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DECEMBER 1999
Leicester 0 Arsenal 3 Now this was a welcome early chrissy pressie. Leicester have been unbeaten for ages, haven’t lost at home this season and despite fielding the quite ridiculously old and smelly Tony Cottee, have been playing some good robust stuff. Arsenal without Seaman, Keown, Vieira, Ljungberg, Parlour and Bergkamp, had a muscular, if a somewhat ordinary look to them. Like a good school team. When Lee Dixon headed off his own line in the first five minutes we all thought that was it. But quickly Adams and Petit got hold of the game and indeed seemed to frighten the willies out of the Filbert Street boys. Same as usual; big blokes in red terrorising small foxes. It suddenly occurred to us in our fogged state that Arsenal were playing rather well. Overmars was running around like something nippy from a Warner Bros cartoon, Adams was deft and Petit was like some sort of pony-tailed god. If I had the hair I’d grow mine to look like him. Or maybe a ‘Nigel coconut’ is more me. Arsenal’s first goal came via that old Arsenal cliché, ‘the Gilles Grimandi power header.’ Unbelievable. Overhead a squadron of pigs did a fly past and a couple of victory rolls. A floating corner found about five Arsenal players fouling anything wearing a blue shirt; Grimandi turned and directed a powerful header past Flowers. Well, we’ve had a few disallowed for bugger all in the past. The que sera, que sera law evens out anything in the end. Arsenal’s second goal came via that other old Arsenal cliché, ‘the Lee Dixon six yard box tap-in.’ The pigs in the sky detonated noisily and hell began to freeze over. A smart Henry cross into the box found Lee Dixon, of all people, sliding in to claim his second goal of the season. Dixon’s goalscoring record, for this season, is now 200% better than Anelka’s. Arsenal then spent the rest of the match taking the royal pee. Kanu went close with a side netter and Overmars finished a memorable afternoon with a simple goal that underlined the Gunner’s total superiority over a Leicester side that were as embarrassing as your Auntie taking a handful of E’s, thinking them to be a new sort of water retention tablet and then spending all afternoon dancing to next door’s car alarm that’s just gone off. Solid, emphatic and as one sided as a weighted dice. Arsenalness at its best. ‘Can we play you every week?’ Man of the Match: Petit. If he’s injured, I want what he’s got.
Arsenal 1 Wimbledon 1 Remember when you were at school, in Biology, or something, and they gave you a Petrie dish full of some Agar junk and you were supposed to supply some 'matter' (usually a hefty thumb dig of something from the nasal department or a furry ball of earwax) the point being that by introducing the foreign matter you could grow a whole new culture. Well, as a tactic, it's worked for the Arsenal, but definitely hasn't for Wimbledon. Egil Olsen has succeeded in taking Wimbledon back to the dark ages. A time when the god of football lived in the sky and the ball, a small round offering, was regular sacrificed to appease his wrath. The only things he's seemed to have added over the heady days of Bobby Gould is a smorgasbord of deeply limited central defenders, an offside trap as solid as a wet fart and a mandate to his players to use their elbows more than Dick Van Dyke doing a 'cockeney' knees up. Believe it or not, for the last few seasons, Wimbledon have been playing some good stuff. Not any more. Their tactics appear limited to using John Hartson as a blunt instrument. Arsenal themselves looked a little blunt: no Seaman, no Adams, no Parlour, no Bergkamp, er, noel. Grimandi partnered Luzhny at the back and Henry partnered an absolutely frozen rigid Kanu. And just to mix it up Ljungberg played through the middle and Overmars on the right. A right old dog's dinner. Before Arsenal could settle into their usual pattern of late; potshots and near misses, Wimbledon put in a speculative cross, Cort stuck out a foot and the ball hit Manninger on his open legs and fannied into the net. Horrible little goal and completely undeserved. The rest of the game was a flurry of fouls, elbows and an appalling Lee Dixon miss from 0 yards out that he managed to just about take out the Hubble telescope with. Henry's goal, when it came, was a lightning bit of poacher's finishing, from a wide Silvinho cross. Blink and you'd miss it. That really was it. Arsenal finished strong as Wimbledon's heads and elbows dropped. A nasty little game that never really got going. Have a cool Yule. Man of the Match: Gilles Grimandi.
Coventry 3 Arsenal 2 Apparently, the one night that London had a respite from the Luftwaffe blitzing the capital during WWII was the night they decided to decimate Coventry. Fifty odd years later and Coventry decides to return the compliment. This was an horrible one sided mismatch that reeked of Boxing day; leftovers, reruns and a vague feeling of nausea when you look at all those grease covered turkey legs. When the same legs are trying to kick a ball around, you feel even worse. Only the talent scout from Bernard Matthews seemed excited. I suppose we should appear magnanimous and say good luck to Coventry. But I find it hard to like team managed by anyone with red hair. I’ve had germs more appealing than that collection of organisms at Highfield Road. Arsenal should be wiping their nether regions with teams like this and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to win anything. A horrible game to watch with a scruffy Ljungberg goal from about ten millimetres out and an absolute peach ( dribble, run, turn, beat two men and wallop) from Davor Suker. And that’s your lot. Leeds in two days and the season, like the century, here turns completely. Man of the Match: Sukor for the goal.
All week I’ve been stomping around (well shuffling like the frickin’ Elephant Man owing to a pulled back muscle) telling everyone that our whole season hinged on this game and that we would be the team to suss out a Leeds team whose combined ages don’t even make up mine or Lee Dixon’s grandchildren. I really thought we’d win this. Mind you, I think that Coventry are just footy fodder, Jim Davidson is funny and Marmite is the single greatest British invention in the last thousand years. Referees are amazing. Take Graham Poll. You could walk up to him in the street, kick him up the arse, elbow him in the face and roger him senseless and he wouldn’t even notice. It was obvious from the off that Poll and his appalling linesmen were content to let the kids throw all their toys out of the pram and be rewarded for it. David O Leary brought down his collection of kindergarten thugs, fully expecting them to get the blind eye approach they’d been getting all season from over lenient referees. Add this to amazing luck the Leeds team has been enjoying for the last three months (if you don’t believe me, have a look at that Harry Kewell ‘penalty’ and all those iffy last minute goals) and you have a team that has Premiership winners written all over it. Leeds are, without doubt the filthiest team in the league, bar none. Smith, Bridges and Bowyer were particular culprits. There’s something atavistic about Bowyer; he’s got malnourished northern underclass written all over him. The last time I something that ugly it was strapped onto the side of a fucking cathedral with rainwater poring through the ‘o’ of its mouth. Arsenal, still smarting from getting well turned over by Coventry on Boxing Day, made a hesitant start. Keown, Dixon and Winterburn were all returned to the rest home for this match; Luzhny and Silvinho being preferred at the back. It looked like a gamble to us, but once again Wenger read it perfectly; preferring the speed to the experience. There was a bloke in Arsenal’s middle who looked suspiciously like Patrick Vieira; we all thought he was suspended at least until hell was due to go a bit frosty at the edges. Welcome back Pat. Henry partnered Kanu up front with Ljungberg and Overmars tucking in behind. Still no Bergkamp though. God’s groin muscles obviously takes longer to heal the elastic bands of us mere mortals. From the off Leeds tried the kick and elbow approach. If there’s one thing you can’t do and that’s kick an Arsenal side. Our boys took care of business off and on the ball and the match settled down into a high octane niggly groove. The referee was letting the Bash Street Kids get away with murder, so the only way the Arsenal were ever going to take this game was by moving the little round thing around better than the opposition. Vieira, Petit, Adams and Ljungberg were quite superb. But Henry and Kanu were playing a game that you rarely see; the kind of football you only see at night in between the lager bloats and the curry fuelled gassed up nightmares of a fever dream. Fantastic stuff. Indeed, it was Kanu, unbalanced, one of his deceptively thin legs stretched out who managed to snap off a shot out of nothing that Martin could only parry to reduce it’s sting. Freddy arrived and smashed home the rebound. That was it really until half time. Leeds pressed but the Arsenal defence looked tighter than a duck’s ringpiece. The second half was the same but more intense; every Arsenal ball had destiny written all over it or maybe it was Adidas. Kanu, by this time was doing his party pieces deep in the Arsenal midfield. You know the ones; get a tube of superglue and stick the ball to the toe of your size fifteens and then wander all over the park with it. Breathtaking and impossible to describe without seeing it. You’ll have to wait for ‘Kanu the Movie’. It was a lazy Kanu stretch and snap that rolled the ball behind the Leed’s defence and into the path of a gliding Henry. Thierry one-on-one with Radebe took the ball parallel to the Leed’s goal line, somewhere on the edge of the area. We all thought he’d left it too late; Radebe definitely had it covered. Suddenly Henry accelerated and in a space that you’d be hard pressed to get a dozen atoms into, a gap appeared and the Frenchman lashed the ball across the goal and into the interior of the side netting. Lovely goal. This is where Leeds’ mettle was to be really tested. And to be frank they quite simply lacked the bottle. Even the narcoleptic Graham Poll woke up to the fact that the brats were throwing their jelly and ice cream around. Several cards were branded and O Leary pulled off Smith and Bowyer to stop them getting sent off. A famous victory and a decent bit of revenge for last season. Now the kids have been put to bed it’s the chance for the grown-ups to get down to some serious business. Man of the Match: Kanu.
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