All we hear about at the moment is Wenger’s blaming the referees for every point that Arsenal have lost recently, and there have been quite a few of them I’m afraid to say. I cannot disagree that Mike Dean was at fault for stealing two points off us against bottom-of-the-League West Brom on New Years Eve, but the fact is that we had only taken the lead ourselves 5 minutes before the end of the 90 minutes and that was due to a lucky deflection from Alexis’s free-kick!
Wenger moans about another penalty awarded to Chelsea yesterday, but I can’t help but notice that our defenders were rubbish as usual, and if Alvaro Morata had had his scoring boots on Chelsea would have been out of sight long before that decision.
We have dropped out to sixth in the title race not because of the referees but because we can’t hardly win a game. Let’s look at our last 8 League games. We have only lost one, but we have only WON two!
This run started against Man United when we made disastrous defensive errors and out of 33 shots on goal we scored only once. That has continued in all the following games and in fact we have scored 12 and conceded 12 in those 8 games, due to misfiring strikers and awful defending.
When Wenger was asked last night (after the usual rant about the referee) if he was frustrated by being in 6th place in the table, he replied: “That is very frustrating, I agree with you. We have to look at ourselves as well, but still, I think it was a great football game and when you look recently our performances have been top quality. The regret we have is that we have not the results that we could have had. Certainly that is part of our problem, but as well on the other side, you have to say that we have not been gifted this luck.”
The performances have been ‘top quality’? With 2 wins out of 8? Are the points we dropped in the other 6 games just down to referees decisions? I think not.
Wenger’s rants after every game is deflecting criticism where it is due. The reason we are down in 6th place is because our strikers are not scoring and the defenders are not defending. Maybe we should talk about that instead of referees after every game?
Darren N