Arsenal ‘handed’ Premier League title by Everton ‘fraud’ after Gunners avoid VAR ‘travesty’ | OneFootball

The Mailbox reckons the Premier League title ‘race is over’ after an Everton ‘fraud’ gifted the crown to Arsenal on Saturday evening.

Also, VAR, referees and the Premier League product are criticised as a mailboxer longs for days gone by.

Title race *is* done

Title race *is* over now. Even if Arsenal slip a couple of times, City just aren’t consistent enough to take advantage.

Well, good for them. I’m no Arsenal fan – and I’m particularly not fond of Arteta – but they’ve been the best team this year. Forget the nonsense about set pieces, goals all count the same and you don’t get more points for scoring all your goals from 30 yards out.

Anyway. Fan or not, watching Dowman running the length of the pitch to score was a pretty cool moment. Imagine having that composure at *that* age. Almost as impressive was how much better Arsenal were with him on the pitch. Skys the limit for this young fella.

Though how you could ever focus on your GCSEs after you’ve done *that* is beyond me. James, Liverpool

The fraud, Jordan Pickford

Jordan Pickford’s performance against Arsenal was a glaring reminder of why his reputation as an elite goalkeeper is wildly overstated.

He was directly responsible for both late goals that snatched a deserved point from his side and handed the Gunners what is a crucial win. The 89th-minute breakthrough was all on him. Max Dowman delivered a wicked, whipped cross from the right. Pickford charged out rashly, got the faintest of touches but failed to claim it, hungover Sunday League stuff. A competent keeper punches clear or stays put. Dowman was electric in his cameo and Pickfords incompetence shouldn’t detract from that. That pinpoint cross sparked the opener, and his composed, history-making breakaway sealed it. The teenager deserved every accolade as he changed the game with maturity beyond his years.

However Pickford’s misjudgment turned a routine defensive moment into a gift and then came the ultimate farce in stoppage time. Desperate for an equaliser, the commentary says Everton sent Pickford forward for a corner. Incorrect. Guaranteed it was Pickfords call to go up, his ego overriding basic sense. Arsenal cleared, the ball found Dowman, and the 16-year-old simply sprinted the length of the pitch before calmly rolling into an unguarded goal. Pickford was left stranded upfield, completely forgetting that he’s actually last line of defense.

He didn’t even start running until it was clear Dowman was through. Arrogance and complacency compounded by laziness.

This is textbook main character syndrome, the keeper who inserts himself into every dramatic script, convinced the game needs his heroics or in this case, self-sabotage.

Pickford made a few solid early saves to keep Everton in it but those count for nothing when your two catastrophic errors in the dying minutes undo 88 minutes of heroic team defending. Everton were compact, disciplined, and unlucky not to nick something earlier but their “no.1” gifted Arsenal the points.

This isn’t a one-off either, it’s a pattern. Flashy saves, attempts to cultivate a big personality with wild theatrics towards his own players whenever anything happens in the Everton box, performative “distribution”, that ridiculous haircut, and yet repeatedly, at pivotal moments for his club, Pickford crumbles under pressure and/or overcommits disastrously. The amount of England caps the man has boggles the mind.

He is a goalkeeper who abdicates responsibility and treats every match like his personal highlight reel.

The myth of his greatness needs burying. Eoin (he’s another Joe Hart) Ireland

‘Minimal contact’?

Amongst the emails celebrating the emergence of Max Dowman, let’s not forget what could have been a travesty of a VAR decision.

Havertz is through on goal, 1 on 1 with Pickford and Michael Keane treads on his foot/heel. Ref is poorly positioned, so don’t blame him for not seeing it but VAR is ‘check cleared’ after about 3 seconds?!?

Apparently the reasoning is ‘minimal contact’? Since when was that part of the LOTG? Aside from the fact that Havertz was through, anyone sprinting and then getting tripped like this will go down. Spurious claims that Havertz ‘initiated contact’ are false. He was ahead of the defender and has every right to get across his line and the fact that Keane trod on Havertz’s planted foot clearly shows it wasn’t initiated by Havertz.

If we are going to say that contact has to be significant, then how do PGMOL explain the denial of an Arsenal penalty earlier in the season when Nick Pope got ‘minimal contact’ on the ball before wiping out Gyokeres? Either contact matters or it doesn’t- Keane did not play the ball and it was a clear penalty. PGMOL aren’t even trying to look neutral any more.

Anyone that saw the rest of the match saw free kicks given for much, much slighter contact than that. Some of the Everton players looked to be suffering from positional vertigo. Pete, Maldives

Is it just me, or (huddle nonsense aside) are referees getting in the way much more often recently? Seems like they are much closer to the action outside the penalty area than they used to be. Anyway, Max Downman eh? Stu (what actually was that huddle nonsense all about though?) AFC Illinois

Kinsky and the pitch

Just want to say that in not one article I’ve read about kinsky and spurs has the state of the pitch been mentioned. Griezmann said in a separate article afterwards it was really bad and they had time as the home team to get used to it (which means it aint about the studs you wear as the entire top surface was loose and slipping). I’m an arsenal fan so obviously not big on spurs but let’s be fair here. Without that factor 2 players aren’t making those mistakes in the first 15 mins. Give them a break. rojapy

The poor Premier League product

It’s the 43rd min of the Sunderland v Brighton game, 1843hrs Kenyan time, in my tired from working (unnecessarily) a full day on a fkn Saturday Kenyan stupor, a cold reality hits me…this is not worthy of my time, brain power nor eyesight. This product (EPL) is no longer worthy of my time.

A few kilometers from here is a local live game about to start, it is a game of no consequence, at all! It’s a footy match between rival neighborhoods, semi-pros who mostly work in factories 6am to 2pm, some are literally fishermen, and I am going right now to watch that. Kick off is 7pm and I am not certain that that is definitely a better use of my time than this. It’s free and all around you can grab and come with whatever you want. Hard liquor? Sure. Some snacks? Who cares? Weed? Nobody gives a damn. Khat? Might as well pass it to the players on the pitch. Bring your own food? Nobody gives a toss, bring and light up your own grill pitch side if you want.

Arsenal v Everton is up next, and I just don’t care. Man City and Westham after that, and I am just indifferent. The team I have supported my whole life Man Utd is tomorrow and I can’t summon the will to care about it. I am done with this product, the thrill is gone. I cannot place my finger on what the trigger or catalyst of it is. But I’m done with whatever it is.

I need some magic and charm from this game and I am certainly not getting anything near it from the EPL. I am going to watch hawkers, fishermen, traders, probably local thugs and troubled youth have a kick around under dodgy flood lights at 7pm EAT and I am certain it is better than sitting at a pub watching HD EPL.

Kick off is right after most of the lads here break their Ramadan fast so it’ll be doubly fun watching them run, getting stitches and pains as they attempt to keep the chow down. Paddy G, MUFC, Mombasa, Kenya.

Days gone by

I’ll be 45 this year which means I’m now legally obliged to start sentences with “football was better in my day”, so apologies in advance.

But reading the debates on here from the regular mailboxes and the reactions from the esteemed ‘below the liners’ and of course watching the game now it does feel fairly obvious which direction football has gone in. Winning has always been the priority of course, but modern football has taken that idea and turned it into something close to an industrial process. Systems, structure, pressing triggers, data, recovery stats, heat maps, probably the players’ sleep cycles being monitored by a bloke with an iPad somewhere.

The result is incredible athletes playing incredibly efficient football.

But they’re also starting to look a bit… the same.

Everyone presses. Everyone tracks runners. Everyone runs 11 kilometres or whatever a match and understands their tactical role down to the centimetre. It’s all very impressive, but sometimes it feels like the game has become one big homogeneous talent pool where individuality has been gently coached out of people somewhere around the age of 14.

I grew up with my dad telling me stories about Law, Best and Charlton and probably like most football obsessed kids of that time I went down the rabbit hole of old footage. I used to hunt down every VHS tape of 60s football I could find. Grainy black and white clips of George Best basically deciding that five defenders weren’t really his problem.

Then obviously English football had its… shall we say “character building” years in the 70s and 80s while Italy and the rest of Europe were busy playing something that actually resembled football. And then I’d of been around 11 when the premier league was formed and the landscape changed a bit.

And no, I’m not saying every Premier League match in the 90s was some kind of technical masterpiece. But there were players.Proper players. The kind who looked like they were making it up as they went along.

I played to a decent level myself with Southport before my ACL exploded at 24 and like every player you model your game on certain idols. If I had to pick three it would be Cantona, Kinkladze and Ginola.

Just saying those names now feels like describing three completely different sports. Cantona wandered around the pitch like he was the only person who understood the script. Kinkladze looked like he’d accidentally wandered out of a five a side cage and onto a Premier League pitch. And Ginola just decided full backs weren’t really his concern that afternoon.

We don’t get to see these types of players anymore they wouldn’t be tolerated and there’s no place for them in modern teams and systems as they’d be seen as far too much of a luxury. It brings a tear to my eye that Garnacho is a premier league winger.

The modern winger presses the full back, covers 60 yards when possession is lost and probably has a spreadsheet somewhere explaining the optimal angle to cross from.

And yes, I understand the game evolves. Players are fitter, tactics are smarter, analysis is better. Football has basically become Formula One with shin pads.

But I do miss the chaos, the flair and the unpredictability. The winger who beats his man just because he feels like it. The number ten who ignores the tactical plan entirely. The bloke who suddenly decides to dribble through the middle of the pitch because why not.

Now everything feels… optimised.

We’ve got VAR arguments every weekend, rules that nobody fully understands, set piece routines that look like NFL plays, and teams winning titles while creating less excitement than a queue at the post office

I genuinely don’t even have a dog in the Arsenal debate at the moment, definitely no asterisks or any of that Pardew nonsense for me, but watching them grind their way through games does sort of underline the point. It works. It wins. But good grief it doesn’t exactly make you want to cancel your Saturday plans.

Of course some of this is nostalgia. We all remember the magic and forget the rubbish. Football in the past wasn’t wall to wall brilliance. But I do think the game had a bit more personality before it became quite so systemised, quite so optimised, and quite so full of… well… excess bollocks

Somewhere out there is a kid who could be the next Cantona, Ginola or Kinkladze.

Unfortunately he’s currently being told to press the full back, track the runner and keep the team shape. And if he’s very lucky, he might one day grow up to be an exceptionally well organised winger.