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“We’re not a one man team! Did Robin save the penalty at Anfield? Is Robin assisting himself in all these goals? Did Robin make the last-ditch block at the Hawthorns? Shut up with your one-man team rubbish, we’re not a one-man team! One man team, why I outta… one man team… what are they like… one man team…”
And so we sat, bent out of shape about something only an Arsenal fan would ever get bent out of shape about, rocking back and forth and twitching slightly more violently each and every time van Persie scored yet another goal for us. All. Season. Long. Of course it’s a stupid term and one made up exclusively to wind people up. It’s reductive and it’s insulting… but oh boy did we rely on that Dutch person a lot last season. The facts and stats that just kept on coming were of as much use in the super-straight laced world of statts as a chocolate teapot of course: “If Arsenal didn’t have van Persie they’d have scored three goals all season long/Arsenal haven’t scored a left-footed goal that wasn’t from a Dutch left foot since 1972/If van Persie had only one leg, he wouldn’t have scored this season”… and I’m only slightly exaggerating.
Given I generally think wins come from sparkly magic win dust and losses come from the loss monster cursing you with his loss electrons every now and again, stats in general bore me. I just think that trends are there to be bucked, you know? I always believed Gael Clichy was only a match away from his next Premier League goal. And I was right, that one time. So when you add into the equation stats about facts that aren’t even correct – we HAD Robin van Persie, so why are you tools talking about how we’d be faring if we didn’t? – it just adds to the bulging eye vein and the ground down stumps in the back of my mouth that used to be teeth.
But anyway, the one man teamism. We weren’t lucky in any way, shape or form to have had the Dutch person in our team last season. He was there because he’d been bought in 2004 and was finally, after about seventeen million years, in one working, placenta-free piece. But people behaved in such a fashion that would have led a non-earth-dwelling human recently arrived on the planet to have believed that he’d been given to us as some sort of consolation prize for losing Cesc Fabregas. (I hate people saying we ‘lost’ him. We didn’t ‘lose’ him. We sold him. Don’t be so passive. Even if we did sell him with our hands tied behind our back and looped over our head and with our elbow joints bent back to front, clinging on to his leg and sobbing that this time it’d be different.)
Read the rest of the article by Sian Ranscombe “Not a One Man Team: An Arsenal fan’s ramblings on sharing the goal scoring load”
Follow her on twitter @SianyMacalarny
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