Stick your Gabi Martinelli Witch Hunt Where The Sun Don't Shine 

Five Key Takeaways from Arsenal's FA Cup win at Portsmouth after Gabi Martinelli's hattrick 

1 - His name is Gabi…….and you can stick your witchhunt where the sun doesn’t shine

Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Tim Sherwood, Martin Samuel and all you ignorant pricks stirring up the media withchunt against Gabi Martinelli……did you see how much he and we care about your opinions??? 

Gabi answered the pathetic self-important commentariat in the best possible way and for all the booing by the home fans he left the filed with the away end serenading him and making it clear he is fully supported.   

His first ever hat-trick in professional football was the perfect answer to the noise swirling around him. 

The hysteria being whipped up in the media is genuinely staggering – if anyone was justified in making something of the incident it’s Arne Slot and his comments after the game were perfectly pitched – the real issue is timewasting inn the football and that’s what these so-called experts should be focussing on, not encouraging professionals to take each other out (though is it  a surprise to see a thug like Keane (Alf-Inge Haaland anyone?) and a nasty little prick like Neville (Jose Antonio Reyes anyone?) advocating violence. 

If this is how Gabi is going to respond, keep it up fellas, it seems like the perfect motivation for our Gabi from Sao Paolo.

2 - This was a proper FA Cup 3rd round day

What’s not to love?  Cold, wet, windy.  A proper old ground.  A club struggling in the league.  An early goal for the home time.  Some thunderous tackles flying in.  I loved it. 

There remains something special about the FA Cup despite th best efforts of the authorities to devalue it. 

The latest insult to the grand old lady of worldwide domestic cup competitions is to move the final so that it is no longer the last day and game of the domestic football season – no, that last day now has to belong to the self-important Premier League. 

I for one hope that the Premier League is never ever again decided on the last or penultimate weekends of the season.  I hope the last two rounds of league games are to all intents and purposes dead rubbers so that the FA Cup Final can reclaim its proper status as the last important match of the domestic season.

3 - There’s something missing….and it’s bloody wonderful.

This is how football matches used to be folks. 

The game flowed and what you saw happen in front of you was real – it didn’t need validation from outside sources. 

Referees made decisions based on what they saw, not what they were told. Assistant referees did their jobs and raised the flags when they thought someone was offside. Nobody pointed at a camera when arguing with the ref over a decision, asking for a second opinion. 

Days like this remind us of what we have lost with the introduction of VAR which is doing its best to ruin football.  And days like this are all the better for it. 

I genuinely do not know how anyone can argue with a straight face that VAR has improved the game. 

I remain an advocate for binning it without ceremony and letting us have our game back.

4 - Set piece FC?  Own goal FC?  Why choose…..?

Nearly in the words of Kevin Keegan (how sad to hear he has been diagnosed with cancer by the way), I loved it that we won this game with set piece goals (apparently it’s not proper football don’t you know) and one of them another own goal (we are the only team who benefits from them apparently because we are uniquely lucky). 

One of them may have been a bit of a scramble but the flicked header by Gabi was beautifully taken and the quick free kick by Myles Lewis-Skelly to Gabi Jesus to set up Martinelli was a wonderful piece of quick thinking, superbly executed by all involved.  

I genuinely do not understand the criticism we get – the sneering that we rely too much on them for our goals is just a load of old nonsense. 

The scoreboard doesn’t lie – set piece goals are worth exactly the same as open play goals.  It’s not our fault is it that teams are unable to deal with our set pieces?  Why wouldn’t we try and score from them. 

In football’s early days there was a team called the Corinthian Casuals who used to refuse to score from penalties because they thought it was unsporting. 

Is that really what we are supposed to do? Thanks for the corner fellas but do you know what, we don’t want to score from it so have a goal kick instead. 

It’s nonsense – a stick to beat us with because after all that’s what we are there for.  Any stick will do…..well, we will take your stick and snap it in two.   

5 - Ten changes present no real risk

In seasons gone by ten changes to the team would have seen a mishmash of players take to the field and would undoubtedly have presented some risk of a defeat. 

However, the depth of our squad now is such that we still had quality in every position across the pitch with only one player in the wrong place – Christina Norgaard and that because Mosquera and Calafiori remain absent through injury. 

We had big guns galore available to us on the bench and wasn’t it lovely to see Kai Havertz back in the squad and on the pitch. 

It is going to be interesting from here on in to see how Mikel Arteta husbands his resources and in particular what choices he makes up top now that he has Gyokeres, Jesus and Havertz to play with (not forgetting Merino as an option of course – he has done well enough to be considered an option in that position).   

If we can keep the squad fully available for the second half of the season the footballing world really is our oyster – we still have four trophies to aim for after all.