Five Things We Learned from This Weekend's Football

I ​wrote about Arsenal Fan TV before. Since then, the channel has gone even more mainstream, with every Arsenal defeat seeing fans of every club in England flocking to YouTube to watch old men embarrass themselves by pouring more emotion than they've ever shown to their wives or sons into a lengthy speech about French millionaires they'll never meet. It has become as much of a theatrical ritual as the meek surrender that precedes it.​​ ​

The game itself was nothing too unordinary, although we did get the slight twist of Arsenal having the collapse first. Some people decided to look for the positives, but after ignoring the fact Stoke should've been four up, "Ty" cites a chance at 3-2 that "if it had gone in, it's a different game." The sentence is not complete before it becomes too much for Claude, who explodes in rage. It is brilliant television, but cringe comedy isn't for everyone.

The question of what possesses these men to do this to themselves on camera still persists. Football is supposed to be about escapism, but unlike most other forms – Star Wars, Ketamine, whatever – it frequently fails to do the job. For most football fans, their escape is into a world of even more grind, drudge and misery. It's the equivalent of a PR drone reading a social realist novel about a social media manager in their lunch break. It's going on holiday to Slough. It is having an AA meeting in a Wetherspoons.

This is why we have songs with subject matter that would normally be considered way off limits for piss-taking. We would like to vent our frustration in violent, seething rage, no-holds-barred, in day-to-day life, but we can't. We can here. That's the fantasy on offer when the on-pitch product fails to do the job. So on some level, I can respect and understand the offensive ditties. I get why you want to stove someone's head in through an accident of birth. But an old man called Claude shoving and shouting at a twenty-something in Arsenal branded headphones over whether Hector Bellerin is ready for the first-team? Not so much. If this is escapism, call me the prison bitch.

Perhaps only rivalled by "Ferguson would've sorted Gascoignes head out" and saying holding at corners has made football unwatchable, one of the ultimate dad opinions in football has to be that people are too quick to cast judgements nowadays. But damn, it's true. Yeah, this generation wants instant gratification. We know. And to be honest, who doesn't want that anyway? That's like saying we all want to be rich and shagging our brains out. It should just be a given.

If they have a point though, it's surely in football opinions. Specifically, the idea that Chelsea were going to go through this season unbeaten. To recap, the invincibles drew 12 league games and lost to United, Chelsea, Inter, and Middlesbrough twice. They also did that against far, far, weaker meat-and-potatoes Premier League sides, and they were also plainly far better than this Chelsea team. Despite that, the tedious narrative persisted so much that Arsenal fans were celebrating Newcastle's win before their game at Stoke (pause for canned laughter).

Of course, this is a good Chelsea side. But they're dominating because of the weaknesses of their immediate rivals, not those of the mid-table outfits. There are big, powerful teams in the bottom half of the Premier League now. Hatem Ben Arfa can't get on Hull City's bench, for fuck's sake. The idea of an unbeaten season was totally ridiculous.

Yet Chelsea did have that quintissentially Mourinho combination of guts, know-how, big-game, when-the-chips-are-down performances, flashes of genius, jammy deflected goals and horrible gamesmanship. They were looking pretty indomitable, but if you want to stop a team of bastards, call on the biggest bastard of them all. It had to be Alan Pardew to end the streak.

Above all, it's good to confirm that Pards' entire existence, now those bizarre days of Newcastle putting in something resembling a Champions League tilt are behind us, are only about one thing. He is there to piss people off. He is there to pick fights with the cuddly and the nondescript, break winning streaks and legs, and crush dreams. He exists solely to piss people off. You might hate him, but it's proof that absolutely anyone really can find their place in the world, and that can only be a good thing.

This weekend saw the happy return to form of the most-maligned footballer in Britain. Some people like to point towards Mario Balotelli, who for them represents the antithesis of what an English footballer is supposed to be to the outdated clique of ex-pros that have punditry and management sewn up. Maybe there's a truth to that. And there's certainly some crypto-racist bullshit going on there. But what happens when the reverse is true?

Consider it. England is a country that desperately wants to become Spain or Germany, in footballing terms at least. Andy Carroll is simply too English, too nineties – he reminds people of an idea and a world they both love yet want to leave behind. Of big number nines, getting it in the mixer, tabloid reports of shagging and boozing, and people from the North-East being allowed to represent England.

It's a heartwarming tale though. Carroll is frequently mocked, but he's basically never harmed anyone and has only ever been a good footballer other than the terrible spell at Liverpool. If someone can survive the Hodgson and Dalglish eras at Anfield and the discovery of their 16-year-old self's Bebo page when they're famous and in their mid-twenties, they deserve all they can carve out for themselves thereafter. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to love him.

Weird news on the continent this week, at Steaua Bucharest. You may remember them from such Champions League classics as losing 3-0 away against Chelsea in the group stages, losing 3-0 at home against Chelsea in the group stages, and losing 2-0 against Chelsea at home in the group stages. But no longer.

Steaua no longer exist. This isn't the usual sad tale of administration – the stadium and players are still there, the club isn't in financial ruin. But since they split from the general sports club of the Romanian Army in days of yore, both have used the Steaua name, and now a high court has ruled that has to stop, in favour of the army.

The result was that at Steaua's last game, masking tape was applied to all mentions of the name and images of the badge. The scoreboard labelled them simply as "hosts", with fans cheering "come on, hosts" to get into the spirit of things. It was surely the most bizarre scene of the season, but maybe it can offer some hope out there. If it's this easy to just wipe out your identity, why don't more teams do it? It could really exorcise a team like Arsenal or Spurs, simply wiping out their heritage in one fell swoop to embark on a bold new era as a blank canvas. It's not like there's any other plan out there they haven't tried.

The Wealdstone Raider

As with Arsenal Fan TV bringing faces and names to vague caricatures we have in our head of opposition fans, the same is true elsewhere. Every week on Twitter new vines surface of 14-year-old West Ham casuals, United fans in half-and-half kits, and this abomination. The biggest hit for some time has been the Wealdstone Raider – a Wealdstone FC fan who shouts "You've got no fans, you've got no ground!" at the opposition Whitehawk FC before offering someone out for a fight for talking to him.

If there's any proof that football is getting too big – that it is unsustainably, unfeasibly popular, and is due for an imminent crash, consider this. The Wealdstone Raider is appearing at club nights near you. My friend and yours, Clive Martin, once wrote with despair on the appearance of TOWIE stars at provincial nightclubs. Not two years have passed since then, and now here we are. If it takes crumbling stadia, a stabbing at every derby and two forklift drivers and an Alsatian comprising the average League Two team's away following to rectify that, so be it.

@Callum_TH