Arsenal v. Manchester United: erm, not that important, actually

To my mind, the FA's refusal to do anything about the childishness in the tunnel before the start of Tuesday's match only helps to fuel the perception that this game is uncontrollable and make it easier to allow these two teams to be irresponsibly indulged in ill-disciplined, petulant and gratuitously aggressive conduct which would not be tolerated in any other fixture and certainly not from other team. We already have referees who won't apply rules in this fixture which they apply in every other game and this only gets worse with every time these teams play each other. If Boro went to Highbury and conducted ourselves like United routinely do we would be lucky to finish the game with eight men and rightly so.

My United-supporting mate Thomas offered the view yesterday that Graham Poll had a good game. Based on the half hour I watched before I lost interest I thought he was inept and gutless, as usual. Heinze should have booked after 19 seconds for throwing an forearm at Ljungberg's neck. Cole should have been booked after three minutes for a Dioufesque obscene dive when Keane was feet rather than inches away from making contact. Rooney should have booked long before he was. Arsenal should have had a penalty when Pires was floored. The list is long. Does anyone really believe that penalty wouldn't have been given if the away shirts had been worn by Boro, Charlton or even Liverpool? Thousands of people cheered the sight of the shameless cheat Pires being chopped down and getting no penalty but I didn't, even though I despise Pires, because the only team who ever benefit from bad decisions against Arsenal are United and United get more risible non-decisions in their favour by a country mile than any other team in England.

And another thing. Personally I find that this is precisely the sort of game that turns me off Premiership football completely. Thomas seemed astounded when I said I'd lost interest and stopped watching after half an hour. I replied that I am among the football-watching majority who don't subscribe to the view that Arsenal v. Manchester United is the most exciting super soaraway critical game in the history of organised sport. It's not. It's a grotesquely over-hyped pissing contest between two good but flawed teams who have virtually no chance of winnning the league. I support another team who were playing the same night and I cared rather more about our score which I could follow on another channel. I don't dispute his assertion that it was a cracking game, but so what? I despise Arsenal, I loathe United and the game has no bearing on the title or the Champions League places, so why would I, as a fan of a different Premier League club, wade through the nauseating hype surrounding this game to watch what is an irrelevant game? I'd rather watch Norwich play West Brom. There's something riding on that game.

On a lighter note, I was tickled by this: