Ten, metatarsals and dodgy refs at all levels

So it's ten years in a row in the CL, a comprehensive enough win over Liege means qualification is now guaranteed. The big negative for me was the injury to Kieran Gibbs. Not only does it mean we are short of our best two left backs for several weeks, but it was a great opportunity for the young Englishman to cement himself in the side as our first choice left back, it is really bad luck for him. Gallas and Andrei Arshavin should both recover for the chavs' visit on Sunday, but the gap at left back is a big problem, hopefully Traore can step in and do a job, big question marks remain over his defensive positioning though.

Am in the middle of watching the reserves tonight, they are playing against a strong Villa side that includes the injury prone Stuart Downing. The game started off in a pretty competitive manner, one very poor tackle on Wilshere went unpunished while several other cynical Villa lunges were also ignored by the bald cretinous ref. The bald tosser than proceeded to book Bartley for a tackle that was rather innocuous, he then sent off Merida who looked to have been kicked off the ball by Fabian Delph, somehow Delph got just a yellow. The ref and his assistant looked to be well away from the action before deciding upon this rather harsh red card that ultimately looks to hand the game to the Villa reserves.

Wilshere then got a yellow for bugger all. In between this frenzy of crap refereeing Watt had given us the lead with a handy glancing header from a Merida set piece, then after the ref card Villa made the extra man count with a couple of rather average goals. Bloody frustrating stuff, it goes to show that at least the lads can get used to being on the end of poor refereeing decisions from a young age, preparing them well for the equally useless officiating in the Premiership. The ref lost control of the game early on, failing to punish some awful early tackles, he then compounded this by throwing the cards around like candy and wrecked the game with an out of place red card, promote him the the Premiership I say, muppet. The Arsenal reserves ended up fighting hard in the second half but unfortunately failed to get a second goal.