Except what’s been really striking about this particular 48 hours is that it’s not just the usual Arsenal-based sources of that fevered online discourse.
This time, everyone in the football media appears to have suffered simultaneous widespread and catastrophic headloss.
The reaction to Myles Lewis-Skelly’s red card at Wolves has been truly astonishing. We have spent much of the last day and a half feeling like we’ve taken crazy pills.
First up, let’s just say this. We don’t think it was a red card. We think it’s quite harsh. But the vitriolic and fevered response has been wildly over the top.
It is at the very, very least a high-scoring yellow. It’s the type of take-one-for-the-team cynical, counter-attack-preventing move we’ve all seen plenty of times and for which the standard, basic punishment is always going to be a yellow card. Factor in that this deliberate act of foul play incorporates what we’re willing to accept an accidental raking of studs upon leg, and you can surely see why a referee might upgrade that yellow to red. You don’t have to agree with it – we don’t – but it isn’t inexplicable.
Similarly, once a red card has been given on field and the VAR sees studs on leg above the boot, you have to acknowledge that it no longer becomes as straightforward as people have insisted to just simply overturn that decision. It is not at that stage an objectively, indisputably, factually clear error that requires correction.
There are mitigating and exacerbating factors at play here. There’s no use pretending the fact it’s Arsenal isn’t part of the picture. They set the temperature on these matters, for better and worse. The fact Lewis-Skelly is a young player with a clean rap sheet is also a big part of it.
We’d go so far as to say there are certain players who could commit that exact tackle and receive the exact same punishment and we’d hear no more about it beyond Gary Neville watching the replay on commentary, making that ‘Oooooh’ noise he makes when he thinks someone is in trouble and then confirming this by saying out loud ‘I think he might be in trouble’.
But we’re getting off track a bit there. The point is this: it probably shouldn’t have been a red card, but it is not a decision that defies belief or one that simply cannot be explained without recourse to dark conspiracy theories and the rest of that kind of maddening guff.
We’d seen and heard some initial reaction on Saturday afternoon before seeing any footage of the actual incident. When we did see it, we were genuinely a bit annoyed. Certainly a bit underwhelmed. We’d been promised an all-time clusterf*ck disgrace of a decision and instead we got a ‘Yeah, pretty harsh that, will probably be overturned on appeal, won’t it, but can see where the ref’s coming from’. Which is absolutely no good at all.
Perhaps that’s why everyone decided to continue insisting a season-defining disgrace had occurred. Even after Arsenal managed to win the match.
The football punditocracy commenced a 24-hour period of intense scrutiny and wild criticism of this one refereeing decision, scrutiny and criticism that was not applied to anything any footballer or manager did or didn’t do this weekend.
The gobsh*tes of talk radio lined up to declare it a shocker, incompetent, horrendous and the rest, as you’d expect.
More worryingly, even the Match of the Day pundits lost their minds. Alan Shearer, a pundit of whom we’ve grown increasingly fond over the years, called it ‘one of the worst decisions I have seen in a long time’ which, given the amount of football Shearer watches for that job, simply cannot actually be the case.
