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March 2001 18.3.01 Aston Villa 0 Arsenal 0
Arsenal 3 West Ham 0 On Monday most Arsenal supporters were walking around with the red and white pieces of their team sullenly trying to put them back together again. It was like your favourite tortoise had just died or the boss had ordered you take a pay cut or the lab results had just come back from the Seriously Itchy Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinic and they weren’t looking too clever. Not a good day. And then something came along to put the whole thing in perspective. A policeman on duty at Hillsborough, the day of the disaster, received £330,000 in compensation for ‘post induced trauma.’ The same article mentioned that a family that had to take the decision to turn off a life support machine that their son was on received, wait for it, £3,500. A bloke whose job it was receives an obscene amount of money for basically not doing his job. What next? The army boys bunging in claims? Me, I work in advertising, the most trivial pursuit in the world. I was a little put out at work last week, send me a big cheque now. The point is; worse things happen. At least we didn’t come back from the game in a body bag. Suddenly, as stupid and as shallow as it seems, we actually began to look forward to the West Ham game. It was a cold day, cold enough to make brass monkeys forlornly look at the hole where their nads used to be. West Ham, playing in a strange ninja grey strip and led surreally by someone who was the spitting image of Nigel Winterburn, trooped out sans Di Canio, Kanoute and half dozen others you’ve never heard of; just enough players no doubt for Harry Redknapp to use excuse number 12, ("We were down to the bare bones.") Probably followed by excuse number 17, ("The lads had one eye on the cup next week.") Doubtless, Spurs used the same excuse in the face of their laughable defeat at Derby. Wenger, with one of his eyes on the Spartak match, rested Henry and played Wiltord alongside Bergkamp. Also rested and hopefully chainsawed into little pieces and sold to the local kebab shop were Stepanovs and kLutzny (mmmm, a Freudian typing error, how apt). Back came Adams and Dixon and back came a semblance of order in the back four. Grimandi escapes censure for the Old Trafford debacle because he is a ‘chameleon’ player: plays like who ever he is alongside- takes on their characteristics. (‘Tonight, Gilles Grimandi you are a slow, one footed, Ukrainian who would only look half decent if he was pulling a plough.") Enough Old Trafford autopsies, let’s move on. The scoreline (3-0 at half time) slightly flattered the Arsenal. This was a truly miserable West Ham side; a flat, square defence composed of unpronounceable foreigners and blind octogenarians, (bit like Arsenal’s really) a midfield that had the cohesiveness of a bus queue and a forward line that was a spooky Gunner remix: Diawara and Sukor. Arsenal began purposefully but without the kind of gnawing hunger you would have expected after being roundly tonked. Bergkmap, Vieira and Adams were terrific, Pires, deeper than usual, did his excellent take on Warhol’s, ‘everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes’ Cole and Dixon were solid and Ljungberg was just outstanding; his running through the middle was incisive and full of stuff that people do when they’re running. Which leaves us with Wiltord. I dunno. Three goals, all good strikes ( a smash, a lash and a dash) and I still don’t know what to think about him; he still seems to do everything in slow motion and he still reminds me of…Diawara. I think a couple of top drawer goals against class opposition and maybe I’ll change my mind. Or it could be that I’m just a miserable sod. Cast your votes now. The second half looked exactly like a testimonial game, apart from an increasingly fractious referee who felt the need to keep blowing his whistle to stop the pea from freezing. Edu made his home debut and looked like a very cold man an awful long way from home. But he moves his head when he runs and appears to use his eyes and he looks like he can pass even though, at the moment, tackling looks as appealing as incest to him. But you never know, he may fill that Petit shaped hole. So, a game of one half really. The highlights? The Clock End deciding that Frank Lampard was fat and singing, ‘big fat Franky Lampard’ and ‘Salad for Lampard’. Totally surreal. See, a sobering dose of real reality, a few goals, a defence that’s not based on osmosis and a totally bonkers bit of chanting. Equilibrium restored. Man of the Match: Freddy Ljungberg.
Aston Villa 0 Arsenal 0 You don’t really want to know about this game do you? Duller than a wet bus shelter, exciting as soup, this was the game that had more nothings than a vacuum. Arsenal fannied about like a blind mime act and Villa, copycat drones to a man, followed. OK, we might have had a penalty, but I’d have settled for a few more shots on goal and a attitude only marginally above ‘giving a fuck.’ Make no mistake this is the utter bottom of the season; in its way nearly as bad as that Sunday in Manchester. (That’s the last Sunday in Manchester we had, not the next one.) Crap game, crap weather and Gilles Grimandi managed to get himself sent off in the 89th minute. Me, I’m with the rest of the team, I don’t give a toss either. See how they like it. However, Don Howe team impersonations aside, the big news of the week was that sacking. I thought he had done a reasonable job; but he had to go. And to make it worse they reappoint one of the old managers. I can see deep shit looming. Now, that is worrying. Anyway, enough about Cottee getting the boot from Barnet FC. Big, big games still to come and the Arsenal just get smaller and smaller. Roll on next season. (Of course, as soon as we start moaning and giving up then they play a blinder and make us look like blithering idiots. Let’s see if it works this time…) Man of the Match: No men, no match.
Arsenal 2 Spurs 0 Glen Hoddle, eh? So God finally returns to his forsaken people. After years of wandering in the wilderness harassed at every turn by the Fallen Pleatites, the Christian Grosses, by St Francis the Feeble Excuser and the Man Who is Not Sweet but is Called Sugar, and most recently by he who shall not be named but known only as ‘The Bloke Who Weareth the Raincoat’ the People of the Scraggly Cockerel have finally been delivered. However, the problem with coming into anything as a ‘god’ means that the only way to go is down. ENIC’s ambitions in appointing Hoddle seem transparently to be: 1. We want to be popular with the hoi polloi and 2. We want to be Southampton. We’re not about to stick up for George Graham but his dismissal for revealing that Spurs had a ‘limited’ transfer budget, when all he was really doing was trying to give himself a bit of leverage in the Sol Campbell negotiations, smacked of mindless corporate blood letting. A week later ENIC’s David Buchler blithely reveals to the press the innermost details of his talks with Campbell’s agent. Middle management types eh? Never a decent killing disease around when you need one. Tottenham fans are like old people; all they remember is something that happened forty years ago. Mark my words, in eighteen months time when Spurs are bobbing along mid table, full of first division journeymen, all the fucking protozoa that support Spurs will be holding up Alan Sugar as some kind of folk hero and will be still banging on about Billy Nick, Danny Blanchflower, Ozzie et al and all that claptrap about how much better it is to lose 4-3 than win 1-0. Me, I love the past, but who wants to live in a place where the main ambition for most people was not to smell of animal shit. Still, Spurs fans have always had the most tenuous grips on reality. They should get on marvellously with L.Ron Hoddle. Glenn Hoddle, eh? Probably the second most overrated player in the last forty years (Bryan ‘Man of the Match’ Robson eases in at number one). Glenn: mercurial, talented, gifted, blah, blah was a five minute player of staggering laziness whose reputation solely rest on 1. A goal that involved some sort of chip and 2. A couple of long diagonal balls. This is sacrilege, but believe me, Beckham pisses all over him. Tottenham fans dog-like devotion to Glenn is on par with a bunch of people worshipping an old stick: pointless. Anyway, anything Glenn could do, Charlie George could do better. And he was cooler. (‘Diamond lights’ eh?) Glenn Hoddle, eh? Stark, staring bonkers. Professional athletes don’t need the odd isotonic drink and a bit of training but definitely benefit from faith healers and a bit of regressive therapy in order to get in touch with all the Baldric’s and Blackadders that they were in a previous life. Handicapped people? Fuck ‘em. It’s their own fault. In a former existence they were all Genghis Khan or Martin Bormann or something. They’re atoning, see. All perfectly logical in the new age noodle that Hoddle has the cheek to call a brain. And Tottenham fans actually want this loony in charge of their team. Only two more wishes left Spurs Boys; rub that lamp carefully. Glenn Hoddle, eh? Beware the new broom. But seeing as the new broom stayed in the cupboard under the stairs and doesn’t officially start sweeping until next week, we’ll all have to wait for Glen’s All Star XI. Surely any team he picks must be better than the blue and white impostors running around Highbury today. Which brings us nicely to the match itself. The Match Itself The game started with a desperately sad silent tribute to David Rocastle, who passed away this morning. Despite what we said about Spurs fans in the preceding paragraphs, they observed the silence impeccably and deserve credit for that. Maybe the enormity of a young life terminated so cruelly infected the mood, because this was a local derby devoid of fire and passion. Only the clumsy fouling of Freund made us think wistfully of past encounters. Spurs, devoid of Campbell, Rebrov, Stephen Carr, Sherwood and Anderton looked like a bunch of gawky unfamiliar reserves, with only Kryten up front and Pleat kerb crawling the touch line to give any indication that this was the team we all love to hate. Arsenal carried on their sleep walking displays from previous weeks. Henry had a clever swivel shot ding off the post in the first half to supply us with the one highlight in 45 long minutes. The second half was better, especially when Kanu came on and decided, like the sun, that he was going to shine a little bit. One back heel at speed opened up the Spurs defence only for Henry to tie his legs into knots. Vieria, by far the best player on the park, was a forward running, ranging nuisance. One run in particular found Pires on the wing. Robert ran at a couple of players, dinked the ball right and let fly from the most ridiculous of angles. The ball flew across the goal, describing a wonderful out swinging curve that curled away from Sullivan like it was programmed. After that Spurs’ pressing game came apart and Kanu and Co began to find acres of space. The second goal was a great bit of Henry opportunism. Thierry ran from the half way line, bamboozled Thatcher in a one on one, fell over his own feet and the ball and still managed to clip it past Sullivan. Nice. At this point the Clockend quite wickedly started singing to the Spurs supporters, ‘You’ve got your Tottenham back.’ Subtle that. A subdued derby when measured against past tussles and not much of a indicator for next week when the Spurs team will actually have some players recognised outside of the SE Counties League. Man of the Match: Patrick Vieira.
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