- Do Arsenal need a goalscorer? And indeed did we need one last summer?
- Approach those last couple of matches, and the nerves are jangling
By Tony Attwood
Who exactly runs football is an interesting point, and of course, to answer it, one needs to ask, what do we mean by “runs”? And I pondered that today, on seeing that West Ham United are going to the PGMO to complain about Arsenal’s goal and what they perceive as a lack of consistency in refereeing.
Interestingly, we never hear of a club complaining about the issue that underlines such problems – the fanatical secrecy of referees and their association PGMO. They give no interviews, issue no press releases, and they have no website. PGMOL just is, like some god from the ancient world that looks down on football and issues diktats.
Thus, when we make our regular complaint about how often the same referee might oversee matches for the same team, we are in effect complaining to the PGMO about the behaviour of the PGMO. We’ve argued for no referee to oversee a match involving a particular club more than once for a home game and once for an away game. But it is not a point others have appeared interested in, yet at a stroke, it could reduce a lot of the frustration involving referees and the cumulative effect of seeing the same man in charge of the game over and over again.
True, that one step might not get rid of all the inconsistency that now even the media in England mentions from time to time, but in the absence of any other move, it could help us all a little bit.
So all we can do is wait for the next secret meeting of IFAB, which makes the rules and tells referees how to interpret them. That meeting is due sometime, in a place not specified, on a date not yet set.
As things stand, the PGMO don’t allow their staff members to look at monitors to determine things like whether a player should get a card or whether the result of a ball crossing the goal line should be a corner or a goal kick. And to some degree, they have a point because it takes a long time for a referee to wave players away and trot over to a monitor to see exactly what happened.
But not the only strange thing in football, for just as the media hardly ever mentions PGMO there is also little reflection in the media about how clubs like WHAM and Tottenham can go into periods of decline while Arsenal under Arteta have been in a period of growth. What exactly have the clubs done in such different ways to give such different results?
WHAM, for example, started the decade coming sixth in 2020/21 and then started to zig zag down and are currently sitting 18th. Which means they are actually doing worse than Tottenham, which takes some doing. The two clubs below them (Burnley and Wolverhampton) have long since descended to the lower reaches mentally, and more recently on points, but WHAM could actually survive, although they seem to have chucked the towel in.
Fortunately, the one thing we can be quite sure of is that Arsenal are not going to be taking any of these League matches easy in order to save themselves for the Champions League final – the club, the players, and all of us want the League Title, especially as it means ManC not getting it.
But perhaps the most important news for Arsenal is that there are still six days to go before the next game – something that has rarely happened this season. Of course, tall the extra matches have been in part due to Arsenal’s success in progressing through the cup competitions, but even so, it does bring quite a strain onto the club and the players.
However, if there were a secondary league in which Arsenal could play its backup and recovering players, as well as in the League Cup, that would work rather well. In ancient days, we had that with the Football Combination, the games for which were played at Highbury and could bring along over 10,000 fans to a match. Now of course, it is no more, and instead the benches have had to be extended to accommodate all the possible subs for each League match.
I suppose that is progress, but it seems a bit of a shame. The first Arsenal games I went to, along with my Dad, were Football Combination matches, and at the age of 9 I didn’t see the difference in skill levels between those games and the occasional first division games I went to. But no, the Combination is long gone, and football rarely goes back to its old ways.
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I still remember Bill Shankley famously saying that there are only two great teams in Liverpool . Liverpool FC , and the Liverpool Reserves !