Ramsey the latest victim of this country's hatred of Arsenal FC

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Date	Time	C	Opponent	F	A	R	S
27 Feb	3:00 PM	P	Stoke City (A)	3	1	Win

I'm glad we beat Stoke today, but it's hard to think about the title race after what happened to Aaron Ramsey.

Incidents like this really make me fall out of love with football, particularly English football where this level of physical aggression is celebrated rather than condemned.

What's going to happen to Aaron Ramsey? Will he ever fulfill his amazing potential? Will he ever play football again? Will he ever walk again? Would he want to play in such a corrupt league where teams and players can get away with disgusting behaviour like this?

The media laugh at us and call us a soft touch. Managers and players of other teams talk with pride about how they rough us up. People make fun of Wayne Bridge for deciding not to go to a World Cup. Football has become far too important, and people simply aren't seeing clearly. Football has succeeded in distorting everyone's moral judgements.

Football is not worth any of this. Why do teams like Stoke, Bolton and Birmingham encourage their players to simply do ANYTHING to stop us playing? Why does winning football matches give human beings such motivation to assault each other?

I've criticised Arsenal a lot this season, for numerous reasons, but I'm starting to wonder if we genuinely do have it harder than most teams.

We don't have the spending power of United, City and Chelsea...

We play a possession game which invites these sorts of challenges...

We have young players who are perhaps not as experienced at avoiding them, or in some more minor cases are simply not as physically developed enough to deal with them...

We have a foreign manager who the media look for any opportunity to criticise and ridicule...

And we have foreign players who perhaps aren't considered big-names in the way a lot of United and Chelsea players are.

No one in this country really respects us, and that's evident in the way players like Taylor and Shawcross will happily throw themselves in against our 'weak and pathetic little foreigners'. You won't see them doing that to Rooney, Gerrard or Lampard.

It's one rule for us and another one for them. I hate to sound so paranoid, but be it conscious or sub-conscious, there is bias out there, and that must not be ignored.

What are football's governing bodies going to do about this?

The issue, as ever, is money. Money has made football about winning at all costs. Most teams that play like this are relegation strugglers fighting for their lives, because going down can do so much damage to a club financially.

People need to remember that football has been a great game for a long, long time, well before Sky pumped all their cash into it in the early 90s.

Introduce a wage cap and stop the hype, so there's a small hope that footballers won't continue to think they're the most important people on the planet, and hand out more severe punishments for incidents like today, and if we're getting really extreme - reward stylish and attack-minded football, so we can see this very ugly side of the game die out.

Eduardo's horror injury two years ago really shook the players, and disrupted our title challenge. Could you point at Martin Taylor and say his misjudgement cost us the title, or does the table never lie? Some journalist said last week that if we won the title this season we'd be the most undeserved champions ever.

Is it possible, over 38 games, to finish top and somehow NOT deserve it? That's a really difficult question, but with the amount of injuries we get and points we drop due to a lack of protection from referees, you really have to wonder where we could have been now, considering how poor United and Chelsea have been this season. If Arsenal haven't looked like 'deserving' champions this year, then it would be fair to say no one else has either.

I've said many times that Arsenal are too unpredictable, so I have no idea what will happen, but I do know people will be gutted if the Premier League's French team end the season ruling the country.

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