Bury The Hatchet

There’s been a buzz surrounding this Saturday’s match against Stoke and as per usual it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Since the day Tony Pulis arrived at the Stoke training ground wearing nothing but a basbeall cap and smile on his face, things took a turn for the worse in the North...

Despite enjoying a successful start under Sam Allardyce v2.0 the club began gaining a reputation as a side whose primary tactic consisted of out-muscling the opposition and crowding the penalty area on set plays.

This inevitably endeared them to other football sides....

But there was one with whom their ‘style’ of play was particularly frictitous, that of Arsenal whose own way of playing the ball along the ground in passing triangles coudn’t have provided a greater antithesis.

Similarly Wenger’s preference for technically gifted midgets provided just as much of a physical representation of this difference as did the stats.

Thankfully we have since shaken off the label of ‘weak’ side owing largely to the signing of Mertesacker, Flamini and Giroud who are quite happy to stick the boot in when required.Others have grown into this more resilient side, we all know Wilshere likes to get a bit lairy at times, while Oxlade-Chamberlain and Sanogo take some effort to dispossess.

However there was a time when players like Almunia, Djourou, Fabregas, Nasri and Ramsey occupied the Arsenal spine and for all their wonderful ability (not you Almunia or Djourou) were often targeted  as a side who would crumble in a scrappy game.

Of course we weren’t helped in an era in which referees thought a return to the good ol’ days of Chopper Harris and Vinnie Jones would be a good idea and often allowed a succession of bookable offences to go unpunished.

This inevitably lowered the tone of those matches considerably and often saw the Arsenal players reduce themselves to the level of the opposition, seeking retribution in the face of an apathetic referee.

In some equally frustrating yet more unfortunate instances the referee's unwillingness to stamp out (pun intended) the foul play sometimes lead to particularly nasty fouls going in, think Eduardo or Diaby.

On the 27th Feb 2010 the match between two opposing football ideologies came to a head, the Stoke players no doubt fired up Pulis, their own fans and a subconscious desire to prove themselves physically saw Ryan Shawcross make a rash challenge on a young Aaron Ramsey.

Many of you will know what happened, and will have seen footage of the break which to this day makes me feel a bit queasy even thinking about it.

Ramsey, whose career at the time was progressing at a faster rate of knots than Wilshere was hospitalised and ruled out of action for 9 months.

 

It took the Welshman a couple of seasons to fully recover and find his best form which we were all enjoying immensely until his injury against West Ham has since ruled him out .

Every year we play Stoke home and away and every time the pre-match furore surrounds the war of words between Arsenal and Stoke fans. The Stoke fans shoudn’t have a leg to stand on in this, considering it was their player who almost ended the career of another, yet they somehow draw on Ramsey’s refusal to accept an apology immediately after the incident as some kind of scandal.

Let them have it, if that’s all the straw they have to clutch then TLR pities them, I mean it can’t be fun supporting Stoke or even living in Stoke so if posting things about Ramsey and Arsenal helps them sleep at night then we should leave them to it. Consider it a gift people of Stoke, but one you can’t take to the pawnbrokers and exchange for a pack of fags or a tin of special brew.

Ramsey won’t be playing, Arsenal are a completely different team to last season and Stoke have a manager in Mark Hughes who is actually trying to change their style of play for the better.

We say let’s bury the hatchet (right into Shawcrosses fa..) no we really mean it. This feud can’t go on for ever. Our travelling fans will no doubt receive a fair amount of abuse but our message to them is support the team, ignore Shawcross and the Stoke fans and enjoy the football.

Who knows it could even be a match in which we simultaeneously outmuscle and outplay them as we now possess a potent combination of resilience and brilliance that is shown by our huge number of clean sheets this season.

Shawcross, Ramsey and everything that period of our club’s history stood for is in the past. We have come back stronger, more determined and hungrier than ever. Let the players show that through their football and the fans urge them on. Stoke and Pulis have gone backwards...significantly, for them those torrid days were a golden era of course they will try and rekindle those emotions as it means they’re still relevant.

This match is billed as an unwitting derby of sorts, a fact the media inevitably exacerbates to create a hype out of something that shoudn’t still exist.

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