Losers: Arsenal And People Who Don't Understand Why Intelligence Is Valuable In Football
The only thing that is intelligent about Arsenal is their nickname. Just how stupid are The Braindeads? Too stupid to learn from their mistakes, that is for sure. Arsene Wenger did an Emmanuel Eboue and gave the game away when he suggested, with bitterness rather than appreciation, that Lucas Leiva's "intelligence" had won Liverpool's penalty. That wasn't the issue, Arsene. The problem was that whereas Lucas had some, Eboue had none.
It is quite the unmirrored irony that Wenger is one of the cleverest managers in football because his team are, in blunt terms, unprecedentedly thick. There is scarcely a couple of football brains between them, and even fewer active cells when pressure is exerted, which is why they keep falling for such obvious tricks, why they lack the intelligence to learn and why they keep making the same damaging mistakes time after time.
Here we go again. For their inability to defend in proper numbers to what should have been the final attack of the game, see Tottenham's injury-time equaliser at the Emirates two years ago when one goal-kick found the home side, winning 4-3, outnumbered six to four. For Eboue's idiocy, committed against a back-to-goal opponent bereft of any danger, rewind to Alex Hleb's infamy against PSV (From Winners & Losers that April: 'It was Hleb who idiotically pushed over a boxed-in Sun Xiang on the touchline for the free-kick from which Alex produced PSV's one and only shot on goal. If you witness a stupider piece of football in your lifetime then it will be because the inmates of the local lunatic asylum have been released for the day unsupervised'). And for the capacity to throw away a valuable victory in time added on to injury time, step back just a few months to their draw at Sunderland in September.
It's what Arsenal do. What they never do is learn.
So did Wenger see it?
