Arsenal do NOT need to calm down: we need more and more of this passion

 

 

 

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Carragher loses touch with reality

“Arsenal and their fans must calm down if they want to win the title.”  So pronounced the all-knowing Jamie Carragher who not only wants to tell us how clubs should play football but also how fans should behave and think.   And that is the same Carragher as the man who was sent off for throwing a coin at Arsenal fans.

This is not to say that Carragher might not be right to think that “Only a more controlled emotional approach will enable Arsenal to challenge rivals Manchester City.”  Personally, I think he is wrong, but it is an arguable point.   Except that it is not arguable by a man sent off for throwing a coin at fans in the ground.

A fan found guilty of coin throwing is liable to have a lifetime ban from the ground.   But Carragher, being Carragher, just got a three-game ban.   And clearly he didn’t learn anything from it.  

Of course the Telegraph must take responsibility for allowing such a person to express his views, and in many ways they will be seen as a laughing stock for publishing this, but the win took Arsenal to fifth, while other members of what we called the Big 7 (and yes that was our fault, and I confess it) linger in 11th (Manchester United), 12th (Chelsea) and 14th (Newcastle United).  It is, as Carragher might learn to say instead of the stuff he currently writes “a funny old game.”

One of the problems with Carragher as with many other commentators, is that he likes to imagine he is a psychologist, without realising to be a person adept at understanding and interpreting the behaviour of individuals, one needs around six or seven years of training.  Which I rather suspect neither the ex-player nor his editor has.

And less you think that I have picked out just two or three statements in the Carragher piece to suggest he is going through a rather long moment of feeling the right to grandeur  on stages other than those of playing football, his claims to  psychological insight reverberate all the way through this piece.  Take for example, “I understand why Arsenal feel like they do.”  Although atually there he is moving into social psychology – which is a different study, considering group feeling and emotions, rather than those of the individual.

But even when he gets onto football, he is still wildly out of step with reality.  For example, he says, “My concern with Arsenal is all their momentum was at the start of last season.”  Thus he probably was asleep or out of the country when Arsenal went through seven consecutive league wins from 18 February to 1 April scoring 24 goals in that run (which for the sake of Mr Carragher we should point out is 3.429 goals a game).

Now most people (not Mr Carragher of course but most people) would call a run of seven successive Premier League wins scoring over three goals a game on average, a run which has a certain amount of momentum.  Indeed not only was it Arsenal’s best scoring run of the season but the only time in the season in which they won seven games in a row.

My argument would therefore be twofold at this point.  One is that facts should be checked, and the other is that the integrity of a commentator who is held up by a paper like the Telegraph which likes to consider itself to be a propogator of truth and wisdom, should be checked.

For what is really bad here is that not only is the Telegraph allowing (or quite possibly even paying – which makes it much worse) the Carragher fellow to speak or maybe even write this stuff, no one can be arsed to go and check anything that he says.

One final observation.  Near the end of his tirade Carragher writes (and I am allowing him the compliment of thinking the he wrote this, and didn’t pay someone else to do it), “To keep it going, Arsenal need to reconnect with the enjoyment at the start of last year’s ride.”

I wonder if he was at the game.  I was, and I suspect that if Carragher was there, he left before the end (as some journos do).  Because I have never witnessed such undiluted joy and excitement at an Arsenal match since we beat Leicester in order to complete the unbeaten season.

I would say “shame on you Carragher for such undiluted tripe.”  But really it is shame on the Telegraph a) for publishing it and b) for thinking its readers are so thick they might not notice how stupid the piece is. 

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