Published: 13 March 2014

ARSENAL by Richard Osley

IT sounds like hard eggs for Arsenal to accuse Bayern Munich's pin-up winger Arjen Robben of theatrically silly attempts to win penalties after their defeat in the Champions League. Nine times out of ten, Bayern will always beat the Gunners. No point pretending otherwise. They are the genuine article.

But it’s this obvious superiority held in Munich which kind of makes Robben's dramatic collapses in the penalty area oh so more galling. Imagine being that good and still resorting to the mime-dance of a snipered peacock. Seriously, what really goes through the ticking mind of a man who can dribble his way through the Arsenal team if he so chooses and score whenever he wants, but instead decides: Nah, far better to show off my spilt-cheerios grimace on the flight down.

Every team has had players who search for penalties and peek towards the ref with hopeful moo eyes, but those divers are generally awful players, just trying to swizz a living. But with Robben: he’s a supremely talented player, already a step ahead of his rivals. So it’s his curious mind that psychologists should be studying for years to come, to unlock the mystery of the muggy genius theorem. Really, it’s something to marvel at in a way – that absolute, unwavering determination to be able to tell the grandchildren in a generation to come about all the picturebook penalties he won over his career. One day, little Arjen Junior Junior will beg: Tell us again grandpa about how you won the penalty, and that other time too, when you won another penalty, we’d love to hear it all again.
 

TOTTENHAM by Catherine Etoe

OH dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Right, that’s enough about Fulham’s dreadful season. It’s time to talk about Spurs.

Now, we’ve all had bad days at the office. Why, last week I championed my boys for their determination to get something from our mess of a season. And look how that turned out! But it’s one thing to have a bad day at work, it’s quite another when you ensure that every Spurs fan on the planet has one at theirs too.

To sum up our match on Saturday: forget the 12th man that is the Shed End, a land where grown men bray like donkeys, Chelsea had a rugby team’s worth against Spurs, with Jan Vertonghen the 13th, Sandro the 14th and Kyle Walker the 15th. Yet, you know the worst of it? No, not having seen Gooners practise the conga down the Essex Road earlier in the day! Let them dust down their big fat foam fingers, jazz up their Ray Parlour wigs and attend a match at the new Wembley years after it was built.

Nah, the worst is that this is the second time we’ve had a player wrongly sent off against one of our top four rivals when we’ve been holding our own. And rather than man-up, we’ve switched off like sulky teens desperate to leave the dinner table before everyone else has finished eating. Yes, it’s s-o-o-o unfair! But it happens. And if any of you really do want to quit Tottenham if we don’t achieve Champions League status this term, then at least put in enough of a shift to give us a chance of getting there – however many players are on the pitch.