We need to talk about the Granit Xhaka incident

Sarthak Dev

29th October 2019 | 10:37 PM

There is a video on the internet, titled The horribly slow murderer with the extremely inefficient weapon, that shows a hooded assailant stalking, chasing, and beating an innocent man. He follows the man like a shadow, waiting for any opportunity to pounce with his weapon of choice – a steel spoon. After days and weeks of hitting the spoon awkwardly all over his body, he finally kills the victim.

The video is clearly made in jest, but in the seconds between closing the browser tab or switching to the next video, you wonder for a second about the distance between its premise and plausible reality should the events translate. A spoon – as the video title suggests – seems innocuous, but if you are relentlessly attacked with it, at some point your muscles are bound to swell and your bones will ache.

On Sunday night, Granit Xhaka’s mind gave way. Jeered and booed by the Arsenal home crowd once his number came up on the substitution board, the club captain threw his armband away to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, hurled the proverbial pleasantries at the supporters, and walked away in a huff, taking off his shirt in disgust on his way to the dressing room. The video gets worse every time you watch it, and the camera angle – carefully focussed on Xhaka – does very little for objectivity. The commentary slides in like a knife to his back – “It’s not good from Xhaka.”

Granit Xhaka

Twitter immediately burst into flames; Troopz, a regular at the megaphone of outrage, sensationalisation, and poor fan behaviour known as Arsenal FanTv, screamed “Fuck Xhaka. I swear, if Emery gives him the armband again..”. On being asked by the host if the fans are at all culpable for drawing that reaction out of Xhaka, he cited the money an average fan pays for a ticket as the license to show their frustration towards the captain of one of England’s biggest and most illustrious football clubs.

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