Big Willie wrote:
Yeah, people found it hard to accept this Frenchman winning trophies in England with a team made up of mainly foreigners. I don't think we were being treated like this until around 2002 or 2003 when the papers started highlighting and focussing on us making history by not having any British players in the starting XI. And it's been a factor since.
Not sure us winning a couple trophies will change that either tbh, this generation of refs have been biased against us. They also grew up in a time when Liverpool and United were winning trophies regularly and so I'm not surprised to see them get loads of decisions that most other teams wouldn't get.
Spurs are the anomoly for me though. They somehow have lots of support in the media and also seem to be getting lots of decisions going their way but it could be because England's captain and star stiker plays for them.
Yep, Will, that feels like an accurate distillation. I don't think what we've experienced this season has much to do with Arteta, except for the fact he's still not an Englishman.
I think it'd be fair to say that a few calls aside, we'd probably be staggering into fourth, but that was a challenge we had to face up to and we've failed.
As for Spurs, I think the public just continues to love the narrative of us getting screwed. It's not that people love Spurs, it's that they love the additional salt of Spurs getting past us. The injustice of the calls in the derby speaks to a primal distaste for Arsenal that's a generation away from being rectified.
