Wrong red but right result

I’ve seen a lot of bad refereeing over the years, plenty of it atrocious enough to reduce a grown man to tears. But the decision to send off Robin van Persie for time-wasting on Tuesday must rank up there among the worst calls of all time.

The Arsenal striker kicked the ball towards goal a second after the referee blew his whistle for offside. Just a single second. That’s less time than it took Swiss official Massimo Busacca to blow the darned thing.

While I don’t agree with van Persie’s suggestion that he didn’t hear it because of the 95,000 people in the stadium, that doesn’t change the fact that it was not a deliberate attempt to eat up the clock. Had van Persie’s shot come three or four seconds after the whistle then maybe Busacca would have had a point.

Had van Persie thrashed the ball wildly into the crowd instead of towards goal then maybe he would have had a point. As it was, though, the player merely followed through with the action he had already mentally planned.

With the game delicately poised at 1-1 and Arsenal set to go through, van Persie’s departure was not ideal and may genuinely have had some sort of bearing on the final result.

But we need to be realistic when looking at the incident: Arsene Wenger trying to blame Arsenal’s Champions League exit on this one moment of referee madness is clutching at the thinnest of straws.

The truth is they were outplayed from the word go by a team that was massively superior in just about every department. I don’t enjoy saying that because I am a bit of a closet Arsenal fan and desperately want to see them win something this year.

But sadly it is the truth. Barcelona simply outclassed Arsenal. For the first time since Opta began doing the stats for the Champions League in 2003, Arsenal became the first team ever to fail to have a single shot in a match. By contrast, Barcelona had 17 in the game, 12 of them on target. And while Barcelona had 686 touches in their opponent’s half, Arsenal managed just 104.

You could argue that Wenger had set his team up that way, that Arsenal had aimed to get the draw they needed to progress. But if that was the case then it was a very flawed plan from the word go.

No team on the planet can realistically expect to defend for 90 minutes against the likes of Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and David Villa and not concede. Especially considering Arsenal’s far from convincing defensive record these days.

Even if van Persie had remained on the pitch Arsenal would still have cracked under the relentless waves of Barcelona attacks. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how things would have panned out with 11 against 11. But I doubt it would have made much difference.

I am not ashamed to admit that I desperately wanted Arsenal to go through and was hoping against hope that they would pull off the near impossible. But the simple truth is that the best team won, and that’s nothing to do with anything other than the respective squads and the choice of tactics.

Meanwhile, while it was heartbreak for one north London team, the other one in the Champions League scraped their way through to the quarter-finals. Tottenham Hotspur were under the cosh for most of their match with AC Milan and it often looked like the Italians were the home side, but Harry Redknapp’s boys held on for the draw they needed to progress.

It wasn’t pretty, but at least Spurs posed some sort of threat in attack and didn’t spend the entire 90 minutes defending desperately.

It would be fascinating to see how Spurs, assuming they were brave enough to stick to their attacking principles, would fare against Barcelona themselves. They might let in a few but I am pretty sure they would score a few too.

Who knows, we might just get to see that very match when the draw is made for the quarter-finals next week. It wouldn’t surprise me with football’s penchant for the quirky.

If that happens we will probably be able to hear the chorus of “Are you watching Arsenal?” from here.

Your say

Among the abusive e-mails and relentless offers for Viagra and fake Rolexs watches, I came across this gem of a piece from a certain Patrick Galea. So I’m handing over the rest of this week’s column to him. Hopefully, the editor won’t ask him to replace me permanently.

“Telling people that choosing a football team to support is the single most binding commitment a person may ever make in their life does not usually come with nods of enlightened agreement, and much less with kudos and cheers. It may be an absurd statement, but absurdity never stood in the way of things being true.

“Choosing a team is undoubtedly the most binding decision people make in their lives. Think of other important decisions your average Joe may have to make in their lifetime. Not one of them comes with a lifetime guarantee of loyalty across all the people who take that road.

“Getting married? Buying a house? Signing contracts? Chances are you know somebody who went back on one of these commitments with relative ease, and without losing any social standing whatsoever.

“Now think of somebody who has arbitrarily decided to change football team loyalty. Think...

“Nothing is as universally everlasting as picking a football team. Even in a parochial country like ours, which is as far away from floating voter heaven as you can get, a country in which politics is more about family heritage than rational thought, changing party allegiance is not unheard of.

“Have you thought of supporters who changed teams yet? I’m sure you have heard of people betraying their homeland, disowning their children or their parents, but have you ever heard of anybody changing ‘their’ football team?

“In liberal societies that freely hand out rights, this is a right you don’t dream of getting. It’s a cruel negation of rights that is reserved exclusively for the fan, the person with least control and involvement in the actual mothballing process.

“Players, coaches, managers, club owners, administrators, and anybody else who is even remotely connected to a football club can pack their bags and move to another club without a problem. The worst they can expect are a couple of chants from supporters (lifetime ones) of the previous club. It’s easy and accepted. Hell, it’s expected.

“Not for the fans. There’s a fascinating social sanctioning mechanism that perpetuates this state of affairs. Switching teams would lose you credibility in the sports random world. It just doesn’t happen.

“But why do people spend their lives enduring endless suffering, fuelled by naïve, hopeless optimism of future success, just to be loyal to a decision taken years ago?

“Think about it, the beginning of a football season is like going to a race track and placing the same bet on the same horse, year in year out, no matter how hopeless, inadequate and unlikely to win it looks. Not only that but you have to cheer it on as it stumbles its way past the finish line in a lucky seventh place.

“And why is that? Think of how ridiculous you would feel if your little daughter asked you, and you answer: ‘Well, because that, my dear, is the horse that caught my fancy when I was eight.’ What a pathetic scene that would be.

“And that’s how it works, doesn’t it? You choose a football team when you are young, and you’re stuck with it. Whatever happens to that club you are going to have to lump it. Teams may fall from grace straight into the dustbin of history, and you’re going to have to follow them, no matter what.

“Why? Because, well, that is the team you picked. The only alternative is to lose interest in football in general. And that is as effective an escape plan as farting your way out of a maximum security prison.

“When considering its long-lasting implications, the fact that such a decision is normally made in childhood makes the whole thing even more absurd. There is no way a child’s mind can fathom the consequences – the emotional investment, the pain, the disappointment, the potential euphoria and the never-ending palpitations choosing a team inevitably brings.

“It is amusing then that this momentous choice comes to be decided by something as trivial as the colour of the home jersey, a charming mascot, the hairstyle of a star player, or any of the other inane reasons people give for siding with particular clubs. It is also amusing to think how that seemingly insignificant choice never fails to come bite people in the backside when they are grown men shedding tears of disappoint-ment at their team’s final seconds heartbreaking loss.

“It is particularly intriguing that this type of undying and fervent loyalty is reserved solely to sport. If loyalty to childhood declarations had to be translated to other aspects in life, people would be eating cereal in restaurants and bingeing on chocolate milk.

“That this is not the case might be a saving grace. God forbid we’d have people dancing to Barney songs in their 40s and 50s just because we once said ‘Mummy, this is my favourite song’.

“Maybe everything else in life is just too important to hinge on infantile choices. Truth be told, in the great scheme of things, football is one of the most unimportant things in life. But it is the most important of all the unimportant things.”

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com