What can I say here? What don't you already know?
I didn't see large chunks of this due to that whole "having to do work" at that "job" thing, but I saw enough to last me a lifetime.
I mean, it's all so goddamn predictable by this point, isn't it? We hit the woodwork three times. The ref was a bit of a prat. A couple of deflections could just as easily have gone in instead of gone out. If only that butterfly in the Amazon basin had flapped its wings a little faster.
Whatever. The loss of form (and spirit, and guts, and fight, and heart, and balls, and...) has been too consistent for too long. You can't blame posts or a referee or bad luck anymore.
I mean, what else do you want to know? Campbell scored a peach of a goal, was our best player all day, and was the first one subbed off. Gabriel did his best slack-jawed yokel again, Ramsey's ghost haunted the middle of the park and Alexis was again walking up the side of the road with a gas can looking for somewhere to refill his empty tank.
The manager is getting pelters from all over in the aftermath, and I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for him. This is the team he's created, every year, over and over and over since Vieira left. No strong personalities to challenge him on anything, just a collection of delicately-skilled identikit flat-track bullies. Only Ozil and Alexis are truly capable of the sublime, but the former can't also finish the chances he creates and the latter is so knackered that he looks like of those old racehorses that are about to be shipped out to the old Elmer's factory.
But, that dog only hunts so far. Yeah, he hasn't given us strength in depth, he doesn't lead from the front, sure...it's all true. However, it's also more than fair to wonder where the professional pride of the players themselves has gone off to. I mean, I get that losing streaks can happen to anyone, and lord knows we've seen enough Arsenal collapses to last us a lifetime, but this one is almost majestic in its scope. Seriously, I'm almost all the way back around to "I'm not even mad, I'm just impressed." I feel like someday someone's going to win a Nobel Prize for psychological studies when they interview these guys in 20 years. Schrodinger's Football Team. Unfuckingreal.
Meanwhile, you have our "title rivals" pratfalling all over themselves - the Scum losing to a sneaky-good West Ham side, City imploding against the Scousers...and the team whimpers to a loss like this. It's so Arsenal.
Sidebar: The fact that we can safely say "That's so Arsenal", everyone in the world gets the reference, and the people in charge are OK with that state of affairs? The mind, she boggles.
What else do you want to know? Petr Cech, apparently carrying an injury that he's been playing through for who knows how long (Quoi? Arsenal not handling injured players well? C'est incroyable!) is a bit whiffy on both goals, and then injures himself Schmeichel-in-1998 style. God, the Scum and the Chavs must have loved that one. What a fucking season.
All of this actually makes me chuckle with all this talk of a European Super League going around. I do think that's an inevitability in our lifetimes, for better or worse, but can you imagine this lot having to play Barca and Madrid and Bayern every week? My god. It'd be like the "4th place is a trophy" routine all over again, except in this version it'd be the "17th place is a trophy" variation. Can't wait. Embrace nihilism, eat Arby's.
Man of the Match: Ashley Williams, I guess. Sure wasn't any of ours.
