(Ed’s note – This piece was sent to us before the weekend and the visit to Ewood Park where some early “challenges” on Arsenal players resulted in unquestionable free kicks, but no cautions…)

Here we go again another season and another no brainer directive from the incompetent F.A (F*** Arsenal ??) with their ‘Respect’ campaign. When you actually analyse it you find no more than a ‘human rights charter’ for every thug player to be allowed one scything illegal challenge each before they get booked - that is as long as the rest of the team doesn’t surround the referee while he tells him not to do it again!!

The lunatics have not only taken over the asylum but helped design and build it too. I’m really looking forward to our away trips against the northern monkey teams when we get a weak (and now made even weaker) referee who can now quite legally allow us to get kicked off the pitch. I can hear the noise already as the inbred macho troglodytes in the ground celebrate an injured opponent being carried off like it is a winning goal in a cup final, and then when we have to meet fire with fire and start using up our FA quota of one dirty tackle per player we find out that it doesn’t apply to southern softies with a French manager - only real men from oop north.

This season is mapped out already as an accident waiting to happen because of an amateur organisation running a professional game that quite calmly and deliberately keeps football in the dark ages. It achieves this by pandering to the loud minority whilst preserving the status quo and their own lucrative jobs, by refusing to use technology when it is available. And by not using retrospective action against career threatening tackles, are they not just condoning incompetence and violence?

How many times have you been in the ground when you have heard from somebody watching on television that it was a penalty or it was not offside or it was a straight red card etc, etc. Over a 90 minute game the ball is in play for on average 60 minutes... so do the maths. For a third of a game we’re watching not a lot going on... but the prehistoric F.A refuse to do the sensible thing as it would make them redundant in the professional game and just leave them in charge of grass roots football.

All you have to do to remedy the problems in the professional game is add to the current laws the little line ‘where the technology is available’ and you remove 99% of mistakes by the officials. To my mind you only earn ‘respect’ by doing the right thing and not by trying to buy it.