By Walter Broeckx
With Andrew not being around for the moment to write his pre-match referee preview I have taken the task to write about the man we all hate to see appear on an Arsenal pitch. Yes it is not only PL starting time. It is also…. Dean time.
Over the years I have written about a dozen times about Dean I think. Apart from the reviews that is. Add those in and we would end up somewhere between 50-100 articles. As for some unknown (well we think we do know) reason, don’t we Mike (Riley, not Dean) we had season after season when Dean was the ref who did most of our matches.
In fact Mike Dean only did two Arsenal matches last season. The 0-0 at home against Middlesbrough and the 1-4 win at Stoke of all places.
In the season before he did three Arsenal matches. And in one of them he made a complete fool of himself by sending off Gabriel for nothing (except for just being an Arsenal player) and let Costa stay on the field to win the match for Chelsea. He even managed to send off Santi Cazorla off all people. We lost that one 2-0 with nine men on the field at the end. And another Chelsea player being able to kick left, right and everywhere in between without getting send off. No lenience for Santi when he committed a second bookable foul. Old skool Dean one could say.
The other two matches he did that season ended 0-0. Against Hull in an FA cup match and away to Sunderland. The season before we got him 4 matches in the PL. Or around 10% of our total matches.
We’ve been to hell with Dean on the field. But we also managed to get one over him from time to time. We remember him dancing of joy when the spuds managed to get 0-2 up after half an hour but nothing sweeter to beat and the spuds and Dean at the end with a 5-2 final score. Ever since that match he is known by many of us with the nickname Dancing Dean. Not the Tony Attwood jive dancing of course….
One of the things I have seen when I looked at the career of Dean and Arsenal was a very strange (let us call it “strange”) pattern. When Dean was just Dean and an upcoming ref we did rather well under him. You could say we did extremely well under him. Dean as the ref was almost equal to an Arsenal win in those first years.
But then things changed. Dean got a Fifa badge. And from the moment he got his Fifa badge Dean in charge was equal to us losing. People tried to argue that this was only down to him being a Fifa ref and thus Arsenal getting them in the big games against MU, Chelsea or City. Well the numbers show that even when we played against the smaller teams we couldn’t win those matches. Always some strange or bizarre decision and always going against Arsenal.
Now since, I think, the start of last season Dean no longer has a Fifa badge. And since then… well our results are slowly improving. With Dean around we are still not likely to win but a draw is always better than losing a match. So that is slight improvement.
And the way we beat Dean and Stoke at the end of last season was impressive. And I haven’t done a ref review of that match but believe me we did have to beat Dean also in that match. Apart of course from missing Crouch scoring with his hand he managed to let Stoke get away with elbows from “not that type of player” Shawcross on Giroud.
But we managed to overcome him, although it still remains usually a struggle even when we win.
If the people who come up with “it all evens out in the end” were right we now surely should have a few matches where Dean would give us penalty after penalty in our favour. Give us illegal goals. And rules out goals from opposing teams for no reason. But somehow I don’t expect it to happen.
This season marks the 10th anniversary of the great thuggery AND robbery in Birmingham. The match in which Dean allowed our title run to get off the rails. If match 50 was a travesty in honest refereeing, the match at Birmingham was equal to it.
I think it is that day that Dean for some reason started to hate Arsenal and Wenger. And he never really got over it. Neither have we, Mike. Neither have we.
I think over the 10 years following that match we only have seen fewer than a handful acceptable referee performances when Arsenal has been around. And he have been in charge of 61 matches of Arsenal in total in his career. No other team in the PL has had him more than we did as far as I know. During the summer there was a rumour that he would stop refereeing but he didn’t give us that pleasure….
So I expect us to face a difficult opening match. We probably will have to beat Leicester and Dean. We will have to watch out for any wrong move in our penalty area and we will have to be on top of our game to win this. If it is in line with his other matches over the last few seasons a bleak 0-0 would be already a good result under Dean.
Let us hope our boys have other things in mind and will come out with the will and desire to beat Leicester and Dean.
- The nine things we have learned this pre-season
- Shock horror: Alexis sneezes proving he will leave. Oh and he’s injured too.
- Alexis deal with PSG, the latest. And the list of players leaving Arsenal grows
On UntoldArsenalToday on Facebook
“Watching Tottenham at Wembley in their pre-season friendly was rather like…”
From the Arsenal History Society
Isn’t it about time the Chinese league looked for a new top man and made Mike (Riley or Dean… or both please… Pretty Please!) an offer that was too good to turn down????
Will Mike Dean allow Maguire to use his knuckle-dusters or a spare sock with a couple of pool balls in it?
This is the Fixer’s first home game for the Arsenal since his stinking fix at Gazcorp’s stadium in Fulham.
I hope the home crowd support their team. Certainly he’ll be loudly heckled and booed as the crook shuffles out from the dark and onto the pitch *gollum gollum*, same as the last time they sent him to N5 to fix a football match, but I’m sure the broadcasters won’t be mentioning why they are doing that to their listeners as they cut the crowd noise down.
He’s a transparent charlatan who doesn’t have reputation left save for people laughing at him, and he is close to retirement. This high profile season opener might be a pathetic and obvious attempt to airbrush his tarnished rep before he his moved upstairs. Predictable? We shall see.
i hope you all enjoy the Football.
COYG!
UTA!
In as much as Mike Dean has shown he’s an anti-Arsenal referee overtime, beating Leicester on Friday night tomorrow at the Emirates Stadium in the first Premier League match of this new season that opens with that game, is a 3 points match victory the Gunners MUST get by all means over the Foxes in one hand and over Mike Dean in the other hand as the 12th player on the field playing for Leicester.
Notwithstanding, despite the unfortunate suspension and injury issue that will deny Arsenal from employing the services of Mertesacker, Coquelin, Sanchez, Koscielny, Mustasfi and likely those of Ozil and Ramsey if they haven’t recovered from the minor injuries they’ve picked. Even then, Arsenal still have the Gunners of timber and caliber in the rank and file of their first team squad left to collect the maximum 3 points that will be at stake in this match to begin their PL season campaign on a winning account. And that exactly what the Gunners will do to the Foxes comes Friday night tomorrow as they will massively beat them by 4 goals to nil with our new signing Alexandre Lacazette among the scorers.
My advance 3-4-3 playing formation starts and bench:
Cech
Holding Monreal Kolasinac
Bellerin Xhaka Elneny Welbeck/the Ox
Ozil/Walcott Lacazette Iwobi/Welbeck
Bench: Ospina Maitland-Niles Chambers Bramal Nelson/Iwobi Walcott Giroud.
Note: I’ve left out Oxlade because of the rumour surrounding his seemingly transfer to Chelsea. But if it’s a baseless rumour, then, I’ll start him as left wingback and start Welbeck instead of Iwobi who I’ll drop to my bench and unfortunately dropped Nelson out of my 18 man match day squad for this our MUST collect all points match.
Andy Mack
What is it you know of Maguire?
I thought it might be a possibility, but really I know nothing about the man.
I seem to remember a couple of years back that Tony called him Mike ‘Shit’ Dean. In our house we’ve used this description ever since. Works just fine for us.
With the recent unveiling of the curtain that covered the substandard wages being paid to Spurs players by Tottenham Hotspur by Danny Rose, in comparisons to the far better wages their colleagues are earning at the other top five Premier League clubs of: Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool, one begins to wonder what is the £100k/w and the £60k/w earners at Spurs, striker Harry Kane and midfielder Dele Alli are doing at Spurs? Whereas, if the duo top quality players leave Spurs this summer to Arsenal, they could have their Spurs wages doubled for them by Arsenal to be earning at the Emirates Stadium if Arsenal can persuade them to join us and also afford the cost of their transfer fees. But Arsenal can’t sign every top quality player, can they?
Mike Dean is a person that made me hate football after the Grand Theft Stamford Bridge 2015 when he made two wrong red card decisions in a single moment. I don’t give a crap about his refereeing in other 89 minutes of the game. For me, he shot my love for football in the back of the head like all professional killers do.
I can’t say I feel disdain for him. I feel a genuine hate for him as he represents everything that is wrong with English football. He is arrogant and ignorant which is the deadliest combination of all.
I would advise our players to leave two-footed tackles at home as Dean won’t miss a chance to send a player of ours for a violent conduct which would lead to a three-match ban and missing the big game at Anfield.
Gord, He was a thug at Hull. What else is there to know?
OT: Womens football – sister club program relaunched
https://www.arsenal.com/news/wsl-sister-club-programme-relaunched
> The deadline to submit an application for the coming season is Friday, August 18.
I suspect this program is intended for womens and/or girls teams in England. But, if your team is outside of England, maybe you should provide feedback?
Signs to me are, that Arsenal will have different views/comments by the media this season.
I cant put my finger on it, but something has changed, slightly.
Arsenal is now doing what they have wanted all along, buying, but on top of that i get the feeling that Arsenal is slowly becoming one of the “boys”.
Anyways, it will be a tough season whatever.
I think finsbury @ 6:19pm will prove prophetic.