Tim Cooper
Hurzeler's Huff Helps Inspire Not Hurt Arsenal
Here's the brilliant Tim Cooper with a superb takedown of the irritating Fabian Hurzeler
When you're winning you get used to hearing hurty words about your team.
And hurty words don't come much Hurtier than the nonsense spouted by Fabian Hurzeler both before and after the game at the Amex.
Which is why winning with just two shots and an xG of 0.01 somehow made it even more satisfying to take the points back to North London.
Which is why my abiding image of that game will be the Brighton manager trying to get in the ear of our big Ecuadorian defender Hincapie - man of the match for my money - and Piero looking dismissively over his shoulder at the angry anoraked German telling him to "f****** play football" and putting his finger to his lips before taking his own good time to take a throw-in.
The irony is that while we took our own good time with everything on the South Coast, apparently spending a record half an hour preparing to put the ball back into play, Brighton didn't play much football themselves.
They huffed and they puffed and they pressed but they didn't really threaten us over the entire... let's say 60 minutes just to make him happy.
Of course Hurzeler had got his complaints in first, like Fergie always used to do and Pep still does (though he most reecently used Rodri as his proxy and, guess what, Rodri has STILL not been punished for openly accusing a referee of being biased against his team, ie. Cheating).
On this occasion, he pretty accurately predicted exactly how we were going to play - “There are no clear rules any more," he moaned, "(about) how much time you can spend for a corner, how much time you can spend for a throw-in.”
He got that right - unless the rule is "no more than 30 minutes per game."He was still at it afterwards, whingeing: “Only one team tried to play football.
The Premier League needs to find a rule because that’s not football what Arsenal did there." Oh dear.
There we were thinking it was 11 v 11 on a level playing field with a goal at either end and a ball and a a referee in the middle with a whistle and an earpiece and two linespeople and a fourth ref on the sidelines and a few more in a van somewhere watching on multiple TV screens.
Hurzeler asked whether we had ever seen a goalkeeper going down three times for treatment, like Raya did.
Well I don't know, but I do know that the goalkeeper of almost every team that comes to the Emirates can't catch a ball without throwing himself to the ground and waiting for the box to clear before getting up and releasing it; that when the ball goes out of play behind the goal line they set off to fetch it like an arthritic octogenarian, put it down on one side of the goal area, look up, then move it to the other side and then, sometimes, change their minds about taking a goal kick and wait for a defender to come back and pass it to them.
I know that when they get free kicks they line up a player or two to take it before changing their minds and trotting upfield while the keeper ambles out of his box to take it himself.
I know that they can never quite find the ball under their nose when they have a throw-in but have to find one of the other ones sitting on a cone, then wait for a team mate to perform the arduous task of throwing it back into play.
I know that whenever they're tackled they flail around on the turf flapping their hands until the ref stops play for treatment before frantically signalling to the medical team on the touchline that they'll be all right with a team mate holding their injured limb, in order to avoid the compulsory 30 seconds on the sidelines afterwards (one of the daftest rules in the game, btw, and next season it's going up to 60 seconds, so woe betide any defender who gets injured before a corner).
All of which is "not football" either, but we have to put up with it almost every week, when we face yet another team who put 10 or 11 behind the ball.
But here's the thing: the objective of football is really very simple - it's to score more goals than the other team.
At its most basic it's to score a goal at one end and not let any in at the other.
Which is what we did at Brighton. One-nil to the Arsenal.
So f*** you Herr Hurzeler, your hurty words don't hurt us.
They inspire us.
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