Bernardo Silva’s frankly hilarious cryarsing about Arsenal’s shameful refusal to simply roll over and have their tummies tickled at the Etihad on Sunday came hot on the heels of Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson channelling his former manager impeccably to bemoan Nottingham Forest wanting only to defend and play long balls in their very funny 1-0 win at Anfield the other week.
Here, then, is a top 10 of those and similar bouts of cryarsing that could easily have been comprised entirely of one particular manager. Especially Arsene Wenger, but especially Jurgen Klopp.
10) Alisson on Nottingham Forest
One of two recent entries here, with Alisson having clearly learned at the feet of the master himself with his absolutely textbook Jurgen Klopp response to Liverpool’s recent Anfield mugging at the hands of Nottingham Forest.
“It was a shame, losing points at home is not good at all but the opponent today only wanted to defend and play for the long ball.”
Shame on Forest, coming to Anfield of all places with the specific, game-spoiling intention of trying to score goals while also not allowing Liverpool to do so. No wonder people are falling out of love with the sport.
9) Bernardo Silva on Arsenal
The Manchester City man’s response to Arsenal’s 10-man rearguard at the Etihad on Sunday contained such dangerously high levels of salt that even just reading his words carries a significant health risk.
“There was only one team that came to play football.”
This, as an opening gambit, is unimprovable post-match cryarsing. It has it all, including the core cryarsing belief that there is only one true way to play football and that anything else isn’t even football at all.
Where it works particularly well is in a game like this, where Arsenal played an enormous amount of what surely constitutes football even by this absurd definition until they found themselves down to 10 men and required to adapt. Which also makes this next bit slightly odd.
“The other came to play to the limits of what was possible to do and allowed by the referee, unfortunately. But at the end we got a draw, the best we could get considering the context of the last moments of the match. We’re not happy as we wanted the three points, but personally I’m happy with the way we came to play and faced the game. I’m glad we always enter the pitch to try to win every match.”
Yes, if only the team that was 2-1 up after 97 minutes had tried to win the match, how much better a spectacle that might have been. But Bernardo was really only just getting started with his logic-twisting complaint.
When asked how the rivalry with Arsenal differs from City’s previous tangles with Liverpool, he came up with this magnificent nonsense.
“The difference? I don’t know. Maybe that Liverpool have already won a Premier League, Arsenal haven’t. That Liverpool have won a Champions League, Arsenal haven’t.”
The news that Arsenal haven’t won the Premier League will be bad news for another prominent figure on this list, but let’s also consider that Champions League part and think back on how many Champions League titles City had to their name at the time Liverpool were their main domestic foes.
8) Arsene Wenger on Pulisball
In its own way, perhaps the purest managerial rivalry in Barclays history. There can never have been two managers in Our League with more contrasting or steadfast views on how the game should be played than Wenger and Tony Pulis.
The biggest clue as to just how much Wenger despised Pulis’ methods is in the fact that for all the complaints that followed his frequently unsuccessful trips to watch Stoke or West Brom commit purest Pulisball upon his side, Wenger’s grumpiest outburst may in fact have been in response to Stoke giving – of all teams – Tottenham a thorough Stoking.
“You cannot say it is football any more. It is more rugby on the goalkeepers than football. When you see the way Shawcross kicked Heurelho Gomes, how Robert Huth pushed Gomes in the goal, you cannot say that is football anymore.”
Look, Arsene, we understand it can be frustrating but let’s not say things we can’t unsay. It’s one thing calling Stoke players thugs or bastards or bullies or cowards as he famously did in 2008…
“Do you think Delap tried to play the ball when he tackled Walcott? Or that Shawcross tried to play the ball when he tackled Adebayor off the pitch? All the players have been injured deliberately. I am not ready to listen to things that are completely untrue and make people who are cowards, for me, look brave.”
…but let’s not lose the complete run of ourselves and call them rugby players. There are limits.
7) Arsene Wenger on Manchester United
But it wasn’t only Pulisball that failed to measure up to Wenger’s exacting aesthetic standards. Not even old rivals Manchester United could escape the focus of his attacks on anti-football.
He would often be found grumping and huffing after any disappointment against his toughest rivals, but things truly reached a head early in the 2009/10 season. Already raging at news of a UEFA investigation into Eduardo for diving, Wenger watched his side lose 2-1 at Old Trafford and his head promptly fell clean off.
“I have seen today a player [Eduardo] who plays only on the pitch, but there are other points that for me are more urgent – players who play only to make fouls, who make repeated fouls and are never punished.
“They get out of the game without a yellow card, but I think it is more anti-football than a player who did what Eduardo did.
“I have seen a player make 20 fouls without getting a yellow card. If you have seen the game, you don’t need me to tell you who but their player gets away without a yellow card. It’s quite amazing.”
“Look at how many deliberate fouls some players make and get away with it. I think that’s a bigger problem because it cuts the flow of the game every time.
“People come and pay to see football. They do not come to see free-kicks.”
The final booking tally in that match was six for Arsenal and three for United, while we can alas only guess at how disappointed the United fans were on the journey home from their win having been forced to watch all those free-kicks and a win over their biggest rivals.
READ NEXT: Jurgen Klopp behind four others in top 10 Prem managers list as Liverpool boss departs
6) Cesc Fabregas on everyone
Bonus points here for Wenger disciple Fabregas who may have been speaking in the wake of a disappointing 1-0 defeat at West Ham back in 2006 but managed to extend his cryarse about it to cover the entire league.
“Teams just defend, defend and defend, they try to waste time.
“I call it ‘anti-football’ – but we have to accept this happens and break teams down.
“From my experiences in the Premier League, I would have to say that I could never play like that because I am only really happy if we are winning games and playing good football, not being so happy to draw and play in such a negative way with 10 defenders.”
Not even Wenger ever declared the entire rest of the Premier League anti-football. Wonderful purity, textbook zealotry from the young man.
5) Jose Mourinho on Tottenham’s parked bus
Scores very highly this one for sheer gumption. With Wenger or Klopp or Guardiola and their assorted disciples you can at least point to a degree of consistency, however misguided and bizarre, to their cryarsing about teams who dare to approach the beautiful game with a method and interpretation different to their own.
When the complaints come from arch-sh*thouse himself Jose Mourinho, you have little choice but to simply acknowledge and admire the sheer brass balls of the man.
Mourinho made many great contributions to Our League, but arguably the finest of all his legacies in English football will be the phrase ‘parking the bus’, one now so well-known and ubiquitous it’s actually hard to square the fact it is, in English at least, a relative neologism.
Spurs were the first but by no means last English team to ever officially park the bus in a goalless draw at Stamford Bridge in 2004.
“As we say in Portugal, they brought the bus and they left the bus in front of the goal. I would have been frustrated if I had been a supporter who paid £50 to watch this game because Spurs came to defend.”
Fair to say Mourinho’s concern about ticket-buying fans getting plenty of entertainment for their cash dwindled as the years went on, while there are also valid questions to be asked about how precisely a bus whose constituent parts included Erik Edman, Noe Pamarot and Thimothee Atouba was able to so easily nullify Chelsea’s stars.
Years later, Mourinho himself had become the game’s pre-eminent top-level bus-parker. When Inter memorably sorted out Barcelona in that epic Champions League semi-final second leg, he admitted to parking not only the bus but also the aeroplane.
But he never truly forgave Spurs for their perceived crimes against football that bright September day back in 2004, stewing on it for 15 years before serving the best and coldest revenge imaginable on that club and its fans by becoming their manager.
4) Jose Mourinho on West Ham
But if Mourinho’s 2004 complaints about Tottenham could be given the slight caveat that his managerial style had yet to evolve into its final form at that stage, there could be no such defence ten years later after another frustrating and goalless 90 minutes, this time against Sam Allardyce’s West Ham.
“This is not the best league in the world, this is football from the 19th century,” I-prefer-not-t0-speaked our hero.
“The only thing I could bring was a Black and Decker to destroy the wall.”
Some lovely Mourinho imagery there, but he was soon playing all the standard, generic cryarse hits.
“It’s very difficult to play a football match where only one team wants to play. It’s very difficult. A football match is about two teams playing and this match was only one team playing and another team not playing.”
Important to constantly remind yourself who’s speaking here. Although Mourinho was gracious enough to concede in the end that it actually might possibly have been acceptable for a team to decide not to simply roll over and let his Chelsea players do as they wished.
“I told Big Sam and I repeat my words: they need points and, because they need points, to come here and play the way they did, is it acceptable? Maybe, yes.
“I cannot be too critical, because if I was in his position I don’t know if I would do the same. Maybe.”
Think we can all now say with the very greatest of confidence that yes, Jose, you would definitely do the same.
3) Pep Guardiola on Atletico Madrid
Every top manager of the current generation has at some point or other come unstuck against Diego Simeone and his magnificent team of sh*thouses, but Guardiola scores bonus points for saving his biggest cryarse for the aftermath of a game City nevertheless just about won thanks to a second-half goal from Kevin De Bruyne.
After that 1-0 win, Guardiola produced a typically stylish and clever piece of cryarsing.
“Simeone has put Griezmann on the far right and Joao Felix on the far left, and they have gone 5-5-0. Two lines of five.
“And in prehistory, today and in a hundred thousand years, attacking a 5-5 is very difficult. It is that there is no space. Apart from the fact that they are very competitive and defend very well, there is no space.”
Guardiola knew precisely what he was doing with the word “prehistory” there, and sure enough every headline that followed included reference to Guardiola criticising Simeone’s prehistoric tactics despite that not quite being what he actually said.
2) Jurgen Klopp on Atletico Madrid
The undisputed master of anti-football cryarsing. There can be no true contender to the crown. His most famous outburst is perhaps the one after Liverpool’s Champions League exit at the hands of Atletico Madrid back in 2020, when he couldn’t understand why they didn’t play ‘proper football’:
“I don’t understand why they play this type of football with the quality they have. Koke, Saul [Niguez], [Marcos] Llorente!
“They could play proper football. They didn’t even have counter attacks in the 90 minutes.”
They did qualify, though. Which feels relevant.
Diego Simeone’s team of arch sh*thouses were always Klopp’s bete noire, his constant reference point when airing other grievances. Such as…
1) Jurgen Klopp on Tottenham, and also Atletico Madrid again
After a 1-1 draw with Spurs in 2022 he insisted Antonio Conte’s team should “do more for the game” before comparing them with Simeone’s gang, which is perhaps looking back the least-deserved compliment that Spurs team has ever received.
“I don’t like this kind of football. But that is my personal problem. I think they are world class and I think they should do more for the game.
“It’s a game against Liverpool, they have 36 per cent possession.
“But that is my problem. I cannot coach it. World-class players block all the balls. It is really difficult.
“Atletico Madrid is doing it. Fine, whatever, absolutely fine, it’s just I can’t.”
‘Fine, whatever, absolutely fine’ of course being instantly recognisable as the exact things one always says when things are definitely absolutely fine.
READ NEXT: Arsenal are Premier League winners after City cryarsing but West Ham, Howe, O’Neil blasted
