The game between Arsenal and Chelsea is the main talking point from the Premier League weekend, unsurprisingly, or more specifically the controversy surrounding Diego Costa, Koscielny, Gabriel and the myopic referee Mike Dean and his assistants that just happened to be making a cup of tea or something when it all kicked off.
However, looking at the comments on all the stories about it in the football media, it is clear that as well as almost universal condemnation of Costa and his antics (apart from the Chelsea fans of courser) there is a very real sense that Arsenal would not have won the game anyway and that this is just more evidence of the problems at the club.
Is this fair? Well you could certainly say that Chelsea had edged the first half up until then. You can also say that Cazorla´s role as captain was not great, as he basically did nothing to calm his team mate down, bring the antagonism to the attention of the ref or actually do anything. Okay he is not usually the captain but neither is Ivanovic and he ran the length of the pitch to get involved when Gabriel reacted.
So there is certainly an argument but I am not sure this is really fair. For one thing, you would expect a big Premier League rival to dominate at home and with Walcott always looking to run in behind and counter attack, this was Wenger´s tactics and they may well have worked.
For another thing, people are saying that Arsenal should have been better with 10 men and we had replaced Gabriel with Chambers and so could have avoided their goal with better defending. Maybe, but we had also lost our first choice defender Per Mertesacker to illness and that is just bad luck. This is also forgetting that it was not just us being a man down, but the fact that it should have been Chelsea with the disadvantage and if Mister Dean had done his job then Gabriel would have had nothing to react to and we would have still had 11 players on the pitch.
The fact is that there is no way to know what would have happened of Costa had been, rightly, sent off or even if the incident had never occurred, so it is incredibly harsh to say that Arsenal would have lost or that the Gabriel red just masked Arsenal´s failings.