When should you be criticised? (From St Albans & Harpenden Review)

When should you be criticised?

5:34pm Monday 20th April 2009 in

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It’s funny how quickly people can change their mind about people. At the start of the season Alex Song was deemed not good enough to wear the Arsenal shirt. At the start of the season Dimitar Berbatov was meant to be the key missing component that Manchester United needed to win an unprecedented quintuple.

Fast forward 9 months and Song’s absence from the Arsenal team was apparently the reason why they lost their FA Cup Semi Final on Saturday and Berbatov is not good enough to play for United after missing a penalty which ultimately cost them their Semi Final against Everton on Sunday.

The FA Cup gave us two very different games over the weekend.

Arsenal and Chelsea was a competitive and hard fought match with no side really dominating. Arsenal got an early goal through Theo Walcott but they didn’t push on and get a second and Chelsea took the initiative and got an equaliser. The second half was cagey and there was not much of a threat towards either goal but Arsenal keeper Lukasz Fabianski had looked nervous and it showed when he rashly ran out of his goal but was beaten to it by Didier Drogba and he rounded the keeper to score and send Chelsea through.

Fabianski has received a lot of criticism from fans and pundits in the media and it’s unjustified. All it takes is one mistake and whatever good you may have done in the past is completely disregarded. And that’s where Alex Song fits in because he was booed off the pitch at half time in 2007 in a match between Fulham and Arsenal. He was slow, ponderous, and just generally looked out of place in an Arsenal shirt.

Two years later and the same fans who booed him now want him to play every match. They have quickly forgotten what they did to the player and reject any notion that they criticised him. He was 19 at the time and to be booed by your own fans must have been so hard to take and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he thought about giving up the game altogether. It’s a credit to him that he has recovered from that incident and has established himself as an Arsenal player.

However, for Dimitar Berbatov he has a lot of work to do if he is going to regain the support of the United fans. Manchester United and Everton was a poor match. Sir Alex Ferguson decided to rest several of his regular players and it eventually backfired when they lost out in a penalty shootout. Rio Ferdinand also missed a penalty but it is Berbatov’s penalty that everyone is discussing.

On his day Berbatov is a great player, he makes the difficult look effortless but with that his body language gives off the impression that he couldn’t care less about what is happening. He slowly strolled from the centre circle and placed the ball on the spot. His face was impassive and if he was nervous he didn’t look it. He took a few steps back, ran quickly towards to ball, slowed, and then hesitated before striking the ball to Tim Howard’s right. The keeper guessed right and saved the shot with his feet. But Howard didn’t have to work hard to save it because it was a lazy strike, it was soft and too close to the keeper making the save easy.

At such critical moments, you need to show conviction and recognise the seriousness of the moment. 40,000 United fans had travelled down from Manchester to see their team go through to the final but what they saw was a player who simply looked like he didn’t care. His reason for missing “I was looking for the goalkeeper and in the last moment he took the angle I was going for, so he saved it.”

How about next time taking a different angle and making sure the keeper can’t save it?

Any criticism Berbatov gets is deserved because he cost £30 million and you imagine that when you pay that sort of money you get a player who plays like he is worth that amount money and not someone who expects others to do the work.