Arsenal’s soccer is a joyless eyesore – however these calling for an asterisk are simply bitter

BRENT A GOB: This week, Harry’s sticking the boot into the asterisk-wailing folks crying about Arsenals ugly football – and slaughtering the VAR vandals who robbed Wrexham

I’ll be the first to tell you that Arsenal are about as gripping to watch as Gabby Agbonlahor giving a lecture on particle physics.

Their football this season has been as cynical as Liam Gallagher nursing a hangover – and with even less class. But bozos like Alan Pardew claiming the Gunners deserve an asterisk next to their name if they win the title are so deluded they might as well apply to be Eni Aluko’s PR manager.

There isn’t some sacred, pre-approved way that football matches must be won. Arsenal aren’t everyone’s cup of tea to look at. But if it wins them the Premier League, so what?

Winning isn’t a beauty pageant, it’s about results.

Lest we forget, Leicester’s 2016 title-winners played a brand of football that was uglier than Nick Griffin’s face and his politics combined, but no one demanded an asterisk for them.

Granted, unlike Leicester, Arsenal actually have the players to win it in style – and by focusing on this joyless, risk-averse, time-wasting garbage – and by becoming the league’s ultimate corner Karens – they’ll be as memorable a title-winning team as Samuel Eto’o was an Everton striker.

But remembered or not, their name will be on the trophy – and if the rest of the league doesn’t like their style, then they should shut up and work out how to beat them.

Pulling a Paul Scholes – i.e. moaning relentlessly without offering any sort of solution – will achieve exactly what Wayne Rooney achieved as a manager: zilch.

An absolute VARce

I’ve finally clocked what VAR actually is. It’s the footballing equivalent of that HR-obsessed jobsworth who lives to ruin your Friday.

It’s the fun-police calling out a ‘microaggression’ that literally nobody saw, nobody felt, and nobody gave a toss about until some nerd in a windowless room in Stockley Park started squinting at a screen.

Take Wrexham, for example – f***** over by the biggest case of pedantic nonsense since the invention of the parking ticket. They were robbed against a Chelsea side who needed 120 minutes and two dodgy refereeing calls to beat the cast of a Disney+ documentary.

Firstly, Wrexham had a man sent off for a challenge on Alejandro Garnacho that was much like Viktor Gyokeres – menacing from afar, but pretty powder-puff up close. But that didn’t stop Garnacho from producing more rolls than a high street bakery to make sure the officials fell for it.

Then, a tight offside call denied them a late equaliser. Mind you, ‘tight’ is underselling it like Manchester City undersold Cole Palmer – it was the sort of microscopic margin that makes the gap in Madonna’s teeth look like the Dartford Crossing.

Granted, it was technically offside. And we can’t just bin the rulebook to suit underdog narratives. But it’s ridiculous that these laws are being enforced by people who understand the soul of the game as well as Chelsea understand the concept of sensible recruitment.

The offside rule exists to prevent goal hanging, not to give dweebs with more camera angles than brain cells a chance to calculate a striker’s toenail trajectory.