Of the many things to have irritated Jamie Carragher since he quit football for punditry, Arsenal's proclivity for taking heaps of pictures of themselves to celebrate a 2-1 win at home to West Brom and other obscure footballing feats is right up there.
It's winding me up - it's an absolute joke.
It was one giant going to another giant. Of course celebrate, but it’s nonsense all of these team pics in dressing rooms - normally you have them with a cup! It’s nonsense and they need to stop doing it.
It turns out that these selfies do, in fact, serve a purpose: they helped inspire Leicester City to the most improbable title victory in decades.
Jonathan Northcroft of The Sunday Times has written a book entitled Fearless: The Amazing Story of Leicester City, and the same paper carries some extracts from the book in today's paper.
The extracts reveal that Arsenal's last minute victory over Leicester at the Emirates in February, and the subsequent slew of millionaires glorying in such a monumental victory gave Claudio Ranieri's side the drive to win the league.
Robert Huth says that this moment was the key to the title win:
For me, the key point in the season was when we lost to Arsenal and it was last-minute. Everyone was celebrating. We were sitting in the changing room. They were doing selfies.
Even though we were still top. We have a group on the phones. A few of the lads stuck a few pictures up and it got the blood boiling. Certainly, it gave us an extra yard in the next few games.
Kasper Schmeichel agreed:
Losing the game in the way we did? Seeing Arsenal celebrate as if they had basically won the league against us: that a victory against us could mean so much to them? It really showed how far we'd come.
Watching them [celebrate], for me, was actually a boost.
As did Andy King:
There were people after that game who thought they had won the World Cup! They were on their knees, pointing to the skies, doing victory laps of honour...we were like, 'hold on'.
After the game, Leicester didn't lose any of their remaining 12 games. Arsenal took one point from their next three games.
That record is bad enough for Arsenal. Furthermore, it's since been revealed that some of the Arsenal players don't even run their own social media accounts.
[The Sunday Times]
