The Offside Treble – Arsenal to be ‘Invincible’ again, David Ginola and a brief encounter between Terry and Sterling

Jen ponders the misquoting of injured Theo Walcott in this week’s Offside Treble, before sharing her thoughts on the David Ginola for president saga and touching on the Capital One tangle between John Terry and Raheem Sterling.

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The Best

According to misleading headlines everywhere, this week, Theo Walcott was alleged to have proclaimed this season’s Arsenal attack as better than that of the 2003/4 ‘Invincibles’ squad. A bold claim when you consider that; a) he’s been injured and out of the game all season and; b) they quite clearly aren’t. Let us consider the evidence. After 22 games this season, Arsenal have scored 27 goals, compared to the 42 scored by the ‘Invincibles’ – after the same number of games. Damning, I know.

But only damning until you further consider Walcott didn’t actually make this claim.  In fact he merely suggested their current attacking players could be better than the squad  he joined as a wee bairn, back in 2006, some of whom were by then the older-and-closer-to-retirement ‘Invincibles’ who had only scored 23 goals after the same number of games.

‘But if they’re so frigging good, why have they been so rubbish this season?’ I hear you cry. Give them a break, at least it’s something different to go on about other than their ‘Inter Toto Limbo’ – it stops being interesting when it becomes a seasonal probability.

Wouldn’t it be nice?

David Ginola’s bid for FIFA presidency kicked off in earnest this week, with the launch of his Paddy Power-backed ‘Team Ginola’ campaign video/kick-starter campaign – like some sort of purple-haired douchebag from Dalston, for their ‘really important art project’.

In the video, which I thoroughly recommend viewing, Ginola makes an impassioned plea for cash because like us, he “loves football” and he wants to change the status quo/ (possible) enormous corruption. But he needs you, and like all good FIFA officials, a shed load of cash, to make those changes. Ginola promises us a brave new world of “democracy, transparency and equality” under his rule, which I’m sure we’d all like to believe was possible. Though evidently we’re not all entirely convinced Ginola is the man to transform the international football playing field, as he’s raised a measly £256k of his £2.3m target, having spent silver much of his week dismissing the campaign, is nothing but an elaborate publicity stunt.

I’ve taken some time to absorb the news and, on balance, I’ve become convinced that we should all aspire to live in a world where David Ginola is the president of football’s international governing body.  The way I see it, there’s absolutely no way the situation could be worse than it currently is, and if Ginola doesn’t have a ‘bunga-bunga’ party style scandal in him, no one does.

Move Closer

And finally, John Terry and Raheem Sterling will presumably be avoiding eye contact in the Capital One Cup semi-final second-leg, after a close encounter of the awkward kind, on Tuesday evening. A poorly executed tackle left Terry quite literally arse-over-tit, betwixt the steely thighs of the Liverpool forward, who only made the image more amusing – his mouth agape as he made his plea for a free kick. Naturally, the crowd (on the internet) went WILD for those picture parody thingys that I think The Kids call “memes”. Fortunately, Sterling saw the funny side and posted one of the incident as depicted in a WWE ring himself. What a fun guy.

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