Carlo Ancelotti says he has no problem with Wayne Rooney taking part for Manchester United against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge this evening, yet it appears the greater part of the country disagrees. A significant body of opinion seems to believe any other player than the England forward would have been serving a ban by now for his impetuous elbow on Wigan’s James McCarthy at the weekend, and one prominent football website even went so far as to claim that cowardice on the part of officials was favouring United and taking all the uncertainty out of the title race.
Really? Surely if Mark Clattenburg – the referee at the DW on Saturday – wished to take the cowardly way out he could have fudged his report by saying he did not get a proper view of the incident, thus letting retrospective disciplinary procedures swing into action with full recourse to slow-motion replays and different camera angles.
Instead Clattenburg stood his ground and said he thought he had made the right decision at the time, and one rather admires a referee willing to do that. Especially over such a contentious issue as a raised elbow. There are many who will tell you that any sort of attack to the head, to borrow a term from the other sport played at the DW, is unacceptable in football, and they might be right. What Rooney did was arguably worse than what Arsenal’s Abou Diaby did to Joey Barton at Newcastle last month, or what DJ Campbell was sent off for at Wolves on Saturday.
Yet no two raised arms are ever quite the same, and despite the hysteria surrounding Rooney’s misbehaviour – as predicted by United’s manager – it seems idle to pretend, as many have sought to do, that this particular assault was a potential jaw-breaker or cynical attempt to hospitalise an opponent.
The Wigan player involved was not wholly innocent, he had moved into Rooney’s path to block his run, and as the game was only eight minutes old it did not seem unreasonable for Clattenburg to try to calm the situation and warn the United player about his future conduct. Those who are now complaining that he ducked the issue or made an exception for Rooney are probably the same people who complain from time to time that referees have become automatons, mindlessly applying the letter of the law with no discretion of their own.
I happened to be at the DW on Saturday and like most people in the stadium, I missed the incident first time round. I also managed to miss it second and third time round, because only about one in three of the DW press-box monitors actually works, and though people in more favoured seats reported that an elbow had been used, the first decent footage I saw was on Match of the Day.
Clattenburg, of course, had to make up his mind on the spot, about something he could only have seen in the periphery of his vision. That is, if you like, an argument for putting players on report and letting video judges with a proper view take disciplinary action after the event, but before going down that route the game really ought to give referees with the courage of their own convictions a chance. Clattenburg may not have had a perfect view of the collision, but he was in a better position than anyone else to form a judgment, so that is what he did.
Judgment, of course, is not an exact science. There are different ways of looking at things. That’s why we are still talking, three days after the event, about something that was over in a second and which few people noticed until McCarthy got up clutching his head.
Here are 10 positions it is possible to take about the same incident. Not everyone will agree with all of them, but each one could be considered true.
1) Rooney got lucky. No one who raises his hands on a football pitch could complain at a red card.
2) The attack was not premeditated, but was occasioned by McCarthy deliberately moving to block Rooney’s run. The Wigan player leaned into Rooney with his shoulder, which is why he got hit in the head. The referee could simply have viewed it as six of one and half a dozen of the other.
3) Roberto Martínez had a point when he said a Wigan player would never have got away with it.
4) The Wigan manager was clutching at straws, preferring to argue that United should have been down to 10 men rather than confront another collapse by his side.
5) Dave Whelan should just pipe down. His team are in enough trouble and his manager had already made the point that United often seem to be treated differently to sides lower down the league. Moaning about big-club bias is a bit much after another 4-0 defeat.
6) Sir Alex Ferguson’s claim that the press would try to persecute Rooney was damn clever. Forcing the press to use quotes about what the press might do next was a smart way to tie reporters in knots.
7) The press, and media generally, did try to persecute Rooney, though they sensibly stopped short of electrocution. Though the crime was worse than the “next to nothing” Ferguson claimed, it was not quite outright thuggery either, and the manager knew exactly what he was doing by hyperbolising the anticipated reaction.
8) John Hartson was right to say on MOTD2 that Ferguson ought not to be trying to defend Rooney’s action, though wrong to say the issue is not about Rooney. The issue is all about Rooney.
9) Rooney’s temper is taking him into Roy Keane territory. He is making himself a centre of attention for reasons unconnected with his core task of scoring and making goals for Manchester United, and not even Ferguson will be able to keep pretending that he is a misunderstood innocent. One of the factors in Ferguson’s decision of a decade ago to swerve the post-match interview that all the other Premier League managers do was that he was finding it increasingly difficult to remain loyal to his players while handling pointed questions about his captain’s behaviour.
10) Clattenburg may have made a mistake, which is to say he might have acted differently with a better view, but unless referees can be 100% sure it is probably best that they give players the benefit of the doubt eight minutes into a game. Whoever they may be.
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Arsenal may find it difficult to recover from this disastrous day
At the final whistle Arsenal’s players stood, sat or knelt on the lush emerald turf like figures in a tableau of despair. Motionless, traumatised, suddenly drained of the last vestiges of belief and hope and even pride, they looked dismayingly like Bayern Munich after Manchester United had finished with the German side at the Camp Nou in 1999.
Jack Wilshere hit the crossbar here and Robin van Persie was the author of one of the most beautiful goals ever scored in a Wembley final – surely, at least, the best ever scored by a player on the losing side – but Tomas Rosicky’s bungled attempt to backheel a clear chance into the net with 10 minutes left somehow epitomised Arsenal’s display on an evening when they failed in the attempt to win their first trophy since 2005.
So stunning was the defeat that they will find it difficult to recover their morale, although the press of events in the Premier League and the European Cup over the coming weeks may serve to take their minds off a disastrous day. Pointing to the enforced absence of Cesc Fábregas, Thomas Vermaelen and Theo Walcott will not help. A club with Arsenal’s ambitions and resources – they have 19 players out on loan – should have acquired the capacity to ride such misfortunes.
On paper, this was a mismatch: thoroughbreds versus mongrels. Of such contrasts are cup classics made, and in the eyes of more than one neutral the two sides produced arguably the best football match yet seen at the new Wembley. To make it so, the occasion required not just Birmingham City’s honest effort, dogged persistence and resilient structure but Arsenal’s insecurity and anxiety, a neurosis born of the weight of the expectation, conscious or otherwise, that they would ease their way to victory by virtue of their superior class.
It would not be too harsh to suggest that Arsenal got exactly what they and their manager deserved for a performance that began with the most blatant piece of undeserved good fortune, contained enough individual mistakes to fill an entire season and ended with the sort of defending that a team produces when not enough attention is paid to constructing a side equally strong and self-confident in all areas.
Of course they had their moments. At half-time, with the score at one apiece, it was tempting to feel that had Lee Bowyer been wearing the Arsenal No7 shirt, rather than the ineffectual Rosicky, the north London side would be two or three goals up and on the way to ending that wait for another trophy.
Yet they should have been a goal, and a man, down after two minutes, when a fine pass from Keith Fahey found Nikola Zigic. The angular 6ft 7in Serb, whose control with his feet is customarily wayward enough to make Peter Crouch look like Alfredo di Stefano, played what may have been the best pass of his entire career, a delightfully perceptive and carefully weighted ball for Bowyer, who ran smoothly on to it with only the goalkeeper to beat and was promptly upended by Wojciech Szczesny, only to be given offside, quite wrongly. A correct decision would inevitably have led to the goalkeeper’s expulsion.
The West Midlanders did not dwell on the injustice but profited from the knowledge of their opponents’ vulnerability. Arsenal’s defenders were never comfortable with the threat of Zigic, who scored Birmingham’s goal in the visitors’ 2-1 defeat at the Emirates Stadium in October. Szczesny, who lacks only two inches of the Serb’s height, could not get close to him when Roger Johnson headed a corner back towards the six-yard box, and Birminghan took the lead.
Arsenal had started to put their attacking game together but they discovered Ben Foster in a mood to show what Manchester United and England missed. Of the goalkeeper’s nine saves, the last two were truly exceptional. When Nicklas Bendtner’s shot was deflected in the 76th minute, Foster was already diving but reacted by throwing up a hand to turn the ball aside. Four minutes later he flew to his left to tip away Samir Nasri’s goalbound drive.
In the absence of Fábregas, Nasri had been expected to provide the goalscoring threat from Arsenal’s midfield. But rather than attempting the sort of incisive dribbles that often reached their climax with a goal in the first half of the season, he tended to loiter on the fringe of the Birmingham penalty area before transferring the ball and the responsibility to a team‑mate.
Andrey Arshavin, whose dribble ended with the cross that Van Persie volleyed home before the interval, was more incisive, and it came as a surprise when the Russian was withdrawn, rather than the pallid Rosicky, to make way for Marouane Chamakh in the closing stages.
“We have to take a lot of pride and encouragement for the challenges ahead,” Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, said, having witnessed a collapse less protracted but potentially more damaging than the tossing away of a 4-0 lead at St James’ Park three weeks ago. Wilshere was one of the few Arsenal players to emerge with credit, going about his work neatly and unobtrusively alongside the dreadfully inaccurate Alex Song. It was his uncharacteristic error, however, that led to the opening from which Fahey hit the post early in the second half.
Birmingham City will not waste too much time on sympathy for Arsenal and their six-year search for something new to put in the trophy cabinet. For the winners, ignoring the Leyland Daf Cup and the Auto Windscreens Shield, the result ended a drought going all the way back to 1963 – between Lady Chatterley and the Beatles’ first LP, as a certain West Midlands poet might have put it.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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