Ian Tanner
Injuries, particularly to Arsenal players, are no laughing matter. I did chuckle, though, in March ahead of our hosting Swansea City. Arsenal.com’s build-up included an article that listed the injured players. From memory, Arsenal had eight. The Swans’ sole absentee was … Kyle Bartley. And we all know where he started his career, don’t we!
Not all bookings are for a single transgression. Many are given – and often mis-understood by the footballing public – for the accumulation of niggling offences; the referee simply thinks, “an egg” - un oeuf (geddit?). Quite how James Milner escaped censure at THOF last month could rank with the great unsolved mysteries such as who shot JFK and the identity of Jack the Ripper. Milner made four “tackles” – for want of a better word – each one meriting a yellow card in its own right. Yet the statistics show that he was as clean as a baby’s bottom straight after bath-time. Commentating for Arsenal TV, the normally undemonstrative Adrian Clarke was utterly bemused. Match officials can be “rested” – a euphemism that actors of the non-footballing variety use when unemployed – for making blatant errors of judgement. Like Milner, Mark Clattenburg should have been brought to book.
I do not blame officialdom for getting wrong the Eden Hazard / Calum Chambers yellow card / free-kick, though. Hazard’s ability to put at speed his right leg across Chambers’ path, inducing the “foul” that earned Chambers his fifth yellow card from five Premier League starts – Dear Norris, is this a record? - was the work of a cheat extraordinaire. Hazard’s countryman Hercule Poirot would’ve needed video evidence to unravel that tangling of legs. The technology exists and is now (belatedly) employed for goal-line incidents. Why not use also retrospectively to award Hazard the yellow card he deserves for his cynicism and to rescind Chambers’?
Thursday was the AGM (Annual General Meeting) of Arsenal Holdings PLC. The bumpf accompanying the Statement of Accounts and Annual Report 2013/14 included this gem under Shareholder Questions. “At our previous AGMs, we have asked shareholders to put forward written questions. … to ensure that the Directors were able to respond to questions across the widest possible range of subjects in the time available.” (my emphasis) The offending phrase was repeated during the meeting by Sir Chips Keswick, our new Chairman and a man with more than a smidgeon of Peter Hill-Wood, his predecessor, about him. My day-job involves attending AGMs not infrequently and all-too-frequently the reading of company Annual Reports. I cannot remember reading or hearing of a time limit, albeit unspecified, being mentioned before. An AGM is a bit like coitus; it takes as long as it takes.
Josh Kroenke was formally elected to the Board. Before the vote, one shareholder asked what were young Josh’s qualifications for the post. This reminded me of a cartoon where a pompous elderly interviewer asks, “Well, my boy! And what makes you think that you deserve the job?”, to which the youthful interviewee replies, “Nepotism, Uncle!”.
