Limerick Gooner wrote: ↑Sun Apr 06, 2025 8:28 am
SteveO 35 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 06, 2025 8:17 am
Suppose that the conspiracy theorists on here are right and supposedly there's an anti-Arsenal bias from officials. What should you propose that the club does about it?
According to the many on here the evidence is supposedly overwhelming. In any other walk of life if that was the case you surely would present your case to the relevant authority or governing body? I remember talk a couple of years back about how we were supposedly presenting our evidence etc but didn't hear much about it really
The more evidence we present, the worse it gets. There is no solution to it. Why does there need to be? We are just pointing out what is happening in plain sight.
I can literally go back years for strange and odd decisions. Do you remember in the Emery season, we got a goal disallowed against Palace where Sokratis scored the winner. Literally nothing happened. Nothing at all. Brentford equaliser. Clearly offside. Bruno elbowing players with impunity but apparently it was a forearm not an elbow. Which would also be a red but was actually used an an excuse to justify a yellow. I remember Xhaka jumping in at City away and missing the ball by about a yard. Straight red given and yet Martinez At United regularly tried to two foot people but if he misses by an inch it’s all ok. We then have Luiz straight red and pen away to Wolves for someone brushing his knee as he ran behind them. Martinelli two yellows in one move. Tomiyasu sent off for a slow throw in and then a ghost second yellow dive. It’s an endless litany of shit. I keep a memory of it and it is beyond coincidence or due to shit reffing. We are reffed differently. The crowd/media/pundits frame Arsenal as cheats or as dirty and the refs are bought in to it. Subconscious bias whatever it is. It is costing us and other teams are getting away with the same and worse.
There's no doubt that all those instances you mention were poor decisions, and as Arsenal fans we remember all of them. The point I'm making though is that supporters of other clubs say exactly the same thing, and statistically when you look at any of these league tables with/without VAR, ones where errors are corrected, then we aren't the worst. There's no point saying "show me all these examples of other clubs" because none of us support them, so frankly we're not sad enough to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every Bournemouth, Everton and Wolves game from the past 5 years
I do remember Wolves being the club to vote against VAR and I remember Gary O'Neil quoting endless examples of injustices that had gone against them - some scandalous reffing at OT on the opening day a couple of years back springs to mind as does Man City's ridiculously late goal against them I think either late last season or early this. They clearly believed there was a ref agenda against them. I think they also had by far the longest run without a penalty despite showing endless incidents where they could have had one. At the time when he listed off the incidents, I remember thinking that I could totally understand how pissed he felt and I felt sorry for him
All I'm asking is that someone is capable of demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that we have way more of this against us than anyone else. It can't just be more injustices than Liverpool or Man Ure or any given club. We would need evidence that across 20 PL teams there was overwhelming evidence that we have far more go against us than for. If someone is capable of proving that, then I would immediately agree with all of you, and also suggest strongly that someone at board level asks for a meeting with PGMOL and whichever other authorities carry clout and demand some answers.
I want to make it clear here - I'm not saying we haven't had terrible decisions go against us. The MLS sending off was dire, as was Rice's, as was Trossard's etc etc. I also remember the double yellow for Martinelli at Wolves which was absolutely scandalous.
My argument is that refereeing standards have dropped for every club. Our refs didn't feature at the 2018 World Cup and for good reason and since then the standards have dropped further. Riley and then Webb have presided over an utter shit show and the pair of them should be banned from any sort of professional officiating body for life. They are all absolutely fucking awful and if we trawled the forums of other clubs I bet we would find equal numbers of complaints and conspiracy theories. I mean Ten Hag blames the awful decision at West Ham on getting him the sack - not saying I agree btw, but every team thinks the officials are against them