Barcelona 3-1 Arsenal or Refs and Jokers

There’s refereeing and then there’s whatever happened on Tuesday night at the Nou Camp.

It’s strange how one man’s decision can affect a group of people so much broader and wider than himself, not just a single player, but thousands of fans as well. I am of course referring to van Persie’s red card given, allegedly, for time-wasting. The Dutchman received a lobbed ball that put him through to the Barca goal, but was called offside. Nothing strange, you see this sort of thing in every game. What happened next is where the controversy comes in. The ref blows his whistle for offside and, not hearing the whistle (there are 90-odd thousand shouting fans in the stadium) van Persie takes a shot on goal. In the space of time between the ball leaving Robin’s foot and the striker turning back around he was shown a red card.

The call was made for time-wasting, but Robin made his shot just one second after the whistle had blown. Such a short period of time tells me that time-wasting wasn’t the issue and perhaps there was some other motivation behind the card (only 55 minutes had been played in the game). I will not go far into speculation here, but the call is controversial and, in my opinion, a bad one. Robin was livid after the game and in a post match interview called the ref, Massimo Busacca, “a joke”. Wenger and Nasri both had words with Busacca in light of the call and, apparently, both will be charged by UEFA for poor conduct. Nothing new here, refs making poor calls have no consequences for negatively influencing what promised to be a good game of football.

It seems most of the talk of this game is about the red card, which overshadows the fact that, at least in the first half, Arsenal defended like machines. There were often five men in the back line and the midfield stayed back to cause the Barca offense as much trouble as possible. This worked well for the first 45 minutes, showing that if we want to park the bus we can and be effective in that role. The consequence was that we created no chances on Barca’s goal (a fact that would remain until the full-time whistle). We are an attacking team and without that part of our game we just aren’t as effective as we need to be to win big matches like this.

Blame for the loss is hard to assign. Szczesny being injured with a dislocated finger early in the first half made things a bit more tense for us. Manuel Almunia had to step in and, I have to admit, I wasn’t particularly confident in his abilities (though I still supported him and hoped he would give the performance of his life). Cesc, on his twitter, claimed sole responsibility for the loss:

Great support from the arsenal fans. I take full blame for the result tonight. One of the worst moments of my life. I apologise.