IT must be awfully trying to be involved with Arsenal. Whether fan, player or manager, it must be galling to know the whole football world is involved in a conspiracy against you.

Why can’t the rest of us just understand that our role in life is to gasp in awe at the beautiful patterns they weave on the pitch, fall at the feet of the masterful professor Wenger and apologise for daring to doubt the true path to footballing enlightenment has only been revealed to the Frenchman?

The rest of us are surely footie’s equivalent of cricket’s ‘pie-chuckers’, philistines unable to appreciate the beauty of the Arsenal Way. How else to explain the continued ill-fortune that befalls them, and the refereeing ineptitude that afflicts only them?

This belief is deep-seated, illustrated by Wenger’s revelations last week that he still seethes at the penalty decisions which went against his team in the two Champions League encounters last season. You might think a rational individual would have got over this. But that would be to deny the paranoia that clearly drives the man, and imply that he or his team occasionally make mistakes.

And of course Sunday’s game gave him plenty more fuel for his phobias. The dismissal of Adebayor, for two clearly cautionable offences, was yet more evidence that the authorities, football in general and perhaps the X-Factor judges all have it in for Arsenal. Wenger’s claim that they would clearly have won with 11 men, given the way they responded with 10, ignored the fact that prior to Adebayor’s departure, it was the team in the garish grey/red combination that looked the more likely victor. Perversely, the perceived injustice galvanised the remaining members of his side and awoke the previously slumbering Arsenal support, who at last had the opportunity to indulge in their favourite pastime of heaping derision on someone, anyone: the Emirates suddenly had more boos than Threshers.