Leaderboard

You know that story about the tortoise and the hare? Well this was it played out in the form of a football match. Literally the only way Arsenal could win this game is if we took them too lightly and allowed it to happen, and sure enough we did. They couldn’t beat us any other way. That’s just a stone cold fact. The gulf between us and Arsenal is the biggest it’s been in my lifetime. This is arguably the best side we’ve ever had and it’s without the question the worst Arsenal side I've seen. I’m actually offended that we lost to them. I’m steaming about it in fact. It’s partly about the points record, but it’s mostly that we lost to an Arsenal side that I couldn’t possibly have a lower opinion of. They’re a fucking disgrace. A cowardly, spineless, and yet somehow irrationally deluded and smug, disgrace. If there’s one team I can’t stand losing to it’s this Arsenal side because I’ve got less respect for them than I have any other side in the league. Arsenal have had some great sides in the past and as a club I've always respected them. Now though I actually get wound up by how shit and gutless they are. I don't even take pleasure from them losing these days, I just get irrationally pissed off by what they've become. They’re pathetic, weak and spineless and we should never be losing to them in a million years. Some of our players clearly felt the same way. How else can you explain Virgil and Alisson taking the liberties they did? Others did too only they weren’t punished as severely. Like I said, classic tale of “the Tortoise and the Hare”. Arsenal only got near our goal three times all night, and two of those only happened because we passed the ball straight to them in our own box. They created next to nothing of their own and were so inferior it was embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as actually losing to these wastrels though. Look, I know it doesn’t matter and that next week when Hendo is lifting the trophy this result will be an irrelevant footnote on a glorious season. I get it, and if this game doesn’t bother you that’s sound. I respect your right to not give a shit and I hope you respect mine to be annoyed as fuck about it. Fucking Arsenal? Jesus Christ lads. There was always a danger that results would suffer once the title was won and maybe I was naive to think any different. It’s happened before - Graeme Souness doesn’t seem to be able to go five minutes without mentioning it - and it isn’t about a lack of effort. You can see in all the games we’ve had since the restart that the effort and commitment is there. There’s no slacking off and you can tell that the lads desperately want to win every game and are pissed off when they don’t. Effort isn’t the problem, but focus definitely is. Stupid little errors have crept in that simply weren’t there when we were still trying to secure the title. Souness describes it as losing “one or two percent” and that no matter how much the team he played in wanted to win they were powerless to do anything about it. That’s what we’re seeing now and while it’s completely understandable it’s still a real shame that the season is petering out like this. It’s like a long distance runner who knows the race is already won. Does he sprint for the line and get the world record, or slow down because he’s won and knows no-one can catch him? We could have been the greatest champions this country has ever seen. Now we won’t be. The City ‘Centurions’ were in a similar situation to us but they didn’t let points slip at the end, they kept grinding away amassing as many points as they could. That’s why they can claim to be the best ever (despite the big asterisk due to the arl illegal spending) and we can’t. Well, we can, but there’s not really any statistical basis in it really. Not now. We could have kept sprinting flat out to the finish line but instead we stopped to wave at friends and family, to sign a few autographs and to chat up the hot girl standing my the finish line. And while we were doing that the fucking Arsenal tortoise crawled past us. I’m not taking this one very well at all because it’s Arsenal. After the Burnley result I was pissed off for the players, not pissed off with them. Against Burnley they were unlucky and I felt bad for them. Against Arsenal they got exactly what they deserved, which seems a strange thing to say when you see the massive disparity in possession and shots. Statistically we battered Arsenal and if you didn’t see the game you’d think that we were just massively unlucky and it was a freak result. It was a freak result but we were anything but unlucky. We got what this rank complacency deserved. It all started so well too. We were in complete control and Arsenal looked scared stiff. We took the lead when Robbo crossed for Mané to finish. Those two were our best players on the night and couldn’t have done much more than they did. Everything was fine up until the drinks break though. For the third time since the restart we gave up a goal almost immediately after one of these breaks. Focus, you see. I can’t believe Virg did that you know. But then on the other hand I sort of can. The only weakness he has is that the game is often so easy for him that he can get a little too relaxed occasionally. This was beyond relaxed, he was almost comatose when he played that backpass. What made it even worse was his desperate appealing for a free-kick. Yeah Pepe did pull him a little and that might have impacted the pass, but even if the VAR feed was hooked up to my living room and the ref asked my opinion, even I wouldn’t have given a free-kick for that. There is nothing in this world that will convince me that Virgil would have done that if we were still chasing the title. As I keep saying, it’s not that the lads aren’t putting in the effort or that they aren’t desperate to win, but they’ve just mentally switched off a fraction and at this level that is fatal, even against bums like Arsenal. Alisson’s mistake soon after wasn’t anything like as glaring as Virgil’s, but in some ways it was even worse. Having seen us give away such a sloppy goal everybody’s senses should have been heightened and their concentration levels off the scale. So for Alisson to then do what he did is really fucking irresponsible. Fabinho also presented the ball to Arsenal in our final third too but he got away with it. What the fuck was going on? You know what we missed here?Hendo. He’s the one that keeps everyone on point and his absence was glaring. On the touchline as all of this was unfolding Klopp looked like he wanted to kill someone. Him and me both. I was hoping he’d get stuck right into them at half time because for one of only a handful of occasions in recent years they genuinely needed a rocket up them. Who knows whether he did or not, but if he did the second half performance certainly didn’t reflect it. The stupid mistakes were gone but by that point the damage had been done. The horse had bolted. Now it was up to the forwards to show their worth and help out the lads at the back. Predictably they failed to do it. I say predictably because my faith in our forward line has just steadily diminished over the course of the season. We’ve gone from a team that a couple of years ago could score at will but who conceded too many to one that’s generally very secure at the back but doesn’t score anywhere near as many as before. We used to be involved in far too many shoot outs but we usually just about edged them because of the firepower we have. Now when the defence has a rare off day the forwards don’t bail them out much. We've done brilliantly these last two years but what can I say, I'm greedy and I want the prolific goalscoring of a couple of years back to accompany the maturity and resilience we now have. I’m largely exonerating Sadio from these all too frequent concerns I’m airing about the forwards as he’s been on a steady upwards curve since he arrived. He gets better every year and he’s gone from being the number three to the number one and it’s not even close anymore. He's great. Salah’s finishing is so up and down though that he can go from Ian Rush to Stuart Barlow in the blink of an eye. He was shite against Arsenal. Just fucking shite. There’s no other way of putting it. As for Bobby, he was what he’s been far too many times this season. Ineffective. He was subbed yet again. Feels like that happens every week now. Firmino actually looks better when he doesn’t play because when he isn’t there we definitely miss him. That’s more down to the lack of quality in those who replace him than it is about what he’s been bringing to the side though. It’s easy to defend Bobby because of all the little things he does that aren’t always appreciated. I get that, I’m fully aware of his worth to the team and I’ve often said I wouldn’t swap him for any number nine in the world. This season’s Bobby though, yeah there’s quite a few I’d swap him for. Here’s the thing. All those great unselfish things he does with and without the ball that allow his fellow forwards to shine? They’re great and I love him for it. Guess what though, he was doing them two years ago while also scoring 26 goals himself. I want that Bobby back, but maybe that was his equivalent of Salah’s 44 goals season and that it doesn’t reflect who either of them actually are? I hope not, but look at the numbers since and it’s definitely trending that way. Even without the numbers you can see it with your own eyes anyway. Both of them need a bounce back year, which I realise sounds an incredibly spoilt and entitled thing to say considering the season the team has had. I’m not wrong though. They set ridiculously high standards for themselves and they are now failing to live up to them. If we are to sustain the success we’ve had these last couple of years then we’re going to need more from Salah and Firmino than we’ve had this season, because the number of narrow margin victories we’ve had isn’t sustainable in the long term. We dominate most games but we often don't have the goals to show for it. That’s just obvious to me, we need more from those two, especially as it seems clear that we won’t be shaking things up by adding a fourth forward to the mix. Competition brings out the best in people but the front three have none and it’s beginning to show. It’s not just them though. We need more from players like Ox, not to mention Origi and Minamino. Ox got the start in this game and did absolutely nothing to suggest he should be in the side for the next game. I like Ox, we all do, he’s a top lad and he’s had bad luck with injuries. We need to see more from him though. This was a real chance for him to do something and lay down a marker for a place. Instead he did very little and was rightly subbed for Keita, who in turn did nothing. I’m genuinely now thinking that Jones should be ahead of both of them. Am I kidding myself there? Put it this way, I have far more faith and confidence in Jones getting us a goal or making something happen than I do in either Ox or Naby. Arsenal’s defence is as weak as a new born kitten yet I knew early in that second half there was no way we were scoring again. You could just tell. We might have gotten something from a set-piece but I knew we weren’t going to break them down because it was obvious that we were running out of ideas. It was basically just get it to Trent and let him cross it. I had no issue with Klopp taking off Firmino and Salah as I’d had it with both of them by that point. The problem is when you see Origi loping on with his stupid blonde hair you know he’s going to do fuck all. I think it’s clear now that Divock's power was in the dreadlocks. Without them he’s been shite. Tell me I'm wrong? Minamino was kind of spritely and was more involved than Bobby, but he doesn’t inspire any confidence either. I’m hoping for him to do something but I’m never expecting it. That being said he deserves a chance to show what he can do and personally I’d be playing him in Firmino’s role in the final two games as we need to see what he is. He had a penalty shout when he was bundled into by Tierney but I wouldn’t have given that as there wasn’t much in it. He needs to be stronger and he’d have been able to take the chance. I’m trying to think of a defeat that has pissed me off more than this one and I’d have to go back a long time. It’s my own fault as I set myself up for this disappointment due to the complete and utter contempt I’ve got for this Arsenal team. Defeat here was always going to hit me harder than most. It’s not a hatred based on rivalry, it’s based entirely on how offended I am by what Arsenal have become. They fold like a deck of cards any time they face anyone decent and the points they pick up invariably come from beating up on the weak and out of form. They’re a playground bully. I despise how pitiful and meek they have become while still maintaining the arrogance they had when they were good and I see losing to them as probably the most unacceptable thing we can do. I’d have been less angry if we’d lost at Norwich. Losing to this Arsenal team is just completely unacceptable to me, especially when it’s the double whammy of screwing up the chance to beat the points record. Some of you never cared about the record to begin with so there’s no sense of disappointment there. I understand that. At the beginning of the season it wasn’t on my radar either. All that mattered to me was winning the title and anything else was just a nice little extra. When you get into the position we did though, with results that had exceeded literally anything we’d seen before in this country (at one stage it exceeded anything that’s been done in the five major European leagues), you realise that there is an opportunity to do something that will live on for generations. I honestly don’t think we’ll ever get the chance to do this again. We were on course for well over a hundred points up until a couple of weeks ago and now the best we can do is 99, which in itself is still great obviously. You have to seize these opportunities though because chances are you’ll never have it again. Let me tell you a little story. About three years ago I was playing golf and was one under par after 14 holes. Now you have to understand that I’m not actually that good and this was just one of those rare times when everything fell into place. I couldn’t even enjoy how I was playing because the pressure I’d put on myself was fucking huge. I knew I’d probably never be in this position ever again. The chance to finish a round under par? I’d dreamed of it since I first started playing but I’d never gotten remotely close to it. The 15th hole was a tough bastard (in this analogy you can say it’s the away game at the Etihad the other week) and I knew there was a good chance I’d drop something there. And I did. A bogey put me back to level par. But still, if I finished strongly I could still be under par which would be incredible. I’d have killed for three pars and an even par round because I knew it was a once in a lifetime chance. I blew it though. I got through 16 and 17 unscathed and then dropped a shot on the last. It was still the best round I’ve ever had (and ever will have, although I do still live in hope) and I’m proud of what I did. But because of how it ended I still have a slight sense of disappointment. That’s how I’m feeling now about this season. Great, the best I’ve ever seen and overall I’m over the moon about it. But it could have been something for the ages and now it won’t be because we were two over for the last four holes. I’m not arsed about rival fans celebrating us not getting to 100 points. That’s embarrassing for them more than anything if that’s all they have to cling to. I didn’t want to break the record to rub their noses in it, I wanted us to break the record so that these lads would go down in history as the greatest champions ever. I’m not sad for me that they didn’t do it. I’m sad for them. And also angry at them for LOSING TO FUCKING ARSENAL! As for what happens next, I’m past caring now. I’m now in the place some of you were from the moment the title was won. If you didn’t care about records then the season was over as soon as the title was secured. I did care about records and now in the space of three days we’ve blown two of them. So yeah I don’t give a fuck about the last two games now. I have zero interest in them as it means nothing anymore. In fact a tiny part of me will actually be annoyed now if we win them both and end up on 99 points. I want to see Jones, Elliott, Minamino and Williams. Klopp did the right thing by trying to honour the competition and take every game as seriously as if we were still going for the title. He’s picked his strongest team for the most part but they aren’t getting the results so let’s have a look at some players with next season in mind now. Star man is Robbo by the way. Team: Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Gomez, Van Dijk, Robertson; Fabinho, Wijnaldum (Origi), Oxlade-Chamberlain (Keita); Salah (Shaqiri), Firmino (Minamino), Mané: