Gunners Shoot Blanks or The Proper Etiquette Guide for Sore Loosers

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.