A bad result, a good performance: the Man City retrospective. « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Walter Broeckx

Sorry for not being able to give my thoughts on the game earlier but sometimes you just don’t have enough time and have other obligations in life. But because of the low score from the ref I had to review the game again to check things a bit and thus got the chance of taking another look.

After seeing the game again one could say that this game could have gone both ways. City won it but they can thank whoever they must thank that they were very lucky. The decision to rule out the Robin Van Persie goal for offside was wrong. The not given penalty decision was wrong. So howdy Dowdy did it again with the help of his assistants. Maybe not as blatant as he did it at Newcastle but the way the game went he didn’t had to do it as blatant as that day.

But I will try not to talk too much about the ref and concentrate more on the team and the players. And I think most of the team did a great job. Remember we went to City the richest club in the league who can buy any player, even Messi if he would feel the need to earn even more money. A team that has beaten Man United 1-6 at Old Trafford. That has beaten Tottenham at their home with 1-5 at White Hart Lane.

A team that had scored 24 goals in their first 7 home games and this is an average of almost 3,5 goals per game. In fact this was the first time in the season they won at home with only one goal difference between the two teams. And by the look on some of their faces they were glad howdy Dowdy put an end to the game.

After the game I felt sad. Very sad. And disappointed. Because we shouldn’t have lost the game. A draw would have been a more justified final result but justice and football …. They had their chances, we had our chances. They took one, we took one but it got ruled out and that was the wrong decision. But at the end of the day we cannot but look at the league table, think what might have been and double our effort.

I think we would have won any game against any team with the way we played on Sunday. We would never lose a game with the way we played like we did on Sunday. Except for the game on Sunday against the team we faced… and the refs we had to face. City is not just the richest but probably also the strongest team in the EPL this season and I really feared they could go unbeaten the whole season until last Monday. But luckily Chelsea made this impossible.

But this is the kind of team we were facing and once again we could/should have taken a point at least. So terribly disappointed by the final result but was happy with the way we showed that they are not really a better team by that much. Our handicapped back four was even more handicapped and I cannot but feel that the goal only came because the organisation was lost a bit at that time. The inexperience of Miquel maybe showed with the goal but overall he did a fairly good job I think.

But as we cannot change the history that happened on Sunday we should be looking forward. Because what is important now is to pick up where we left before the City game. And we should try to win our game against Aston Villa. Two away games in a row for Arsenal this time but if we can win our next game we should be back on track and build on a new series of going unbeaten for a while. I’m sure the team can do it. They are as good as City if you don’t take in account the wrong ref decisions. We pressed the league leaders at their home for the last half hour for a great deal of the time. We shouldn’t be afraid of anyone.

On another note, just imagine RVP and how he must feel. A valid goal ruled out to make him joint Arsenal top scorer and get in touching distance from Shearer. Or do some people want to stop Robin from taking this spot? Well let us hope he does manage to set a new record even just to annoy the people who would hate it to happen.

We just should keep our confidence level high and try to get back on the winning track from Wednesday evening on. Let us just hope that we had enough of decisions going against us for this season. The list is too long : Newcastle, Liverpool, Blackburn, Tottenham, Man City. That is 5 games we have lost points because of wrong decisions from the refs. 5 games out of 16. Way too much if you ask me.

And maybe in a way this defeat could be helpful in the long run. I think the “forces” will now consider us as over and done. And maybe Wenger talking like he did after the game was trying to put a smoke screen. Because if Arsenal are out the title race we could avoid that the forces are interested in us and so maybe the instructions to the refs will not be as clear any more. We can hope.

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