By Walter Broeckx
Sitting in front of my TV I couldn’t really remember seeing such a ref travesty for a long while. But then I remembered the PL has stopped some 3 month ago so it had been a while.
Whatever 11 players we would have put on the pitch today wouldn’t have mattered.
From the first minutes it was clear that the ref was going to give us nothing. Every time an Arsenal player came close to an Anthony Villa player the whistle went. On the other hand Villa could do what they want and only when things really were bad the ref would give the foul.
You could see the frustration running high amongst Arsenal players. And they lost their focus and that was all that the ref needed.
Of course the balance wasn’t right with Arteta missing in midfield and that lead to the first Villa goal. Most refs would have given the advantage as Villa had a shot on an open goal but missed it. This ref came back to the foul and gave the penalty. Defendable according to the rules. But only a ref on a mission would take this decision.
Another good example was the Gibbs injury. It clearly was a head injury and minutes before the ref gave a foul against Giroud for coming to close and the Villa player holding his head with not being touched on the head at all. But it took him a lot of time to realize Gibbs was down and bleeding from a head injury.
Let us move on to the second half. How happy he was to give a penalty for a tackle on the ball from Koscielny. Koscienly clearly played the ball but the ref couldn’t wait to give the penalty and a yellow card. Two wrong decisions.
And minutes later he couldn’t wait to send of Koscielny with a second yellow for….. well tell me for what. The first yellow as not justified as it was tackle that won the ball. And not to my surprise the ref then kept his card in his pocket when Vlaar who was already on a yellow made a similar foul on an Arsenal player with the difference being that Koscielny didn’t make contact but Vlaar clearly did take out Rosicky. But now the second yellow card was kept in the pocket.
That Anthony Villa later on made a third was of no importance at all. The ref done his job.
This is what we can call a ref who gave all kind of small fouls against one team from the first minute to disturb the players of Arsenal? He succeeded.
For once I agree with the “spend some fucking money” chant. Now with SAF out we should have bought the PGMOL this summer. We clearly didn’t spend the money.
Now of course when Arsenal is involved we usually get nothing from Anthony Taylor. Every little decisions usually goes against us. Even in the Emirates cup he was doing it. It seems that since he has become a FUFA ref he has been introduced to how to make it to the top. And that is by annoying Arsenal.
I wonder how many players we have left after the ref allowing the Villa players hacking and kicking at the ankles from behind in many duels that weren’t called as fouls. Cazorla being held (I remember him not wanting to give fouls to Cazorla earlier by the way) twice within 2 seconds just after the interval and the ref only 5 meters away didn’t see it.
I will not go on about Wilshere being stopped by Vlaar in the penalty area where the ref should have given a penalty to Arsenal when it was still 1-2. Because every person with knowledge knew that it would take the most blatant of handballs on the line to make sure that the ref would give a penalty for Arsenal.
The new season is upon and the ref-shite is once again hitting us in the face. I hope ref Taylor had a bad day but with the history he had with Arsenal I just think he is following the footsteps of Dean. He has the same look. And he is as biased against Arsenal as Dean.
And then to think that even with 10 men we had the best chances to equalise. I hope we still have some healthy players left over from this absolutely shocking display of bad-refereeing. If there are injuries we can put them down to a seriously lack of protection from the ref for our players.
We were well on top in this game until the wrong penalty and the second wrong yellow card against Koscielny. And that is the only reason we lost.