Is Penalties A Fair Match Decider? (Julian) | Fleetwood 1-1 (5-3) Arsenal

Hi, welcome to AFTV. I've got Julian with me. I've just been knocked out by Fleetwood Town in the League Cup. fourth round outside Highbury Stadium. Weird one. Highbury Stadium, I'm sure you had fond memories at. This one won't be fond memories for you leaving this Highbury Stadium, I'm sure. Well, the result wasn't fond, but I think most other things about my visit here I've quite enjoyed. Well, maybe not enjoyed that much. I mean, they've obviously enjoyed it a lot more than we did, but you can't look at all the negatives tonight. You've got to try and look at some reasons why it happened. Do you think this is the night for reasons why it could have happened when you've been knocked out by an 18th-placed League Two team? Yeah, well, there's always got to be reasons. Things don't happen for no reasons at all. So the obvious reason... Go on, what's the obvious? Go on. The obvious reason is something Arteta mentioned in his press conference, is that we need to respect the game, we need to respect the opposition. Always. And he didn't. I mean, he didn't. From the team selection? From the team selection, there wasn't the respect because he had to put more of the first team in. But ultimately, you can use words, but actions are what really count. And ultimately, we discussed this after we lost in the final last season to City. The competition doesn't deserve the same respect as the Champions League and the Premier League. therefore he might say the right things and he's he's got a press conference he's got to build it up he's not going to go into a press conference say look we don't really care about the game but ultimately when you make a team selection like that and you also the players go out with the attitude they went out with it's obvious that the words that he uses weren't put into action so that's got to be the main reason why they didn't win but the other school of thought is players have to play games so he may be saying this this is an important game and players need minutes you can't just play your first team week in week out week in what twice week in week out because there's such big games all the time you can't do that so this is a it ends with a trophy i know you're gonna you can talk about which you sometimes have in the past the finances you get from it and and that you know lessons that lessons what this this competition is but players need to play players need to play and and like i said to lee he what he said when you put an arsehole top on your skin you've got you should be beating these sort of teams you absolutely should do and when you look at the statistics for tonight i think we had 26 shots against their three yeah 26 shots they're three wait wait off there's not on target though yeah we're not talking about the penalties we're talking about we're talking about about the 90 minutes yeah so in most games we would have won that regardless of the performance the performance wasn't great now things you can't blame tonight you can't blame the pitch the pitch was wonderful you can't blame the wind because they're having the pass they're having the pass when it was windy and there were large gusts the forecast said there was going to be 25 mile an hour gusts there wasn't you can't blame that so other than the obvious of the respect that they played in the competition the attitude what can you look at What are the smaller margins? One thing is that they obviously condensed the play and they defended really well. But we're used to that, no? We are and we're not because the pitch here seems small It seems a little bit small. It wasn't only seems, it's 103 metres long. The Premier League is 105 metres. In fact, it's 102 metres against 105. there's just under three percent difference now when you have margins of that kind of level it is only small margins but it can make a difference and what that allowed Fleetwood to do was it was easier for them to condense the play on a smaller pitch which they're used to playing I know that that is the fact but it sounds ridiculous you know that right it's three it's three metres we're not talking about the main reason why they lost we're looking at the smaller margins And the smaller margins tonight was three metres less in length at the pitch. But that's not why we lost. It's one of the smaller reasons. It's one of the smaller reasons when you're looking at it. The other thing is penalties. Is penalties a fair way to decide a game of football? I understand that you want to get it done and that it's 90 minutes. I understand that. It's eight hours off it. All right. But I support the fact that you're not going to play extra time. I support that. But there's a few aspects of the penalties. The first one is that, and it happens in the Champions League final as well, is that they do two tosses. The first one they lost because they went up the other end, and there's a slight margin. We're talking about marginal calls here. A slight lesser probability they're going to win up the other end. The second toss they lost, so they went second, which puts slightly more pressure on now the probabilities again now if you're looking at making it a little bit fairer if you're gonna have one toss that you win then the other team should have the choice of whether they go first or second and okay so you've got you've got three marginal calls here of what wasn't in Arsenal's interests but already overarching margins your premier league champions we are premier league champions arsenal arsenal fc that should override all of these small margins it should but it didn't so you've got to look at the smaller margin because we lost on the smallest of margins tonight which was penalties and getting back to penalties is penalties the best way to decide a football match all right tonight it didn't matter as much as the Champions League final but there must be fairer ways to decide in effect the biggest game in in world football the Champions League final all right we've lost it in exactly the same way against Fleetwood what other methods could they have to decide these games better than penalties well on that i'll let them decide it's a crossbar challenge