Referee Peter Bankes halted the north London derby between Arsenal and Tottenham in the first half due to a technical communications issue in the stadium. A stoppage of five-and-a-half minutes took place as teams waited for the problem to be resolved, as Gary Neville lashed out at the delay while on commentary for Sky Sports.
“This is ridiculous, the whole game cannot stop just because of an IT issue,” Manchester United icon Neville said. “This is an absolute nonsense, one of the most important games of the season and the players all now have to reset. The game cannot be stopped for two minutes because the linesman cannot communicate with the referee, we have been playing football for 100 years without it, so I think we can play another five minutes without it until they work it out.
“It is an absolute shambles…. I do not know how everyone else is feeling at home, but I am absolutely fuming. It is an absolute joke.”
The issue stemmed from the linesman’s equipment, which had to be changed as the players had only been competing for 10 minutes before they were told to stop.
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Igor Tudor, Spurs’ interim manager in his first game in charge, took the opportunity to gather his players around and deliver some tactical instructions, having struggled in the opening exchanges.
The home supporters took the opportunity to try and galvanise the team, singing chants about former player Dele Alli, who is at the game as a special guest of the club.
Viktor Gyokeres had two early chances for Arsenal, a header that was well saved and a curling effort from the edge of the box, having made a smart run in the channel.
Ahead of the match, Mikel Arteta urged his under-fire stars to “show what they are made of” after dropping points to Brentford and Wolves in their previous two Premier League matches.
“It’s not part of my vocabulary,” Arteta said about his players being given the tag of ‘bottlers’ in recent games. “What I have seen is a tremendous reaction again and I am not surprised at all.
“When you lose points with the last kick of the game and in a very unpredictable manner, nobody can really understand that. But this is football and that is the beauty of football. That was a chapter. We have a long season and chapter 27 says we drew against Wolves in this manner.
“What I am interested in is the next one. What is this team made of? What do we do about this and how we write our own destiny from here and going forward?
“That’s it. You have to react to it because life moves on and as unfortunate as it was, there is nothing we can do. However, what we can do a lot about is what happens next.”