Penalty at Liverpool, by Simon68 from Arsenal Times

Bit old now, but this was an excellent post so here it is:

As the thread about the penalty and the evidence states, the referee got the decision totally wrong.

Lets assume for a minute that we weren't hard done by and that Babel was booked for diving or that Gallas just cleared the ball as he would have done.

Would we have been able to hold out for a further 6 minutes including injury time?

On the basis that we had conceded on average a goal every 60 minutes over the two legs, the assumption would have to be we would have.

That would have meant we were in the CL semis and not Liverpool.

Add in the penalty which we undoubtedly should have had at The Emirates (not to mention Bendtner's goalline clearance), and the margin over Liverpool would have been even more emphatic.

And given our superiority in both games it would have been no more than we deserved.

On that subject, it's interesting that so many people, both so-called experts, ex-players, journalists, fans, blogs etc. are so eager to put forward the theory that we 'ran out of steam' on Tuesday. I have replayed the second half of the game and if that was the case it is even more remarkable that we played much the better football, crisper passing, better movement, and created better chances than Liverpool.

Liverpool ran around alot, spoilt some of our play, fouled, dived, and put together a couple of decent passing movements and had one moment of excellence from Torres.

My question is this:-

Being pretty certain we would have gone through with fair/competent refereeing, would there be so many people talking about summer clearouts or apportioning blame to players or saying AW should have spent millions in January (hindsight's a great thing isn't it?) or, f*ck me, that AW isn't good enough?

I know fine well what the answer is, but are you lot big enough to admit it?