From Brendan:
Hi,
I can tell you what I don’t like about Burley’s comments.
First, they came soon after the Chelsea game, in which, for me, part of the reason for the wall-to-wall refusal to admit that Alonso fouled Bellerin was the ‘fixed idea’ that Arsenal are ‘soft’.
In most other countries the consensus was that it was a foul and the referee made a mistake.
Football rules are often about interpretation, so disagree with me all you like, but I think it was ‘excessive force’ and ‘dangerous play’. I’m not going to deny others’ right to interpret the incident another way, all I would appreciate is a bit more respect to my ‘right’ to my own interpretation – and less of the accusations of being an ‘Arsenal moaner’.
To me, it’s not a deliberate ‘conspiracy’, but there is a discourse which has developed around Arsenal that they are ‘soft’ and they lack in the physical department, and because of this discourse, it becomes easy, safe, and even ‘obligatory’ to favour the ‘hard-working’, ‘aggressive’ opponent, who is not ‘playing dainty passes’ and ‘trying to score the perfect goal’ etc, etc.
This gets to the stage when on the BBC live feed for today’s match, there are comments like ‘the referee had to give Theo Walcott his teddy back’ and any opportunity to emphasise the ‘dilettantish’ and ‘non-masculine’ in Arsenal is jumped on and brandished. It’s boring and ignorant.
The ‘soft’ angle is then mixed up with Wenger’s overuse of the phrase ‘mental strength’, and then all of a sudden, Wenger is mentally weak. The players are mentally weak. But guess what? The FANS are mentally weak, too!
I don’t really believe I need to explain how stupid this comment is, but I’ll try.
Can we say that Manchester United fans are mentally weak for tolerating what they have since Sir Alec Ferguson retired?
Finishing below Arsenal every season and failing to qualify for the Champions’ League?
Can we say that Tottenham fans are mentally weak because they persist in their support of their team?
Good friends of mine who support Tottenham have confided that at the end of last season, they were close to winning the league, but they had that nagging sense that ‘But we’re still Tottenham’.. and then their title challenge collapsed. Are they mentally weak for thinking that? Did they transmit their ‘mental weakness’ to their team? Of course not.
Are Liverpool fans mentally weak because they continue to support a club which hasn’t won a league title in 27 years? Of course not. Why aren’t Liverpool fans ransacking their stadium every week, if they’ve been waiting double the length of time for a title that Arsenal have?
The difference is that Wenger is still there, while at the other clubs they’ve changed managers time and time again. I’m not being a Wenger apologist by any means but his longevity in the position does put him in the line of fire, and by implication Arsenal too, merely by virtue of the fact that he remains in charge.
It’s not as if Liverpool or Tottenham have moved further forward in the time Wenger has been at Arsenal in particular, but the changeover in managers gives the media and pundits a different focus. The teams who have dominated in the intervening years since Arsenal last won the league (not counting Leicester, which was a magical anomaly) have done so with fantastically high amounts of spending on players and their salaries.
Of course I’m not excusing Wenger for failing to capitalise on the weakness of other teams last year, and of course we should have won the league.
Wenger has become and easy target. He deserves much of the criticism he gets. But when it goes into personal attacks on Arsenal fans.. that is just ridiculous.
Essentially, Burley is over-generalising, and expecting all fans to think and act as a unit, as a mass.
Fans are not uniform. There are Arsenal fans who I share virtually nothing with in terms of how we see football, other than we support the North London team in red and white. I still support Arsenal passionately even though I think the ‘business model’ sucks, the owner sucks, the ticket prices suck, the atmosphere in the stadium often sucks and sometimes the team sucks.
My displeasure at what is happening at Arsenal is different from the displeasure of Fan X, who wants Usmanov to come in and for Arsenal to become another Chelsea or Man City, paying players a quarter of a million a week. Is that Arsenal fan ‘mentally strong’ if he protests against Wenger and am I ‘mentally weak’ if I don’t?
Ultimately, people will lose interest and do something else with their time, but until then, Arsenal “the business” has a captive audience, and sells its version of football to people who are sometimes pleased, sometimes frustrated. Just like other football clubs.
I think sweetscience N5 was spot on with his comments.
Burley’s comments are clickbait, scandal-mongering and nothing more.
Myles says :
This correspondence, following an amicable and detailed exchange of views, is now closed.
Tomorrow I’ll write about Saturday’s games.