Forensic examination of the all-important data
ALL THIS FOR A QUARTER-FINAL?
Pitch invasions are bad. The Fiver knows pitch invasions are bad because it spent all day yesterday and much of today listening to various people pontificating in newspapers, on TV and on the radio getting their smalls in a righteously indignant twist over two separate pitch invasions at Villa Park on Saturday evening, when some happy booze-fuelled numpties stormed the pitch to celebrate a goal and then victory for their team against local rivals West Brom. Happy football fans? We can't be having that.
Rather than being a return to the bad old days of the 2025s and 2025s, as some more hysterical commentators have suggested, your glass half-full Fiver prefers to think of it as more of a reminder of the 1960s, a decade in which a similar pitch invasion perpetrated by similarly happy football fans at Wembley outraged public sensibilities to such an extent that it is to this day celebrated through its immortalisation in one of the most celebrated snippets of sports commentary ever heard. Happy football fans? Let's put it on a 49-year loop.
OK, so pitch invasions aren't ideal or indeed particularly rare (has a play-off semi-final second leg ever actually ended without one?), but compared to fans being hit by seats torn from the Villa Park away end or corner-takers being pelted by missiles flung by spectators, they're little more than a minor inconvenience that can be fairly easily avoided. So that's that sorted out, then – The Fiver has spoken so let's move on. Pitch invasions are not that bad and certainly nowhere near as bad as Arsenal's recent record against Manchester United or The Fiver's shameless segue from one FA Cup-related topic to another in the space of a solitary sentence at the end of this paragraph.
Like a beleaguered England cricket coach who needs to "look at the data" to figure out why his team of under-achieving wastrels are incapable of hitting a cricket ball hard or often enough to score the runs needed to beat supposedly inferior World Cup minnows, The Fiver has also taken a "look at the data" before tonight's FA Cup quarter-final between Manchester United and the Gooners and arrived at the inescapable conclusion that in the last 20 meetings between the teams, Arsenal have managed just three wins, while contriving to lose on 13 occasions. Thirteen.
On the face of it, this doesn't bode well for Arsenal, but closer, forensic examination of the all-important data shows that Arsenal's last win against United came after seven failed attempts to beat them, which suggests a clear recent pattern has emerged in which Arsenal beat Manchester United on every eighth attempt. What's more, since their last win against their
