‘Arsenal’s Gabriel ought to be banned for shameless Brighton dive – he is pathetic’

BRENT A GOB: In this week’s edition, Harry Brent goes after Arsenal defender Gabriel after his viral dive against Brighton, and at the fans debating Dominik Szoboszlai’s volley

I’m so glad it was Gabriel who cost Arsenal in the Champions League final by missing the decisive penalty – because that bloke deserves good fortune about as much as Florian Wirtz deserves his £116million price tag.

For all I know, Gabriel might be a diamond of a fella off the pitch. He probably loves his kids, helps little old ladies cross the road, and nurses injured chaffinches back to health. But on the pitch, he’s about as likeable as sandpaper in your boxers.

He went viral at the weekend for diving to win a free kick against Brighton in a display so annoying and slap-worthy it might as well have been sponsored by James Corden.

While shielding the ball as it trickled towards the corner, he waited for one of Yasin Ayari’s arm-hair follicles to nudge a couple of oxygen atoms in his direction, then collapsed to the floor like a Victorian maiden fainting at the sight of an exposed ankle.

Look, I get it. It’s trademark Arsenal s*** housery, and Gabriel is better at it than Liam Rosenior is at spouting cringe, David Brent-esque coaching jargon. But why, with all the cameras in the stadium and the relentless, unwholesome hard-on modern football seems to have for VAR, can we not stamp this nonsense out?

Going down easy is one thing, but this was taking the absolute p***. It was blatant, shameless deception – i.e. the Ryan Giggs school of family values.

Diving will never be eradicated completely since the line between simulation and a foul is thinner than my patience. But when Gabriel is caught dead to rights, actively conning the referee, what, precisely, is stopping us from punishing him retroactively? Book him. Ban him. Fine him. I don’t care. Just do something.

VAR is a bigger PR nightmare than Kanye West. So here’s an open goal to curry favour with the fans: clamp down on objective cheating and cut Arsenal’s whingey Brazilian man-baby down to size. What’s not to love?

A volley of folly

The online debate over whether Dominik Szoboszlai’s goal against Tottenham last week was actually a volley has been driving me up the wall.

Call me a tedious pedant if you must, but watching football Twitter trying to define what a volley is was like watching Robert Sanchez play out from the back – a total embarrassment where everyone involved got it catastrophically wrong.

First things first: “volley” is an umbrella term. Like Luke Shaw coming back from a six-week summer holiday, it’s unhelpfully broad. So let me break it down.

Szoboszlai controlled the ball on his chest, let it bounce, and struck it on the way back down. It was, by definition, a “volley”, since the ball was airborne. So to the muppets claiming otherwise: you’re about as dense as a bowl of Sean Dyche’s pre-season porridge. But it wasn’t a proper volley.

Pretending – as many did – that Szoboszlai’s goal belongs in the same bracket as proper “full volleys” like Marco Van Basten vs the USSR, or Zinedine Zidane vs Bayer Leverkusen is either dishonest or, like anything that comes out of Eni Aluko’s mouth, stupid.

Thumping the ball first-time out of the sky, and guiding a shot home after you’ve cushioned it, are two completely different things. They’re as night and day as Trent Alexander-Arnold whipping in a cross and Trent Alexander-Arnold tracking back.

Oh, and the folks calling it a “half volley” are like Gary Neville at Valencia: utterly out of their depth. Half volleys are those struck the split-second the ball bounces off the ground. Think Papiss Cisse vs Chelsea.

Cool. Glad we cleared that up.