The match between Birmingham and Arsenal should have been cancelled after three minutes following Eduardo's injury - it was immediately evident when the match restarted that Arsenal's players were struggling to cope with the horrific nature of the breakage and they should not have been expected to continue. Check out the faces of all associated with the club during the 8 minute delay while the striker was prepared to be carried from the field - Sagna, Adebayor, Gallas, Fabregas, Lewin, Wenger.
Obviously, Sky's tv coverage and a major global gambling ambush meant that the game HAD to continue - the supremacy of money would probably ensure that a match would be played out following a death if the right money had been accommodated in the right markets.
Arsenal are a closely knit team, their pre- and post-match huddles bear an authenticity rarely seen in the marketed pseudo-huddles that are now a compulsory feature of the theatre offered by the gambling companies. Arsenal's players were ashen faced and, unwittingly, they were on the wrong end of a major betting event. Notwithstanding Mike Dean's third minute sending off of Taylor for injuring Eduardo, the match official proceeded to get every other major decision incorrect, as is his wont - remember the Man Utd v Chelsea fiasco. The free kick for McFadden's first goal and the penalty for his second were simply laughable whereas Adebayor's penalty claims one minute prior to the penalty gift to Brum looked pretty much like a penalty to me. The second gift grabbed a particular firm of bookmakers the draw they so desperately required.
Our pre-match email to Dietrological clients included the line: "The betting industry are out to get Arsenal in this game but their fitness advantage makes any position perilous. It would need a Dean intervention...". Or three...
Five points clear pre-match and about to exit their only other distraction, the Champions League, Arsenal were looking a potential threat to the power's-that-be. While Chelsea are worrying about 4 competitions and Man Utd three, Wenger could focus on solely on a title run-in with a 5 point handicap start. By making Arsenal play two-and-a-half days after the Milan match, the fixture list manipulators at Sky and Football DataCo Limited ensured that much of the Londoner's fitness advantage could be negated. There were some very serious gambles from very interesting sources on this match and the Asian markets were welcomed back from their Chinese New Year family time with the gift of a cornered market from their European competitors. Revenge will be sweet...
The return of the anti-Arsenal betting scam, the broken leg, a forward line that refuses to speak to each other, Toure's injury, the machinations of the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB), the requirements of the people fronted by Richard Scudamore, a possible lack of resilience as the battle heats up, all these things surely point against an Arsenal Premiership triumph in May. Before yesterday's matches, you could find 3.00 (2/1) on a Man Utd victory and shrewdies were out there stocking up. The end of Arsenal's title hopes has seen United return to odds-on, a strata within which they will remain for the remainder of the season.
We were originally going to produce our latest Bum Ref Index today but a combination of Saturday's comedy refereeing and Eduardo's injury and the new realities in the Premiership title race persuaded us otherwise - mocking the PGMOB officials will now have to wait until Tuesday.
Okay so, one of your colleagues has a career-ending injury in front of your eyes, indeed he might not even be able to walk unaided again. You are forced to continue playing after the injury. The match official is on a mission to get a job done and you are mugged by a last minute refereeing travesty. In that moment, in the despair of missing out on the victory that they were so desperately trying to achieve on Eduardo's behalf, captain supreme, William Gallas, shouts and swears, goes walkabout, kicks an advertising hoarding, gets booked (the booking presumably being for the serious new addition to the rulebook - thou shall not disrespect the advertisers name). Okay so, perhaps he might have shown a "better" example. But to whom? To the watching masses? To his teammates who look up to him? To the sanitised world of football that the media and bookmakers are desperate to sell us? Gallas was quite correct to show outrage. Arsenal were robbed and they will continue to be robbed while they refuse to deal creatively with the spectacular reality with their name on it.
In response to Gallas and his display of anger at a corrupted system, Richard Keys, Andy Gray and Ian Darke used all the words they could to belittle the man's right to be livid. Gray's inane assertion that Clichy "hadn't got enough on the ball" - how much are you actually supposed to need on it? - must have been influenced by the improvement to Gray's bank balance caused by Dean's decision. On Match Of The Day, Hansen launched a bitter outburst against Gallas and Lawrensen piped in with "plain odd" directed at the Arsenal captain. Just as Roy Hodgson correctly asserted that Howard Webb's refereeing Fulham's game yesterday led to a "gross injustice", Wenger was correct to describe Dean's final little earner as "a very dodgy penalty".
The fact that professionals are angered when corruption impacts upon the potential for a competitive meritocracy is painted as an outrage, a bringing of the game into disrepute. But exactly who is doing the disreputable thing? Mike Dean and Howard Webb or William Gallas and Roy Hodgson? And, in that Dean and Webb are only the armed messengers of a hierarchical elite, the real stain on the English game emanates from the boardrooms of the bookmakers, the Premier League, the hyper-owners, the PGMOB, Sky and the sychophantic media with their quisling journalism. Remember that the next time the talking heads try and get you to shout "bad guy" when one of the actors refuses to act out, in a pre-destined manner, the corrupt script on offer.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
