What is it about English referees? As soon as they get referred to as a top referee it they become ego driven all about me crap referees. You don’t notice the best referees, they get on with the job, let the game flow, make correct, consistent calls, play advantage when possible all this without you noticing them.

Not Mr. Webb, everyone has to know who’s boss, he blows his whistle for every perceived breach, brings back play unnecessarily and does so with all the flair and grace of a pantomime villain.

Howard Webb, always has to be the centre of attention

The sending off of Adebayor and the leniency afforded to Lucas goes to show his inconsistency and poor judgement on the day.

What Adebayor did on both occasions is a common ploy used to win and/or protect the ball. Not even a tackle, it’s just putting yourself between the opposing player and the ball to do so requires you to lift your leg over the ball and placing it between the ball and the player. While there is an argument for a foul, there is none for a yellow card.

Conversely a player who continually fouls the opposition has to be warned before brandishing a card, but after warning Lucas early in the game it took another 6 fouls before he he was shown a yellow.

This is not to say that poor refereeing cost us the match, poor defending against a long ball over the top of a high line was what hurt us. The warning signs were there, earlier on Keane was found with a similar ball but instead of attacking the goal he played it back to Gerard.

Wenger pointed this out to the world, at the end of last season he acknowledged that we have a problem defending high balls. Why then has he done nothing about it? This is a source of frustration for many an Arsenal fan. Arsene knows the problems, the fans know, opposing managers know, pundits know yet for some reason unbeknownst to us nothing is being done to solve it.

I am not saying that buying a 6 foot 5 centre half will be the solution, it could be, but wouldn’t help if we insist on playing such a high line all the time. Whatever it is we need to see something being done. We cannot afford to play wengerball only to get undone by a 60 yard punt over the top.

We could be 9 points behind the leaders by the end of today, while it is entirely possible to overcome such deficit we cannot afford to let the gap widen any more.

There was some good to come out of the game though, there was fight, there was passion, and there was belief. When we got down to 10 men (9 ½, Diaby didn’t help much) the team rallied, they were tremendous, not only that but for the first I can remember the crowd actually lifted the team. If we could take the attitude of the last 30 minutes and put it into the rest of our games then I’d be a happy fan.