The long running battle between the BBC and Arsenal is covered

The long running battle between the BBC and Arsenal is covered elsewhere, but in 2007 the Corporation allowed its regular contributors to descend to an even deeper level of stupidity.

It started on the Friday evening before Arsenal played at Anfield in the 3rd round of the FA Cup.  Arsenal, as always, had posted their squad on their web site at around 1pm on the Friday.  At 5.20pm on that day Mark Lawrenson was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live in the guise of a pundit, and was asked about this forthcoming match.

“It all depends on the team Wenger puts out,” said the Lawrenson.  His point was that if M. Wenger played the youth team, it might not be much of a contest.  However anyone seriously interested knew what team Wenger would put out because it was on the web site.   Only Lawrenson did not bother to look.  Arsenal went on to win 3-1.

Four days later Arsenal returned to Andfield, with an even younger less experienced team and beat a near full strength Liverpool including Gerrard, 6-3.  This extraordinary achievement was covered by Lawrenson and Alan Greene.  As a result, while most of the press were happy to celebrate the achievements of M Wenger and his team, the commentators spent the entire game talking down Arsenal, and instead commenting on the problems within Liverpool.  It was a singularly negative affair, followed of course, by huge numbers of Liverpool supporters on the phone-in either knocking their own team or making excuses.

A couple of weeks later, on the eve of the Tottenham v Arsenal league cup semi-final, a group of commentators including of course Alan Greene, started to talk about the away fans problem at the Emirates (as reported elsewhere Arsenal were prohibited from giving the full number of places to the away fans as the competition rules demanded, by the local council.)  All three commentators agreed that they did not know the reason for Arsenal not giving over to full complement of tickets to Tottenham, but then proceeded for five minutes to castigate Arsenal for their failure to comply with the rules.