After Eduardo's leg was broken in that reckless, horrendous moment in the Birmingham match, I texted fellow gooner Arthur and wrote: 'Today is the end of Eduardo's career, and Arsenal's season'. I hope I'm to be proved wrong about the former; I was right about the latter. What truly nauseated me about that day was Sky's sanctimonious decision not to show the incident again to save the sensibilities of the viewers, who all must have scuttled to their computers to download still images from the Internet instead. Richard Keys and, I think, David Platt (who seems to bear an unconscious grudge against the Arsenal, even though we provided him with his highest honours in 1998, when he retired after the team that had just won the Double) blathered on and on about how William Gallas had let the team down, how Arsenal's lack of 'bottle'/ backbone/ toughness had caught up with them. The same line was repeated by Alan Hansen on Match of the Day, when even the supine/ anodyne Gary Lineker felt it necessary to stress the horrific nature of the physical injury to Eduardo's leg, and the emotional effect this had clearly had on a young team and a volatile captain.
Keys, Platt and Hansen unconsciously replicated the very rhetoric about Arsenal's inability to 'take' physical confrontation that led, I feel, ultimately to Taylor's challenge. In retrospect, I do not think Taylor intended to break Eduardo's leg, or even intended to put him out of the match, but I do think it was meant to hurt, meant to give Eduardo pause in the next challenge, meant to 'find him out' physically. Taylor's assault (I first wrote 'challenge' but this is inadequate) was the logical end-point of the escalating attempts of teams, up to and including Manchester United, to 'stop Arsenal playing'. (This has happened for a long time, of course; with Vieira and Petit in midfield, though, this physicality often resulted in red cards, largely for our players, in retaliation. It's worthy of note that the endless media carping about Arsenal's disciplinary record has now been replaced by the assertion that Arsenal 'don't like it up 'em', as the Arsenal players react less aggressively.) Wenger himself argued this in post-match interviews, but it was lost in the furore about his call for Taylor to be banned indefinitely. Eduardo's injury was bound to happen to an Arsenal player sooner or later. And in fact it already had, to Abou Diaby against Sunderland two seasons before, against a team already relegated.
I was shocked by what happened to Eduardo, shocked by the way it was handled by Sky and the BBC, and this isn't just a cliche: the 'shock' made me feel differently about the sport, and about Arsenal. To see this young man's leg broken so badly, his foot nearly taken off by a physical assault, made me feel it wasn't worth following football any more, if a player of such skill and finesse could be brutalised in this way. Arsene has become paranoid about refereeing decisions, penatlties not given, as the Arsenal have slipped out of Champions League and Premier League running; but I would rather he kept talking about the way skilful players are not protected as they should be, in an English footballing culture which still prizes physicality over technique. And for evidence of that, watch any of England's games over the last 5 years. From Eduardo to England's failure to qualify for Euro '08: only connect.
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