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October 2000 1.10.00 Arsenal 1 Manchester United 0 14.10.00 Arsenal 1 Aston Villa 0 28.10.00 Arsenal 5 Manchester City 0
Arsenal 1 Manchester United 0 Not being privy to tomorrow’s press, I have no idea what excuses Alex Ferguson will come up with concerning his team going down. Maybe the pitch was the wrong shade of green, Beckham’s hair was in his eyes or maybe he will just come clean and admit that his moaning bunch of PLC clothes horses were soundly beaten by a gutsy performance and quite possibly the goal of the season. Arsene was taking no chances with the formation. Exactly the same as against Lazio, but with Grimandi substituting for the still suspended Vieira. A quick word about old Gilles, he had quite an astonishing game. He tackled brilliantly and brought the ball out with a fierce intelligence not previously noticeable under that shaggy head. Couple him with a majestic Tony Adams who made Sheringham look like the squint eyed council estate trash we all know he is and you had a spine that would have supported an elephant. It was a tense, probing kind of game. Man United were allowed to play virtually up on the halfway line, the gutless linesmen firmly guided by the ever raised arm of Gary Neville. The referee, likewise did every thing in his power to lubricate the United flow, booking Adams for a perfectly good tackle but refusing to acknowledge the incredible hubris and petulance of David Beckham. The game, as they say, was balanced. From the kick-off you could see Ferguson’s plan. Still playing the control freak, he left Yorke on the bench. That was a mistake. Sheringham can only respond to high or waist height balls and with Adams sticking to him like a limpet he had no chance of ever seeing anything round or leathery. Giggs was playing slightly inside and Beckham had that floating, wafting role that makes him look like a bit of a nance. Tactically, I thought they were fucked. But really, I can’t say it bothered me too much. Arsenal with Henry and Kanu up front looked sharp and with Ljungberg running through there was some real quick pinball football. Did I mention how nerve wracking the whole thing was? Maybe it was the toast with green edges I had for breakfast (well, penicillin cures things, don’t it?) or maybe it was the huge glass of red wine a mate had shoved into my hand about half an hour before kick off (I thought I was getting a cup of tea) or maybe I was having an acid flashback. It’s not often I can see every blade of grass and know them individually by name. I was feeling well sick. But then again, so was everyone else. You couldn’t put a fag paper between the teams when a long cross field diagonal ball found Thierry Henry surrounded by United players. With his back to the goal he turned, teed the ball up, swung, hit it on the volley and looped it into the air from twenty five yards out. Up it went in the sort of parabolic curve usually reserved for lobbed hand grenades, beyond the flailing digits of Donald Pleasance (Barthez) and into the top right hand corner of the net. No foreplay and then an atom bomb exploding on the old g-spot. Highbury moved six foot into the air. A few minutes later we all remembered to breathe and the United boys were shaking their heads as if they were drunk. Doubtless, Ferguson with his pallor the colour of Ribena, his voice tight with thwarted ambition will dismiss it as a ‘fluke’. Yeah, right. Until the end of the game there was a tight knot of players camped around the centre circle with odd break away. Seaman saved a couple of long rangers and Barthez pulled off at least two miracles that did his bad back no good at all. And we sat there, chewing our fingers down to the elbow, shutting our eyes and then casting them towards the massing clouds, finding all sorts of crap deities to pray to, just willing the clock onward. When the final whistle went there was such a collective exhalation of held breathe that thousands of wooly bobble hats soared skyward, boosted by thermals, never to be seen again. As the tired Manchester United supporters made the long trek back to Tunbridge Wells we all clapped one another on the back and looked one another in the eye. We knew the score. In the end it wasn’t easy, but it was a match of equals. United didn’t play bad; we just played better. End of story. Man of the Match: Just this once we’ll be different. Tony Adams and Gilles Grimandi.
Arsenal 1 Aston Villa 0 Most of the brummies I came up to Highbury with on the tube spent a substantial part of the journey talking to a hapless American who was clutching a microphone stand and asking him if he was a ‘rook star’ and telling him that Black Sabbath were a ‘bustin band’. The American, a shade over twenty, clearly hadn’t the foggiest what was going on and was obviously worried by this group of middle aged men dressed in nylon and some of the more bile inducing diamond patterned sweaters from the Pringle range. Being surrounded by people whose accent is somewhere between a senseless dog trying to dislodge something wet from its throat and bubbling mud definitely unnerved him. He’d assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the substantial portion of people in the UK were actually from the same race as his himself ie. human. Me, I don’t care what you say about Birmingham; if the Turin shroud purports to show an imprint of Christ’s visage, then Birmingham definitely has received the imprint of his arse. Consequently, I can never take teams from that part of the world seriously. Take any piece of literature or stirring speech and render it into Brum and you’ll have the whole audience tittering in seconds. John Gregory, while lacking the accent, definitely has the look. Shifty child molester eyes, dyed gelled hair that looks like a wet cat pelt and that ridiculous leather jacket he wears that looks like something off of Captain Scarlet. The man is a total nonce. His team is a faded bunch of inherited legacy players bolted onto a couple of deeply smelly signings with only a smattering of bright youngster; Gareth Barry. But, they are hard to break down, but then again so is wood if you chew it. Arsenal, of course, were going to make very heavy weather of this game. Wenger rotated the squad slightly resting Keown and restoring Lauren, Pires and someone who looked like Vieira but played like his shadow. Adams also was back along with a dangerous looking Lee Dixon; dangerous to his own side that is. The first half was like having root canal treatment with a pipe cleaner and the half time whistle was the sweetest sound you ever heard. Villa were efficient (but, so is a boiler. Not very exciting though.) And the Arse were miles away; distracted by loud noises and shiny objects, but not by round leather things. Pires, sporting his newly restrung hamstring was having a good game. He got the ball just inside the Villa half and slotted a perfect one along the ground to a speeding Henry. The defender committed early, Henry stuck it between his legs and that was enough to unsight James, who stood there doing his superb vegetable impersonation as the ball skipped past him and into the net. And that really was it. Wiltord came on and did his Diawara impersonation (remember him) and Henry went off to a red and white rapture. Arsenal’s grip tightened, Villa’s slipped and the referee, Rob Harris went completely barking. Having booked Lee Hendrie for dissent in the first half, he booked him again in the second for a passing medical inspection on Pires. That was that apparently. We all thought two yellows meant you were off. So did the other 38,000 people, so did all the players. It was only when Grimandi tapped the ref on the shoulder and reminded him of the complicated two card rule that Harris finally produced a red one. Surreal. To be honest you used to get a lot of games like this in the old days. Half a dozen pints of the black and white stuff and you’d be hard pressed to remember it even a few hours later. In fact the only thing that really lodged was those fat brummie blokes on the tube dressed like Ronnie Corbett on acid. An afternoon to be filed under, ‘I was there, but I wished I’d stayed at home and put those shelves up.’ Man of the Match: Strange, but true. Ray Parlour.
West Ham 1 Arsenal 2 It’s actually dead easy to win games if the other mob gives you a two goal start. West Ham’s league position is a bit of a mystery; they’ve got decent players, look good on the park and yet they’re still drinking out of the same dog bowl as the deeply stinky Derby. Harry Redknapp continues to display a level of cockney optimism rarely seen outside of Mary Poppins. If he still thinks the sun is shining and birdies are tweeting round about Boxing Day then his next mockney knees up will be down the frog at the bunhouse. (ie. Out of work.) Many expected some kind of conflagration in this game but in the end it was fairly tame affair, the only blip being Keown having a pop at Pearce. The surreal sight of De Canio acting as peacemaker had us wondering if those dodgy looking mushrooms with the morning fry-up might, perchance, have been of the magic variety. Weird. Even without the able assistance of a thoroughly eccentric Hammer’s defence the Gunners could have had a hatful. You’ve seen those wildlife programmes where the old elephants sense that their time has come so they wander off to die in the bush somewhere with a little bit of dignity; if you sniffed deeply enough at Upton Park you could detect that tang in the atmosphere coming off half the West Ham team. The goals, though, were a right old laugh. The first saw Sinclair completely losing his marbles with a laughable hesitant back pass that dribbled along like an old geezer on a Zimmer frame. Pires nicked in, looked up and chipped the goalkeeper perfectly. Ho, ho, ho. The second came from a brilliant Silvinho shot/cross that Rio Ferdinand decided was too good to anything with except head into his own net. I’ve seen Subbuteo defences more mobile than the Hammers. Stuart Pearce got one back; a half powered free kick that took its time in going in. Seaman continues to entertain the people who like wobbly goalies with his long range specials. And that was that apart from a blinding performance from Vieira and a spirited one from Mr Handsome, Martin Keown. A strange game and stranger still, our first away win of the season. First of many, I reckon. Man of the Match: Patrick Vieira.
Arsenal 5 Manchester City 0 I like Manchester City. Always have. I remember the barely monosyllabic Colin Bell doing painful telly ads for Shoot in the early seventies; it made Steven Hawking look like Clive James in comparison. And then there was Francis Lee, mooted as an all round player mainly because he was er… all round. He also had a tremendous left hook. Some of my most treasured memories involve his fist imbedded in Billy Bremner’s pinched, malevolent, Scottish mush. City also had the suss to buy the discarded Denis Law from Manchester United and it was Denis’s little backheel that contributed to United being relegated to the old Second Division. Happy days. I think we all have a soft spot for City because they aren’t United. They’re a football team, not a corporation, they have passion rather than pique and they’re lads rather than colleagues. We like that. They also don’t have anyone called ‘Sherringham’ playing for them. The ultimate plus. However, after today’s game we might have trouble remembering that we regard them as kindred spirits; they do seem to have a bit of an attitude problem. Maybe it’s fear. They want to stay up, they want to do well, but they don’t actually want to play any games to achieve that. But they seem to expect to tackle, push and kick and then throw a right strop when anyone does it back to them. We all thought the referee was slightly favouring them in 50-50 balls but when Henry was through on goal and brought down by Tiatto, the City crowd went bonkers when their bloke had a second yellow followed by a red card waggled at him. I reckon he should have had a straight red. But the City fans sent up a moaning ululation on par with a group of wailing women covered in purdah. But the free kick that ensued definitely opened up the floodgates. Before we go through the goals it’s suddenly occurred to us why most teams that come to Highbury manage to out sing the home supporters. Simply, they sing because they have nothing to talk about. It’s like being adrift in a lifeboat, you sing to keep your spirits up and avoid thinking the unthinkable ie, that your team is really a bit shite. Arsenal fans, not even average singers, are magnificent talkers. They always have something to say and they always have opinions. Only rarely do they feel the need to subsume their individuality in a sing song. Mind you, they do talk some complete sphericals. The protozoa who sit behind us spent the bulk of the game talking about the Wizard of Oz, Sufi dancing and the ‘Emerald God.’ Maybe singing as the City did, ‘you’re going to win fuck all again’ makes more sense. And now. The goals. 1. Bergkamp flicked the free kick to Ashley Cole, who was deputising for Silvinho. The youngster lashed it through the wall and Weaver was picking it out the back of the net before it stopped rolling. Cole, if you haven’t seen him, is a brilliant prospect; good vision, great pace and terrific in a tackle. So unlike the other home grown vegetables of yesteryear; Hillier, Morrow and Campbell, Cole is a genuine prodigy. The joy on the faces of his team-mates as they mobbed him following the goal brought lumps to where there should be none. 2. A brilliant back heel from Ljungberg fell for Bergkamp who angled the ball around a gaggle of defenders and squeezed the ball just inside the post. 3. Henry did the hard work, poked the ball through to a rampaging Wiltord who slotted the ball between the keeper’s legs 4. As above, but the other way around. Wiltord supplied Henry. Thierry finished cool as a six foot cucumber. 5. As above. Another great Henry finish. Sure, it could have been ten, but Arsenal settled into a rhythm rather than just take the piddle out of a team that started well but finished terrible. We still like Manchester City and with their local derby coming up soon, we all know who we’ll be cheering for, but they must do something about that chip on their shoulders, otherwise they’ll end up like that other well balanced Manchester side; a chip on both shoulders. Man of the Match: First half: Ashley Cole. Second: Thierry Henry.
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