Arsenal rage again after Liverpool hypocrisy exposed by Neville ‘cronies’

There are more points to be made about England, English managers and Man Utd losing Kieran McKenna to Getafe, but Arsenal fans won’t let this one slide.

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Tangled in a Webb of lies

As if talking about current referees and their mistakes wasn’t boring enough, here’s an email about one ‘performing’ on a podcast today. Welcome to 2024; it’s grim.

So Howard Webb was ‘given a platform’ via Gary Neville and The Overlap cronies – for what reason, I’m not quite sure.

Around 20 minutes in, the conversation turns to ‘delaying the restart’ and Webb says that Leo Trossard got a yellow card against Man City “because of the game state”. Remember, it was a game between the country’s top two sides from the last two seasons, being played at 100mph, with Arsenal leading 2-1 at a ground where the champions hadn’t lost for the best part of two years. As the first half ticked into the seventh minute of injury time, the ‘game state’ was pretty nicely poised, with a big second half afoot. Except Trossard kicked the ball away, very quickly, and the game was turned into a training session with the whole world watching. That’s the rule though right? Fair enough.

Except then what Webb goes on to explain is that Dominik Szobozslai of Liverpool did not get carded for the same offence when Liverpool played Forest, because the game state he was involved in was that his team was losing and it was his own time that he was wasting. Sorry?! If the rule is the rule is the rule, then it’s a booking? Whether a player is 1-0 up, 2-0 down or it’s a 12-all draw at the time, delaying the restart is a yellow card offence, dumb as that is.

Much like, oh I dunno, taking your shirt off after scoring? Another dumb rule of course, but just one short hour after this complete drivel (I know, fool on me for still listening right?), Webb tells us that in the 2010 World Cup Final, he booked Andres Iniesta following his eventual winner, and was pleased because he’d not already been cautioned and therefore “didn’t have to send him off.” Interesting, when you consider the game state; the game state of course being the biggest match a player could possibly play in, and scoring the opening goal of that game in extra-time.

“But why did you have to book him for that?” Wrighty asks fairly. “It’s the World Cup Final!!”

“It’s not binary,” replies Webb. “There’s no grey there – that is the rule.”

Right, so just like handing out yellow cards when players kick the ball away? Unless you choose to apply those types of rules subjectively of course.

‘Letter of the law’, until it isn’t.

Webb is a complete chancer.

Joe, AFC, East Sussex

Spurs

So football starts again tomorrow. Oh gawd. It means one thing. That as a Spurs fans we’re very likely to hear the phrase “profoundly unserious’ on the 365 pages at any point between now and well, May.

I’ve found the ‘is it enough for the fans’ narrative fair but futile. None of this matters. And I don’t mean that in an existential postmodern meaning of life way. Just in a way that where we are right now is totally in keeping with how the club has been run. The failure to back Poch, 4 seasons with the same manager not starting and ending the season, and then trying to hire someone when it was obvious Kane was off, led us to this. Who were we going to get in such circumstances? Ange is probably the best we could have hoped for. To start again would be madness and profoundly unserious.

The money and the stadium are side notes in a story which is about relationships. Edwards and Ferguson, Wenger and Dean, Begiristain and Guardiola. At some point a relationship needs to be fostered behind the scenes that will carry the club forward. Daniel Levy and his crew are incapable of such a thing and managers know it. So you’ll always get someone who wants the money, or is grateful to be there. Poch was grateful and it worked, Ange the same…and it might not work.

He can’t set a midfield up. If you look at the volume of subs he made in the midfield as last season wore on, you’ll see a guy who was continually questioning himself. Now we’ve got Kulu, Bentacur and the guy who beckons the camera over for the darts celebration. Profoundly unserious. All this “it’s who we are” is a smokescreen for insecurity about how to set us up. Try telling Dave MacKay, Steve Archibald or even Moussa Dembele that’s who we are. And try telling Emery and Duran that subs aren’t important. Sigh.

So that’s us. Destined for rinse and repeat for the rest of our days. But don’t blame Ange. He’s a byproduct of a profoundly unserious football club run by well meaning donkeys. They do care and want the best for Spurs, for sure. But possibly care a bit too much and really should hurry up and sell to a Sheikh.

All the best,

Andrew

English reality check

I find the clamour around Tuchel’s appointment weird and hilarious, especially since it’s not just the English press who are expected to do some clownery, but even a majority of people in the mailbox and I assume England feel the same way. As an outsider looking in since 20+ years, here is the reality:

– Tuchel has a better resume than ANY English manager for at least the last 30-40 years if not more. I do not think there has EVER been a manager who is as qualified as Tuchel who has been an England manager. You ought to thank your lucky stars as he is much much more than what you deserve.

– He is German, so what? How does that factor in when none of the English candidates come even close in talent or ability as a manager. You can either try and win something, or hire Gerrard and enjoy the English vibes. It’s an absolute no brainer.

– You have gone from the likes of Roy Hodgson (Relegation manager), Sam Allardyce (Relegation manager), Southgate (Championship manager) to Tuchel – Multiple league and CL winner.

– This is the international equivalent of Everton appointing Ancelotti, and rather than rejoice, are there people actually doubting this?

– I will repeat this for the ones in the back: LOOK AT WHO YOUR MANAGER WAS IN THE PAST TWO DECADES! They were all crap managers who wouldn’t get a job anywhere before or after their International jobs other than mid table or relegation fodder clubs.

So yeah, for the first time the FA took a footballing decision rather than hiring based on quota. Well f**kin done. I started following England around 2002/04 (Beckham hype), and this is the only managerial appointment that has felt like an actual manager rather than a retirement home for has-been managers.

Regards

A 

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It’s an English issue

The thing about ‘but hes German’ and clutching at pearls or dragging knuckles or whatever…

We have an issues with Germany but the Germans do not give 2 tosses what we do, They do not have this level of ‘hatred’ for England that we have for them.

To Germany, England are simply viewed in the same way England view Scotland, just not really arsed, they are no threat to us, they shout and scream alot but they are never really an issue

Germans biggest rivals are The Netherlands… from my understanding – We truly are bordering on irrelevant to them in the greater scheme of things,

So this is not a 2 way street, the papers in Germany are not up in arms like The Sun and the Mail would be if Germany national teams next manager was Eddie Howe…

Traitor and Agent Howe headline would be rife Im sure.. But they tend not to be overly bothered

So if we can lose our small minded attitudes, because sadly thats what they are, then all this would simply be ‘decent manager gets decent job’ shocka

Al – LFC – Roll on this tough set of games, lets see how we get on!

Intelligence issue

Just like any other foreigner, I take a lot of delight in the non-stop circus of the England national team. From the performances of the team to the relentless chatter about the manager to the crackpot press coverage to the behaviour of fans online and offline, it’s absolute box office. Long may it continue, please keep doing what you do. There’s one thing I’d like to point out though.

The premier league is supposedly the “biggest, baddest and best” league in the world because of foreigners. Not a single English manager has won the league since its formation in 1992. Alex “Rudolf” Ferguson is Scottish and it was Arsene Wenger who revolutionised the domestic game in England with fresh, innovative and FOREIGN ideas about diets, training and tactics. And he was constantly sneered at from the moment he was appointed manager of Arsenal.

Why aren’t English managers very good? Because English managers don’t tend to be intellectuals and intellectuals have been treated with disdain in English football.

Compare Big Sam, ‘arry Redknapp, Gareth Southgate, Roy Hodgson and Sean Dyche to Jurgen Klopp, Pep, Mikel Arteta, Thomas Tuchel and Unai Emery. There’s a clear difference in the number of languages one group speaks compared to the other (can Redknapp speak even one?), the way each group is behaved and the personality that each group has etc. Not to mention how much more one group has achieved.

Eddie Howe and Graham Potter are exceptions to the rule.

Vish (AFC), Nantes

P.S. And before you start, Arteta is battling the Terminator of football who has infinite resources. He’s had a sisyphean task and he’s still managed to be competitive in challenging for the Premier League. We’ve won enough FA Cups and the Carabao Mickey Mouse Doritos Cup isn’t of any value so we don’t prioritise it.

Swimming in money

Brian, BRFC makes a good point about English football swimming in money, but I think he doesn’t go far enough. There’s another way in which the amount of money in the English game doesn’t lend itself to English coaches coming through.

Consider Jurgen Klopp. He retired from playing football in 2001, after a modest but good career, largely with Mainz O5, hovering between the highest echelons of 2.Bundesliga and the relegation spots of the Bundesliga. A West Brom, or a Blackburn, lets say. Or Max Allegri, who had a journeyman midfield career in the higher echelons of Serie B or the lower echelons of Serie A, pursuing the sort of promotion/relegation/transfer/relegation/promotion/relegation/transfer/relegation career that Dara O’Shea seems to be forging for himself. Or Ten Hag, who had a perfectly acceptable career as a central defender for mediocre Eredivisie teams before retiring in 2002.

A player who has spent 15 years playing for good Championship/bad Premier League teams in England has a level of financial security that Klopp, Allegri or Ten Hag didn’t have when they retired, and might not be bothered with all the grief and hard yards needed to make in high-level football management.

This is also why Wayne Rooney’s quixotic managerial career, although not GREAT, is sort of admirable.

Dara O’Reilly, London

Just my two penn’orth on the ENGLAND FOR THE ENGLISH managerial hoodi-hah currently taking up so much brainspace amongst, otherwise, sane and rational people (the last part may not be 100% true).

I wonder if part of the problem these days is that up and coming English coaches just simply don’t get the chance to prove themselves in their native league which then stops any ‘big club’ (and by that I mean most of the current 20 PL members) from recruiting an English manager who then turns out to be a ‘success’ and has the ability to become ‘world class’.

And the issue here is simply that the money and pressure of the PL means very few clubs in England will take the punt on a young up and coming manager who has been successful in the lower leagues, simply because there is no proof they can handle the big stage and so do not want to take the risk.

Look at the Netherlands, Portugal, France, etc. Their leagues simply don’t have the money sloshing about so they, naturally, turn to homegrown coaches. Many of them fail, or at least don’t stand out, but a handful show that they are gems, taking a top team into the Champions League and then having the opportunity to prove their coaching cojones on the biggest of stages.

Then a PL club who has fallen upon hard times comes along, waves the cash at Johnny Foreigner and feels reasonably confident they will be able to step up because they have done it at Sporting Lisbon/Feyenoord/Lyon/Atalanta/Leipzig and so on.

Take Keiran McKenna. Doing a great job at Ipswich but is still something of a gamble for yer Man Utds and yer Tottenhams. If, in a parallel universe, the Premier League was on a par as, say, France or Portugal in terms of UEFA co-efficients, it would make it much, much less attractive for a foreign coach to join, meaning many more English coaches get the opportunity. In that world McKenna is now in charge of Man Utd, gets them back into Europe and gets the plucky Red Devils into the quarter finals of the CL. Then, next summer, one of those dastardly rich Spanish clubs, Getafe, say, or Espanyol, comes along and steal him from those underdogs in Manchester and he is now considered ‘world class’ as he takes them into the CL themselves and finishes 4th in the league.

This theory doesn’t, at all, lessen the fact that the FA should be doing so much more to raise the standards of coaching in England, and I am absolutely not saying it is the only problem, but I do think the above point is another major barrier stopping English coaches from reaching the top of their game and, therefore, having more options to consider for the managerial vacancy.

Rob, Leicester (it’ll either end in absolute glory for Tuchel and England or magnificent, bollock-dropping ignominy – I know which one is more likely….)

Full English

When it comes to England (football and otherwise), I think a big part of the problem we have is to do with the gap between Englishness and Britishness that we don’t  see. People from the other UK nations, whether they want to be British or not, are all aware of the point where the union ends and the independent nations begin. Even a fervent NI unionist would describe George Best as a Northern Irish sportsman rather than a British one, for example.

But I don’t think in England we’ve ever got to grips with this. Honestly, if you meet an English person who describes themselves as English rather than British, most of us would quickly be searching for the un-meet button. Despite the colonial overtones, ‘British’ is the more inclusive term; ‘English’ means Morrissey. And we never manage the gear change when we switch from club to international football – witness the amount of union jacks at England matches until about 20 years ago, the unending jingo of that horrible band, the *British* national anthem played before the games.

But why does this matter? Well, because the English league has never been English – it’s been the British (and Irish) league since it began. But ‘British’ obviously doesn’t exist in football at all: Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane and Ronaldinho are all equally as Not English as each other. The league was created by Mighty Mac, William McGregor, Chair/Pres of Aston Villa, and a proud Scot; so therefore, Not English, and one of these despicable foreign chairmen that Redknapp was banging on about yesterday. Of the 12 seasons held in the 19th century, 5 were won by Villa and their exotic Not English manager, George Ramsay, hailing from the faraway land of Glasgow.

In fact, since the league started nearly 150 years ago, only 38 actual managers hailing from English England who are English enough to prevent England’s Jeff Powell being [sic] on his full English, have ever actually Englishly won the English league with English clubs in England. The last of these, and the only one still alive, is Howard ‘The D*ck’ Wilkinson.

32 seasons have passed since then; in that time, Serie A has been won by an Italian manager 29 times. (The 3 non-Italian seasons were won by ex-England manager Sven, and Mourinho, who – let’s be honest – would be swept up in open arms by the tabloids were he made England manager.) Whereas if you consider ‘British’ managers, 107 of the 125 English seasons have been won by a Brit of some stripe; while 67% of the non-British seasons were won by Pep Guardiola (who is, apparently, English enough for the media), or the Special One.

The point of all this: ‘our’ league might be hosted in England; it might be called ‘English’; but it’s not English. Its creation, its biggest clubs, its best players, and its least horrible administrators, have been some flavour of ‘foreign’, right from the beginning in 1888. This is what makes it great. If we want more capital ‘E’ English managers, we need to make room for them by getting rid of, or not bringing in, things that we love. When Ten Hag finally gets the boot, is Red Nev going to be touting Potter, Howe, Southgate, Mark Robins, etc for the job? No.

Oh and lastly: seeing as the number of Black English players is approaching 50% now, while the number of Black English managers remains below 1%, maybe we should look at that too? If Emma Hayes is good enough to manage the Women’s Team of the most powerful sporting nation in the world, could she ever be competent enough to pick a f***ing left footed defender for the England men’s team? Maybe there is a colossal pool of talent already here that is being completely ignored, because of what we think a manager should look like? Don’t know if Jeff Powell is the man for that discussion.

Neil Raines

In reply to Otito, im not sure whether your misreading is wilful, unwilful or that I wasn’t clear enough.

Thomas Tuchel is a better manager than any Englishman that could be appointed. My point is, that given everything at the disposal of the English game, there’s pretty much no excuse for us not to have a coach that’s good enough for the national team. We absolutely shouldn’t need to be shopping abroad for a coach. To me, it’s an abject failure of our national game that we aren’t producing elite coaches in the same way our German, Spanish, French and Italian counterparts are.

That is absolutely not the case for developing or smaller footballing nations. I think that’s pretty self-evident and I don’t believe I’m being a “supremacist” or using “centrist rationale” in anyway shape or form by saying that.

All the best,

Lewis, Busby Way

Johnny Nic vs Badwolf: the never-ending story

Almost exactly two years ago, I had an email published that I’d written in response to the schism between Badwolf’s assertion that the England team is packed with world-class talent, and Johnny Nic’s point of view that they are over-vaunted products of the Premier League hype machine and English myopia regarding the merits of English players.

Having caught up on this week’s F365 articles and the mailbox, it appears Groundhog Day may be upon us, as, once again, we have Badwolf claiming that ‘Other than DM and LB, we are exceedingly blessed in options’ with reference to the England team, and Johnny Nic decrying English exceptionalism leading to the one-eyed belief that the England players are world beaters. As I did a couple of year ago, I threw these assertions out to the non-English contingent of my extended family (Austrians, Jordanians, Slovenians, and Germans).

The only player they would put irrefutably in the ‘world class’ bracket is Jude Bellingham. In the rest of the England team they rate Kane, and some of them think that Rice and Saka are good players. Existing outside of the Premier League’s hype bubble – which BadWolf is clearing necking the Kool Aid from – shifts perspectives.

Bellingham, Kane and (at a stretch) Saka, are the only players who we can make a legitimate case for being top-tier talent. Bellingham has been a crucial player in an excellent team and performed well on every stage he has been presented – however, it is also true that he has blown hot and cold in the England team, and been a ‘man of moments’ rather than dominating and maintaining consistent excellence. Kane has played consistently well close to the apex of the game, yet it is also true that he is injury prone and also capable of prolonged troughs of poor form. Like Rooney before him, and as showcased at the Euros, when Kane is off form, he is awful. Saka has probably been the most consistent threat on the England team over the last couple of years, but he can fade badly and be pushed to the margins of games.

The next tranche of players fall into either the ‘potential-exceeding-ability bracket’ or ‘can’t replicate club form for country bracket’: Palmer, Foden, Mainoo, Lewis, Alexander-Arnold, Rice, Watkins et al are all good players who could go on to be better. Some – most notably Palmer – look like they might have higher ceilings than others, but they have not yet reached those ceilings, and may never progress beyond where they are at. The final bracket is a combination of big-club peripheral/squad players and solid lower-mid level PL players. Grealish, Stones, Shaw, Colwill et al. are not guaranteed starters in full-strength versions of their club teams or have woeful injury records.

As good as some of the England players can look, very few of them have that crucial enmeshing of top level ability and consistency. Looking at France, Germany, Argentina and Spain as the last four WC winners, all of the following players were either genuine contenders for best in the world at the time in their position, or were proven over years in international football: Messi, Di Maria, Martinez, Varane, Kante, Matuidi, Mbappe, Pavard, Griezmann, Neuer, Lahm, Hummels, Schweinsteiger, Kroos, Klose, Villa, Xavi, Iniesta, Puyol, Ramos, Pique, Casillas, Busquets, Fabregas. With the exception of Bellingham, we do not have one single player in the bracket of any of these in terms of combining ‘right-here-right-now’ ability, top-level experience of winning or longevity of performance in international football.

When Badwolf says we are ‘blessed with options’, perhaps he means that we have an over-abundance of wide forwards that extends well beyond the number we could actually play. None of my family look at Pickford, Henderson and Johnstone and think we are blessed. They do not look at a pool of CBs where the very best of them is not a first pick for Man City and think we are blessed. They do not look at a central midfield where our options alongside Rice consist of an understandably inconsistent teenager, an out of position right back, a player with less than a full season of PL experience under his belt, and a rabid puppy with no positional discipline and poor technical ability in high pressure games, and think we are blessed. After the Euros, they no longer look at Kane and think we are blessed. Having Saka, and 10 other almost-but-not-quite/not-quite-yet wide forwards doesn’t make England world beaters.

Anyway, I will see you all again in 2 years when we’re bemoaning Tuchel’s inability to get the best out of the world class CB partnership of Colwill and Branthwaite, John Stones playing out of position in centre mid, Walker at left back and failing to build a team around Trent to cover for his defensive frailties.

D*cky Malb@lls

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