When Arsenal threw away another two points against Crystal Palace and I expressed my displeasure on Twitter, I was told by a fan from another club that I was a spoiled brat.
From the outside, I suppose it might look that way.
To a person who is only acquainted with Arsenal through Match of the Day and news headlines, what have we really got to complain about?
We’re wealthy and financially secure.
We always play in the Champions League.
Two trophies in two years have arrived and we get to watch football in one of the best stadiums on the continent.
We have a team that contains stars like Mesut Ozil, Alexis Sanchez, Petr Cech and get to watch young talent develop and flourish like Alex Iwobi.
How many teams would swap places with Arsenal in a heartbeat? Most of them.
I get that, I really do.
But still us Arsenal fans feel (and display) a sense of entitlement and when you only know the tabloid version of Arsenal, I understand how annoying that must be.
That entitlement didn’t just develop on its own.
It has been nurtured and honed over the past decade by Arsenal themselves.
As we watched the team splutter and stutter, we were constantly told that it would be worth it. Ten year’s pain, for so much gain.
We’d be up there with the big boys, able to compete with the Bayern Munichs and Barcelonas of this world.
The spankings Arsenal received from both those sides this season highlighted just how far this side are from anything like that.
Arsenal fans have been fed line after line in order to placate them as captains left and titles faded early.
It’s not that Arsenal lose games that annoys their fans so much (although show me a set of fans that doesn’t get annoyed when their team loses) but the manner in which they do so.
Despite ten years of practice, they still can’t understand how to break down two deep banks of four.
They aren’t alert to the counterattack, they don’t concentrate fully allowing individual errors to gift goals on a regular, and generally comic, basis. When Arsenal drop points, you can almost guarantee that they will have done so in exactly the same manner as when they dropped points before.
It. Is. Boring.
But more than that, it demonstrates that nothing is changing even though so much desperately needs to. We are in a limbo, stuck in a purgatory that the board walked us into in order to build the stadium but have no earthly clue how to get us out of again.
Financial and technical edges that we once had are long gone. Everybody scouts the French second division these days, often without leaving their bedrooms. The extra cash generated by the stadium move has been rendered inconsequential in light of the new TV deals that makes everybody sickeningly rich.
Everywhere around the globe, football has changed and it continues to do so. Except at Arsenal.
In taking a step to get ahead of their competition, circumstance and hubris conspired to pull them behind.
The trouble is, the only people who seem to have noticed are the Arsenal fans, and the club don’t seem to want to listen to them.