My Tenant's Shrieking Girlfriend

2016 has turned out to be one fucked up year.  Leicester win the league, ordinarily a terrific victory for the little guy, but we should've won the fucking league.  And you know what, 'the little guy' cheated their way out of the championship by skirting a points sanction for an outrageous response to the threat of an FFP violation.  Their income was not as much as their expenditure, the basic foundation of financial fair play.  So Leicester tasked a company to find a sponsor that would balance the books.  This company managed to find sponsors for a stadium naming rights deal of 11m pounds, a figure that dwarfed that of comparable clubs in the championship at the time.  This 11m pounds was just enough to balance the books and ensure Leicester were not in contravention of FFP.  When vetted, it was discovered that not only did the company tasked with finding the sponsor not exist, not even a fake website or phone number, but nor did the sponsor.  It must've been like the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums when Danny Glover gets the whole family together, "Not only is there no Dr. Mcleur at Coby General, there is no Coby General".  It turns out that the company that gave 11m pounds to Leicester's owners in exchange for naming rights to their stadium, was in fact owned by none other than Leicester's owners.  Why they were given a break and escaped a points deduction I have no idea.  Moving forward we have a whole bunch of gun violence, unarmed people shot in the street by police, protesters savaged by dogs and rubber bullets and mace, a rise in the white power movement, white supremacists founding towns all over the US, Brexit and of course this outrageous Presidential election with the worst political candidate in the western world since Hitler rallying the bottom 10% of the American gene pool into a frenzy.  Mix all of that with a series of Arsenal related frustrations and you've got an awfully annoying cocktail. However, not nearly as annoying as my tenant's girlfriend's shrieking voice.  Oh my christ, after 2 months away from home, facing perilous New Jersey suburban landscapes in the shape of my wife's family and a slew of other daunting stress inducers there's nothing quite like finally landing at home to be greeted by a brain piercing, high pitched cartoon baby voice, the owner of which is, as much as it doesn't stand to reason, in her early 30s.  

This helps put the Middlesborough game in perspective.  Annoying no doubt, 2 dropped points we'll hope won't come back to haunt us, but perhaps a point that will come in handy down the line.  Since then, we beat Reading in the hilariously named EFL Cup.  Maybe they should hire some Leicester City execs to find a new sponsor.  

Now, I used to absolutely love the league cup.  It meant watching football during the week and like all midweek games they're played under lights, something we all love. And we got to watch our kids hammer teams from lower leagues and down the table in the prem until we'd get knocked out by a team our youngsters just couldn't cope with.  It was brilliant, watching Fabregas, Wilshere, Rambo, Vela, oh my god Vela, Theo, Diaby, Senderos, the Hoyt bros, Gibbs and co on a Tuesday or Wednesday night.  It gave us all the warm and fuzzies, not just about our team and our boys, but about football as a whole.  The more money pours into the game, the less in touch with the game we all feel.  We watch ordinarily nice men do incomprehensibly cynical things with impunity, we watch managers field sides without a thought towards winning a game and we read about grown men throwing strops over birthday cakes because the million pounds a month they're paid is not quite enough.  Seeing those kids play reminded us what it's all really about.  Coming together for a cause, being a part of something bigger than yourself, dedication, fun, family, sportsmanship, quick one touch interchanges through a crowded midfield, 17 year old overlapping fullbacks and a good looking, young Mexican chipping one onrushing goalie after another.  The Reading game was the closest we've come to that for a long time and I enjoyed it.  2 goals for the Ox as he works hard to play his way back to the kind of form he was in before injury and some bad games put him in a bit of a hole.  Iwobi looked very good and Maitland-Niles, the occasional overplaying aside, looked pretty sure.  Elneny was terrific (finally a squad player with some serious quality) and the back 5 looked promising.  I had grander hopes for Rene-Adelaide but I'm sure he'll come good.  Makes me wish we hadn't lost Gnabry, he really would round off an excellent generation of under 23s.  Yes we should've scored more, yes Lucas took a kick which puts him out for 2 months, terribly unfortunate for him, but we finally look to have a team behind our first team that we can all be excited about.  

Then we played Sunderland, maybe the worst team in the prem since that Derby team that got something like 8 points in a season.  That didn't stop us from making it a touch scary, even if only for 2 minutes.  We had a lot of the ball and were never threatened, but we didn't have the zip and verve and energy of a team that looked like tonking the other team.  Having said that, Alexis's goal was terrific.  Great dribble and cross by Ox man and a terrific diving header by Sanchez.  We should've scored more in the first half but didn't.  In the second half, the ref continued to have a poor game and denied us a clear penalty in the first phase of play and awarded them a penalty in the second.  Cech fouled Watmore and it was definitely a penalty, except that we should've had a penalty a few seconds before.  They scored and then Giroud came on and he got two good goals with his first couple of touches before Alexis got a fun training ground style goal, playing as if he was shooting into a small, collapsable goal.  4-1 in the end, points and a result we no doubt deserve.  Sunderland will surely go down.  I feel bad for Moyse, who every day looks more and more like my granny.  But, fuck him, what do I care.  

We stay second after City's win and pull away from the Spuds after they dropped points at Leicester.  3 more games and I think we'll see a top 7 shape up for the end of the season.  Where we all finish within that top 7 will be up to how consistent we can be and how many points we can take from our rivals, nothing I really need to tell you.  That's that, talk to you soon.

Stupid Sexy Joseph Pease

My Granny is tough. Tough and gnarly. She's in Edinburgh, an avid bird watcher and cinephile and an absolute bastard to my mother.  While my parents have worked tirelessly to overcome obstacles and keep our family thriving and together, she's done her damnedest to break it apart.  It's all sort of funny now, how nuts she is - nice as pie, social and hilarious in the company of complete strangers - a ruckus, stroppy,  teenager around us.  What's especially funny about all of this, is that she's a Quaker.  One of those people who is supposed to reflect on a positive contribution to man through God in silence, measured do-gooders who forgo retribution and make delicious granola bars.  Incidentally, the 'father of Middlesborough' was also a Quaker.  Joseph Pease, son of Edward Pease, was the first Quaker member of parliament and helped build the earliest public railway system.  This was all a thousand years after a Masonic sect was put together in the area, essentially the embryo of what would later become Middlesborough, which would later on be engulfed by a county called Cleveland, which is also the name of a pretty mundane city in Ohio, no offense Drew Carey.  Drew Carey, of course, is not only a comedian whose 90s sitcom inspired millions to do, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing at all, but the owner of the Seattle Sounders, once home to one Fredrick Ljunberg.

Duh duh, duh duh, duh duh duh, duh, de, 

Duh duh, duh duh duuuh,

We Love You Freddy Because You've Got Red Hair, ...

Oh how we could've used our red haired, underwear modeling inside run machine to get between the lines of that Quakeresque defense on Saturday.  They sat deep and we just didn't have any ideas.  No Cazorla meant that our transition from defense to attack wasn't as quick or clever as usual and no Giroud meant no fighting fire with fire.  We looked good for the first quarter of an hour but ended up doing the old completely dominate a game but then get totally rocked the second they get into our half trick which we so love to do.  It's the first time this season it's happened and I had a suspicion that this game might turn out that way.  We've been on a great run without being entirely convincing, the Chelsea game aside.  We've played some nice stuff but not totally consistently and something has seemed slightly fragile, despite our results.

Now, I wouldn't've minded the result so much, had we not been taken apart by Gaston Ramirez, a player I've always liked, and Adama Traore, a player I've never seen do anything.  They combined, sort of, when Ramirez maybe should've scored at the far post, instead Cech saved.  I've read that it was a Ramirez mistake, but I think Ramirez headed the ball pretty fucking hard and was going for the near post thinking that Cech would dive back across goal to his right.  I think it was more a game of poker that Cech won than a missed chance by Ramirez.  That, of course, could be ridiculous.  We may never know.

More to the point with being unhappy about the point and the two that we dropped, with Cazorla out and Elneny coming in I would've thought we'd at least be secure defensively, but we just weren't.  And with Alexis, Ozil, Walcott and Bellerin all in the side, I think we could expect to have carved out another clear chance or two.  My fear, as it's been all season, is that we needed more goals from wide.  We were never going to find a center forward to bang in 30 goals a season because they cost about 900 squillion pounds these days, so I always felt we needed a Reus type to get 20 goals and 10 assists from wide midfield.  Someone whose runs Ozil could day dream about.  Someone who can make space and make chances for himself, without needing everything but the finish done for him.  Theo is not that player.  And as much as we all love Alexis and as valuable as he is, he's a little more Labrador than mongoose.  Iwobi has been brilliant and will get there, but is just 20 (I think) and we need someone now, not in 3 years.

Not unlike last season, I can't help but feel that there's a hole in the league winning market this year that with a little extra preparation and just one more player, could be filled by the Arsenal.  With Leicester always likely to fall down the table, Liverpool just not quite convincing and Chelsea and the Manchester clubs with new management, which we've seen recently can shake clubs up pretty badly, we should be ready in waiting to win the league.  Those things considered, the last match against Middlesborough doesn't bode well.  Lets hope it's just a bump in the road.

Lazio Gave Them An Eagle

There's a movie that won some Oscars, or at least was nominated for some, that I don't really think is very good.  Lots of people did though.  They probably still do.  It's hard to tell however, if they like it because someone told them it was good, or because they actually think it's good.  Steve Carell plays a super rich guy that has a sort of long touted melt down and ends up shooting Mark Ruffalo.  Channing Tatum plays Mark Ruffalo's brother.  It's based on a true story and in real life Mark Ruffalo's character didn't have a brother.  And the real life Steve Carell guy became fixated on an olympic wrestler in his stable of sponsored athletes who was from Bulgaria.  When the cops surrounded his compound (in real life), and negotiated his surrender for having murdered a really, really nice guy, he said he was coming out of his house and he'd be wearing his Bulgarian colors.  So fixated on this Bulgarian guy, who was in real life, the Mark Ruffalo guy's best friend, the wealthy guy managed to convince himself that he had some Bulgarian roots, which he didn't.  Turns out that Ludogorets are actually really from Bulgaria - Razgrad, in the north east, not too far from the Romanian border.  They're top of the Parva league, which sounds like something I get my dogs inoculated for.  They're nicknamed the Eagles and when Lazio played them recently, the Romans gave the club a live Eagle.  Knowing this now, I'm a little annoyed that Ludogorets didn't pay it forward and give us a live brontosaurus.  Instead, they gave us some easy chances and some slack goalkeeping which led to a few goals.  We should've scored more.  Theo and the Ox man could've had at least another each.  And likewise, we should've had enough in the team to restrict their chances.

A big tonking win has been well overdue, and I'm not going to deconstruct the one we just had because I watched a replay of the game after I already knew the score and had read the match report and because on about 15 minutes the super strong weed brownies I had eaten about an hour previous kicked in pretty hard.  So, I'll spare you the insight of someone who had recently committed brain cell genocide and instead, I'll be happy about the fact that for the first time in a long time, we've really hammered a team for goals.  Ozil's hatrick is a bonus too.  6 goals for that funky-eyed genius, so misunderstood, so complicated.

Playing a team from a tiny place, with a tiny stadium and players on tiny wages (compared to the 2008, big bank exec bonus style wages on offer in the prem) will always make for tricky PR.  Especially for the Arse.  Drop points and it's a crisis, win standard and it's par for the course, win big and it's just a piddly team from Bulgoromainastan.  It's tempting to roll out the 'you can only beat what's in front of you', but I'm tired of that and about an hour ago I ate some more of those sweet sweet brownies so I really can't be bothered.  All I can say is that we won big, the most beautiful brush stroke of a footballer on the planet got a rare and well deserved hatrick and David Ospina came up massive when he had to.  Coquelin was excellent and that pass from Cazorla to Ozil for Ozil's first goal made me want to fast forward 17 years to when the two of them rent a run down mansion in the south of France for a summer where they spend their days playing backgamen and smoking joints together, entertaining a dozen esoteric, thinking poets and calculated young beauties with bangs and rosy cheeks and disdainful expressions, all listening to old Malcolm X speeches and getting blind drunk on mescaline sherry.

Up next we've got Middlesborough, a team that for no reason at all, or maybe it was the league cup Semi's in '05, I absolutely loath.  We're on a strong, strong run, our squad looking deep, our boys looking good and the results excellent.  It's the perfect time for some Ray Parlour, Paul Merson stealing bunch of league cup semi final winning, Juninho signing bunch of Brexit voters to come and spoil it.  Let's hope it doesn't happen, we should have enough to keep our run going and lets hope we do, I'd love a good game for the Ox and maybe an out of the blue goal for Nacho.

Talk soon, bye for now.

Arse In LA No.1

I’m starting this blog so that I can write about Arsenal and so that I can write about football.  Blog is sort of a dirty word to me, has a shitty connotation, pretentious maybe, even though I read a bunch of them and I have written blogs before.  So not only will this hopefully be a dazzling study in complex, nonlinear football meta theory and the wonderful spectacle of all action sports drama encased within, but a show of personal growth to quell the doubts I see mounting in my new wife’s head, as well.  With this new outlet for all things football and Arsenal, no longer will she have to suffer the ages long back stories about the fan’s sentiment towards a former player who now plays at a different club but he’s not very good anymore and he should’ve never left the Arsenal for bigger wages and it serves him right the son of a bitch and that’s why when that song played in the shop and the girl who worked there dropped the box it was so funny, because that’s the song we used to sing for Freddy Ljunberg and when Petit fell over when we played Chelsea it was hilarious. 

We all have it, that absurd, Walter Sobchak mechanism that triggers an army of thoughts that lurk around every corner of your brain, just waiting to jump out and latch onto something, their only purpose to spread the Arsenal supporting virus as far and wide as possible.  “That’s like when Wenger said ‘we played a little bit with the handbrake on’” or “Typical, I knew he wouldn’t show up, he’s just like Nelson Vivas against Leeds, thought that from the second I met him”.  I now have a lounge bar style, free passed appetizers, drinks on the house mixer convention where all of the Arsenal and football thoughts and ideas can mingle.  I doubt anybody will read this, not many people will be privy to the synergy and behind the scenes deals being done among all these observations, but I don’t think they care too much.  They’re pretty happy in their insular world, perpetually in motion in one place, always now and never later and there’s no over there.  And as long as they have a place to go, whether or not anyone sees, they won’t take up so much space in my brain and will hopefully be kept away from my great sport of a wife.

So, there it is, a reason to start writing.  Why you would start reading, god only knows.  And now, here we are, no segue to the football so we’re just going to do the football.  It’s the day before we play Ludogorets and a few days after we played Swansea.  I don’t know anything about Ludogorets, other than they’re a small club from eastern Europe somewhere and I’m not gonna bother with the research.  I think we might rotate the team but then again, we’re on a good run, 6 bouncing wins, a very good run, and Wenger likes to keeps his bands together when we’re winning like this, so who knows.  I’m not gonna speculate. 

The Swansea game was sort of crazy, great fun to watch at times and so unnecessarily stressful at others.  During the game I thought that we were obviously the far better side, but Swansea have a few capable players and are probably a pretty decent team.  I hadn’t seen the table or their form, which makes this game a lot messier in retrospect.  Theo’s goals were basically gifted to us, which was kind and preemptive of Swansea in anticipation of our gifting them a couple of goals back.  It was like a Korean business meeting with a group of executives politely exchanging gifts over a conference table.  We tried to give them more goals but they weren’t all that polite back and did not accept.  Maybe because Granit Xhaka had been very impolite not long before, tripping up poor old, speedy Barrow on half way. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy with the win.  We looked really good at times and we were pretty strong with 10 men, we really should’ve got a couple more goals.  But blam, there it is, why didn’t we get those goals.  And why did they get so many clear chances after we had been so dominant.  Hopefully the momentum we perpetuate from this outweighs the negatives we can gather and we do start finishing more chances, putting games to bed, not letting teams back in when we’ve been so dominant and not getting men sent off when we should be cruising, harsh as that Xhaka red was. Anyway, I’m liking this top of the table proximity and the league will really begin to take shape over the course of the next 5 or 6 games, so let’s hope for a win tomorrow in Europe and that our momentum continues into the weekend. 

Bye for now.