Should Diego Costa have been sent off? Yes, of course. But he wasn't. He got three match ban no doubt about but it's that what Arsenal fans want? I doubt it. They need a team that is ready for players like Costa. And if your team is up against him you need to make sure your players stay focused and professional, and most importantly, stay on the pitch.
Martin Keown summed it up superbly in his column for Sportsmail this week when he said he would have loved to play against Costa. Arsenal don't seem to have that kind of spirit anymore.
The irony of all this is that Costa is EXACTLY the kind of player Arsenal need. Arsene Wenger's long reign at Arsenal should have taught him how to prepare his players for people like Costa. How to fight that battle, and come out victorious.
Unfortunately the Arsenal manager made the same mistake as he always has – he tried to control things he cannot control.
He may be the immovable force at the helm at the Emirates, he may control the enormous cash reserves sloshing about at Arsenal, but he cannot control referees. So why does he persist with his pursuit of officials? And do Arsenal fans still swallow Wenger's nonsense? Surely they're not so naïve anymore?
Costa is now the enemy, in the same way Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers and Stoke City were demonised by Wenger.
November 2003 – Wenger claimed referee Andy D'Urso didn't 'deal well with pressure' from Bolton manager Sam Allardyce as the Gunners threw away a two-goal lead.
April 2005 - Wenger moaned about Blackburn's 'physical approach'.
May 2010 - The Arsenal boss said he couldn't 'understand' Martin Atkinson's decisions in a 2-1 defeat at Blackburn.
September 2010 - Wenger complained about a bad tackle in a win over Bolton, calling on the FA to act.
He said Stoke made the game 'physical' as they lost at the Britannia in March last year; and a few months later when they lost again at Stoke, Wenger complained about referee Anthony Taylor sending off one of his players.
Wenger keeps moaning about referees, so it's obvious his words are having no effect whatsoever. He's either not important enough to take notice of anymore, or he's wrong.
The point is this: all managers moan about referees and decisions. It's an easy way out when you need to protect your players from criticism, we all know how it works.
Diego Costa did what so many players across Europe have been doing for years: he wound up the opposition. I don't enjoy watching it, but if I had been manager of a football club for nearly 20 years I would like to think I had enough experience to know, by now, how to teach my players to deal with players like him.
But Wenger seems to have learned nothing. His approach to physical teams, to aggressive opponents is to fail to prepare his team for the challenge, watch it happen, then moan about it afterwards. He keeps doing the same things, why won't he change? If you realise that smashing yourself over the head with a stick hurts a lot then you'd stop doing it wouldn't you?
It's probably one of the reasons why Wenger has failed to win the Champions League despite plenty of seasons in the competition.
'Control the controllables,' a wise manager once told me. Wenger can't control referees, they don't listen to him anymore. He can control his players, but he absolutely failed to do that on Saturday. Gabriel fell for Costa's antics. Santi Cazorla got a second yellow while Jose Mourinho substituted two players who had been yellow-carded.
And if any Arsenal fans want to blame the turnaround after a mid-week trip to Zagreb, then don't bother. If your experienced manager hasn't found a way by now to manage situations like that then you really need to ask questions.
Arsenal fans are understandably angry towards Costa. But when they calm down they will surely wonder how Wenger has again sent out a team unable to deal with a difficult opponent.
As Wenger would say, it's a case of déjà vu. At least Gabriel’s appeal has been upheld by the FA’s independent three-man commission after Arsenal submitted extra video evidence to support the defender.
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