Maybe it's conscious, maybe it's unconscious? Refs take a lot of shit, and the impression I get is that a lot of the weaker ones take their accumulated frustrations from all their games out on us, so it's probably a little of both. Like everyone else, they see us as a soft touch - someone they feel safe to make an example of because we never defend ourselves and because, culturally, in the wider football world, it’s become acceptable to do this to Arsenal. There’s an element of conscious bias, but not in the conspiratorial way people think - i think they’d do it to anyone if they thought they could get away with it.
We're fighting against reputation here, and the reputation we should be trying to shake isn't that we're ill-disciplined, it's that we're weak. It's that we're an easy meal. It'll stop when we start making ourselves more trouble than we're worth.
Last edited by I am invisible; 12-02-2022 at 10:48 AM.
Problem is that (on the pitch at least) we are into a spiral here - I can see us getting even more cards if our players try to stand up to this shit. For me, we need Tim Lewis to put together a legal type case to take to that twat Mike Riley and the PGMOL, and it needs to happen behind closed doors so those twats don;t lose face. The case needs to focus not on our cards (for which refs will always back themselves and find justification) but the egregious anomalies between our treatment and that of other EPL clubs...
Putting the laughter back into manslaughter