Holt: Arsenal's statement on Arteta's emotional incontinence is irresponsible

A message from a fan account called the Arsenal Therapy Show, which was originally posted earlier in the year, was getting renewed traction on X on Monday. ‘Like this tweet if you would sign a petition to have @GNev2 (Gary Neville) banned from commentating on Arsenal games,’ it said.

By late afternoon on Monday, more than 25,000 people had done exactly that. Others suggested Neville and his Sky Sports colleague Jamie Carragher should both be prevented from entering the Emirates for future games. I don’t know if the petition has materialised yet but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did.

Neville’s crime — and Carragher’s — was to say he believed the decision to allow Newcastle’s bitterly-contested winning goal against Arsenal to stand at St James’s Park on Saturday evening was correct. Their wider crime was to fly in the face of more hysterical attacks on the standard of refereeing in the Premier League and say that VAR got it right.

VAR in particular, and referees in general, have become the easy out for every manager, every fan and every club who cannot handle defeat and need someone else to blame. If you’re Mikel Arteta and you want to pass the buck because your goalkeeper has had a nightmare again, you pass that buck to VAR.

And you pass that buck with increasing vehemence and passion and conviction and emotion so that your club mistakenly feels the need to get involved, too, as if a defeat is some incredible miscarriage of justice that goes to the very core of the system and infects football’s body politic.

That is how we get to a point where Arsenal, a club that remains revered by most in this country for being a bastion of elegance and class, somehow believes it is right to release a shamefully irresponsible statement