The Gunners forward sparked a melee after throwing a ball at and pushing Conor Bradley when he was down on the pitch holding his knee after suffering an injury.<\/p>\n
Martinelli was booked along with Ibrahima Konate, who was one of several Liverpool players to react furiously, while Bradley was eventually carried off on a stretcher.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Sky Sports, Neville expressed surprise that Liverpool’s players had not confronted Martinelli in a stronger fashion.<\/p>\n
“I’m absolutely fuming with Martinelli,” he said. “I don’t know how the Liverpool players didn’t go over and absolutely whack him and take a red card. Absolutely disgraceful that.”<\/p>\n
Neville’s fellow pundit Keane echoed his comments and called for Martinelli to apologise.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t like it at all,” said the Irishman. “We know football, we know players’ reactions. First of all throwing the ball on him, standing over him and then he’s got a little knee in him, he’s trying to force him off.<\/p>\n
“I’m surprised the Liverpool players didn’t react to Martinelli a bit more. I think Martinelli, with that behaviour, is an absolute disgrace. Not good scenes. Hopefully Martinelli will have a look at it and hopefully apologise for it.”<\/p>\n
Keane praised Liverpool for their performance and believes Arsenal’s tentative display could bode ill for their title hopes.<\/p>\n
“You keep a clean sheet, you take a point, they’re the positives, but Liverpool kind of dominated the game,” said Keane. “OK, they had no cutting edge but I think it was the way Arsenal didn’t go and take the initiative.<\/p>\n
“There was a little bit of tension in the stadium and obviously that will get worse the latter part of the season, so that’ll be a worry, but all credit to Liverpool the way they dominated possession.<\/p>\n
“They showed a bit of fight, they showed a bit of swagger, that they are champions.”<\/p>\n
Reds midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai felt Liverpool sent a message with their performance, saying: “We faced an unbelievable team but I think we showed again today why we became champions last season.<\/p>\n
“This was a step forward after the recent weeks and we showed again that, even against a team who is top of the table, we can compete and we take it with us for the next weeks.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Gunners forward sparked a melee after throwing a ball at and pushing Conor Bradley when he was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[15133,61,60,5859,112],"class_list":["post-235362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-arsenal","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-liverpool-football-club","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}