The Morning After

The morning after.

It's fucking horrible, isn't it? There's a foul taste in your mouth, a throbbing artery in your skull and a nagging feeling that you've exposed yourself in every fucking way possible. And then there's that deep well of despair that keeps growing as your cognition returns, as your powers of self-doubt, self-loathing and self-pity rise anew from the dregs of languid lassitude... and you know you've got to face reality as well.

Fucking hell.

I had a read of the papers. Fuck those know-all fucks who toasted us in January, and are slamming us know. Where the fuck were the claims of under-spending and inexperience when we were top of the league and Adebayor did a passable impersonation of a top-quality striker? People laugh when they say a goldfish has a 3-second memory, but it's a fucking national tragedy that journalists of respected newspapers have the collective recall of a lobotomised amnesiac.

It's a curiosity of life that while individual journalists are often intelligent, perceptive people with nuanced views of the major issues, a herd of journos tend to act like a pack of fucking lemmings. Yes, Arsenal fucked up, but we don't have to march into the fucking North Sea. It's not that fucking bad, and we don't need to start again from fucking Year Zero. The team that wowed the journos in 2007 are the same team that are being pitied/mocked today. We have a team that is able to compete at the highest level, and which can challenge for trophies. It needs to be augmented and tweaked, but it's still a powerful, powerful team.

But that's not to say that we don't need to change.

Wenger had some of it right; the refs paid the penalty that wasn't, and didn't pay the penalty that was. We out-played Liverpool over two legs, and got burnt in return. But like every delusional fucker in denial, Wenger can't see past his fucking nose.

We've got to realise that we're the cause of our tragic circumstances. Over two legs, we took the lead three times, and after each time, we leaked soft goals: Flamini lunged at Gerrard at Emirates; Senderos didn't mark Hyypia; and no one marked Babel. We need to admit that we were fucking poor in defence. We had the run of play, we were rewarded with the lead three times, and we fucked it up each time. Wenger is deluded if he thinks he can blame the ref and leave the squad alone. Fucking defensive frailties have been the bane of our existence, and it's time we acknowledged it. Soft fucking goals are the result of fucking soft training regimes. Is it any wonder that our Champions League run of 2006 was inspired by a defence looked after by Martin Keown? We need to bring in some fucker to oversee our defence.

Otherwise, I'm going to go fucking crazy watching Arsenal fuck it up season after season after season.