Gene - Drug Called Charlie Sheen - already Naked Lunch on the Pop Cult menu.
• Or is Charlie Sheen basically holding up a wobbly coke smeared mirror, reflecting our own depraved dependency on that daily fix of salacious celebrity smack, and morbid media trash that permeates the airwaves, effectively exposing the codependent relationship between his addictions and our own…and vice versa? And If so, does our gawking at the spectacle validate his view that we'd all be doing what he's doing if we had his resources and (ahem) 'Adonis Blood'. After all, ideas are the mother of all actions, are they not?
• Or is this Lenny Bruce-like meltdown some kind of entropic one man po-mo sideshow designed to remind us that it takes two to do the TV town tango and that the inevitable consequence of outsourcing our dreams to Hollywood is that you often receive dreck in equal proportion to the dreams?
• Or is Sheen like some coked-up stunt double of his previous bad boy self, ripping through the hollywood landscape like a ball of fire, blowing up bridges, blazing up 3 oz crack rocks, battering starlets, and biting the hand that signs his checks, all while putting a bullet in every foot in sight except his own?
• Or is Charlie Sheen just the latest in a long line of sociopathic hollywood gas sacks bloated with a hot dose of crack vapours and a sense of entitlement, spewing his toxic tirades into the airwaves like some atavistic cult leader fresh out of the cryogenic deep freeze and trying to con us into swallowing the same lethal dose of laissez-faire libertarianism and ubermensch twiddle twaddle that his kids wife ex-wife and strookers seem lap up like cool aid?
What do you guys think? I look forward to hearing your comments on this.
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