Toure speaks out on Davies challenge
Just one more quick update for you today, Kolo Toure has spoken out about the Kevin Davies challenge which forced Clichy to leave the field against Bolton:
“The tackle was a disgrace – very bad, there is no place for that in football.
I have nothing against Kevin Davies, he seems a good guy. But he uses his elbows far too much.
It is wrong to allow those sorts of challenges in football. If we are going to allow that, you might just as well get in kids off the street because they can make those challenges just the same as anybody else can.
Football is supposed to be a game of skill. I am sure we could go out and kick players just as hard as we are kicked but we’d rather concentrate on playing football
It happened just before half-time and in the break we knew we had to make sure we did not allow ourselves to become intimidated.
In the past we have allowed ourselves to be intimidated but this time we knew that it would be tough at Bolton and we were ready for that.
We know that we have to win our matches away from home this season if we are going to be champions because we dropped far too many points away from home last season.
In previous years we have been too easy to beat away but we have shown this week that we are able to win these games and with the draw in Ukraine in between them, overall it is a good week.”
I do sympathise with Toure on this – I would love to see all teams play the way Arsenal do, but Arsenal have been guilty of the same tactics as Bolton in the past – Not recently but certainly within my lifetime. I’m not sure the challenge was quite as bad as Toure makes out and I have to feel that his comments are in a similar mindset as the comments Wenger made last week about Kiev’s treatment of Walcott – more precisely he wants to send out a message to people within the game and make referees pay more attention to challenges on Arsenal players. Nothing wrong with that really and if it means we get more decisions or less injured players…well I guess I’m all for it.
And now for something completely different…
I know this isn’t in any way Arsenal related, forgive me for that – but can you imagine the uproar if this happened in the Premiership? Take a look at the video of Reading vs Watford in the Championship this weekend :
Absolutely shocking decision, this is one of those freakish mistakes that can’t (and shouldn’t) happen too often. They’ve been calling it the ‘Reading ghost goal’. I saw today that Reading manager Steve Coppell has offered to replay the game – which would certainly set an interesting precedent.
