Keir x Keown: Labour leader and Arsenal legend talk VAR, Arteta in Cabinet and Sambas

I’m going to disagree. It’s the one area that we can get right. These are Nazi lack style. These are my old Giselle’s here. I haven’t kicked the future Prime Minister yet. That’s to come. Played yesterday. How did that go? We lost. There’s nothing good about losing. Hello, this is Metro at Saint George’s Park, the headquarters of the FA. Now I’m joined by footballer, pundit and Arsenal legend Martin Keown and styhard Arsenal fan Sergeir Starmer, who also happens to be the the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition. Have you two met before this? We have, yes. We’ve met once before, yes. We were trying to support a bill for tailgating, which, how’s that going Kiera? I don’t know where that’s going through, isn’t it? That’s going through. We’re now deep in the in the regulated bill. Obviously that’s the big thing for tomorrow. But that was that was a few months ago, yes, in the cost a few months ago. I said to Martin, I’ve watched you play a few times and I think he said sorry about the behaviour. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I support. I’m apologising everywhere I go right now to former players, strikers that I’ve played against. Yeah, everywhere. I seem to have kicked somebody. I haven’t kicked the future Prime Minister yet. Yeah, that’s to come. Yeah. Well, just before we started filming, we were talking about the footwear. We did want to talk about the the footwear. These aren’t Sunak style. These are not Sunak style. These are my old Giselles, but they’re not far off. Cheeky pair of Giselles. Giselles, you want to talk us through your your feet with Well, this is because you’ll see no end of politicians in seat and tie walking onto a football pitch and trying to play football with more than issues on it doesn’t work. So I thought if I’m coming to the training ground, they’re going to wear something that I can actually kick the ball with head of these. Have you had an opportunity to a little, a little dribble here and there as we’re up with the under 17? England, we haven’t seen, we haven’t seen your skill set yet, have we? Tony Blair was doing that, wasn’t he, with Kevin Keaton? Back of the day? Yeah. Football. I had him. He did. He did arrive with a proper pair of shoes on. You’ll have to come down on a Sunday and watch me play. Play yesterday. We lost. Yeah. There’s nothing good about losing. Well, as a matter of fact, losing is something that I was wanting to to bring up with you. This is. Yeah. No, but there’s something about politics and football where high profile losses and things not going your way is very much in the public eye and I was curious about how, you know you’re on the right track despite these things going wrong. I’m starting it can happen with football managers as a losing streak at the start. I think there’s a number of things bound up. Would that be very, very interesting in Martin’s view on this? Because I think there’s a difference between the very big things and then the sort of minor setbacks. So if you take the Labour Party four and a bit years ago, we lost the 2019 election really badly. So this is a football team getting relegated doing really badly and the electorate rejected us. At that point. I felt very strongly this is not the point for we just got to try harder. We’d get through the next game. We had to stand back, analyse why did that happen? What have we got so fundamentally wrong? How have we drifted so far from the sort of working people that we’re here to represent? And we had to do fundamental change. So we turn the Labour Party inside out and over four years have got ourselves match fit. I think then along the way this all in, in football where you you’re doing all right. And then there’s a glitch. I think that is a different, you must have gone. Yeah, probably both those experiences. You have to go through that disappointment, don’t you? And it’s a kind of what you learn from it when it doesn’t go particularly well. So I suppose you’re trying to put that in a football in context. You know, in the Wenger years, we we were losing games. We, I mean, remember the Liverpool game where we lost the FA Cup final and we were on the pitch saying, well, we can’t allow this to happen again. You know, we know where we’ve made the mistakes. We, we might need to change some of the personnel, but essentially we, we know what we need to do next. I suppose that’s what it’s like for you if you’re moving into a general election. But there, there is the overlap because it’s all about preparation. It’s about thinking where, where have we got to be in, you know, whatever, six months, four months, whenever this election is going to be. Same with foot. I mean, here we are at Saint George’s Park. We saw the under 17 women’s team and women’s team, they’re about to go out in the competition. It’s all about the preparation as they get ready. And that’s the same in politics. It’s about preparing professionally going to happen next and being ready for it because when that election comes, if we are privileged enough to win it, it’ll be like the whistle going. Yeah. And you’re on the pitch. We’re stood in the dressing room. And I was thinking that about your, your team. You’ve got you’re there. They must be sort of tapping into this and thinking, well, this is how we’re going to have to run our government a little bit. Yeah. Well, it was interesting being in the in the changing room there. Martyr has done it many times. But to have that position, to have that shirt is an amazing thing, whether it’s for your country or your club. But someone’s got to make the decision about who’s wearing what shirt. How many cabinet ministers have you? Well, we’ve, we’ve got about 30, but we’ll be reducing from that. So. But it won’t be 11, a little bit more than that. So you’ve got to go through that. You’ve got to identify the people you can trust, because we’re going to have to trust you, haven’t we? Yeah, yeah, if you get in kind of a team and it’s the same, you’ve got to have a team that actually coheres together. If you look at the Arsenal team at the moment, one of the strongest things that I think Arteta has done is to build a team rather than a group of individuals. That may seem like a but it’s a culture as well, isn’t it? So he’s built like a culture of behaviour. It seemed that there was one or two that weren’t adhere into that and he sort of was quite, quite disciplined. He made some really big calls at the beginning and I I think when people are looking to who’s going to vote for who, I think people are looking at sort of how they live their lives. I think all of that’s quite important as well. That’s been a big disappointment, I suppose, for people, general public, watching some of the leaders, how they behave and how they lead their lives. I don’t want to name names, but it seemed that people could felt they could get away with anything. And I think it’s right to be the right role model as well, isn’t it? Yeah. And that is about mindset and that is what’s happened at Arsenal. It’s what happened with both the men’s and the women’s England teams, The culture of the team and how you play for the team. You’ve got to have it in politics and that’s hard because it requires discipline, focus, working as a team the whole time. I’d like to know which cabinet position you would give Michael Arteta if he was in. I think he would have to be, he’s too busy at Arsenal about it. He would have to be something like Cabinet Office right in the middle of it, making everything work, the sort of the, the central hub, if you like, making sure that all the other bits were operating properly in that passion. But I mean, he, he, we often wanted to replicate his style because obviously there’s the famous footage of preparing for the game Anfield where he had through loud speakers when they were training. You’ll never walk alone. So the, so the, I’m not saying got used to it. I’m wondering what the equivalent of that is for the shadow cabinet, have a meeting where there’s sort of the the noise of the House of Commons chamber or something going on. Yeah, just quickly, local elections are coming up. Obviously that includes the the London mayor elections. And that means that all eyes are on Count Bin face. Of course. I thought you could ask me why Sadiq is a Liverpool fan. Yeah, he is. Well, it’s good on there. He’s from Tooting, isn’t it? Yes, a Tooting Liverpool fan. You’ll have to put that everyone supporting Liverpool for that too. Well, Count Bin Face one of his policies that has just been announced is that he would ban VAR in the aftermath of the the Coventry controversy. I’d, I’d be intrigued to hear if you would, you would back that. No, we need it. We need it. We we just need it to be done better, don’t we? I, I think the Coventry game is a really good example of where the discussion needs to be here because that was 120 minutes plus how many seconds with one minute electoral time. So this is classic cup. Come back from three mil down 3 all your Coventry. This is a giant killing. It’s a really well worked goal and it’s ruled out because there’s what, a toe bail of difference between the attacker and the defender? Don’t tell me a toenail gives you an advantage in football. I would change the offside rule. I wouldn’t change the AR, I’d change the offside rule to make it more beneficial for the attacking team. I’m going to disagree because I feel that that’s the one area, that’s the one area that we can get right, isn’t it? So it’s objective, it’s not subjective. He’s definitely off. So if he’s off, he’s off. It’s unlucky, but we all have to, we have to try and accept it and it’s kind of like as a pundit now, we have to sort of, we have to be very careful because we have to show we’re talking about respect here. We need to respect the decision, OK? The officials sometimes get it wrong. I mean, there was other games at the weekend that we saw, the Nottingham Forest, Everton game where there were potentially 3 penalties, the Northern Forest and all of those perhaps should, perhaps should have been. But no, it’s just these, these are really teething problems. I like to think we look back in 10 years time and say, my God, look at that. You know, it’s like going to the moon with a small computer as we did all those years ago now. It’s so advanced, the technology, they’re probably superimposed it over some of these old instance and said, my God, he wasn’t actually offside or he wasn’t, but we just have to. We’re in the early years of it. Let’s hope it gets a lot better going forward. Great. Perfect. Well, I think we’ll lap up there. Thank you very much for for doing. Good luck. Thank you very much. Good luck.