Up For Grabs Now

That was fun, wasn’t it? The Junior Gunners dished out a stylish 3-0 thumping to a full-strength Wigan team. I saw the Wigan line-up and thought to myself ”Ok, so there’s no Heskey and the poor buggers have been forced to start Titus Bramble. Wait, hold on, what’s that? You mean Bruce actually chooses to have Titus in his team every week? That’s crazy-talk, at his best he’s a sort of nightmarish version of Pascal Cygan! Vela will eat him alive!”

And how the little scamp gorged himself on Titus’ tender flesh. Wenger has the pleasing knack of finding players so extraordinarily speedy that their favourite trick is simply to hoof the ball into loads of space, giving the defender a 15-20 yard start before tearing past them in a hilarious display of rapidity (I’m thinking Thierry, Overmars, pre-insanity Anelka, Gael, Theo). The second and third goals yesterday put Carlos Vela firmly in this category.

For the second Carlos tore past Boyce down the left before unselfishly crossing for Jay Simpson, who took both of his goals very well, crashed an early shot against the crossbar, and would have had all the headlines to himself in a normal game. What took those headlines off him was quite simply one of the single best touches of a football by any foot belonging to a representative of Arsenal Football Club. The only one I can think of as definitely being better was the one with which The Great Dennis Bergkamp humiliated The Distinctly Average Nikos Dabizas in 2002, though I’d love to know if anyone can think of others. 

Sprinting at full tilt and with Bramble charging towards him, Carlos struck a chip so good that God ought to have dashed downstairs, frozen it in time, bubble-wrapped the entire Emirates Stadium and turned it into an official World Heritage Site. Truly, a chip of outstanding natural beauty. The fans behind the goal watched it float in with open-mouthed astonishment. Actually, some of them even looked a bit scared. 

The great thing about this kid is that he doesn’t just score goals, he scores incredible goals, and watching him play he gives off the impression that he can do absolutely anything he likes with a football. I thought his link up play feeding Simpson in the first half was excellent, showing there’s more to his game than just incredible finishing.

Post-match, Arsene said he was very surprised that Carlos missed his first half chance. Good, so was I. In fact for a horrible moment I thought he’d caught the dreaded Arsenalitis and would be doomed to spend the rest of his career galivanting through opposition defences before needlessly pissing away great chances. We need more strikers who surprise you when they miss – they’re definitely better than the ones whose misses are buttock-clenchingly predictable. Arsene also referred to “the other team” who beat United. Yikes. No second and first teams any more then?

Two players who must be getting close to playing regularly for “the other team” are Ramsey and Wilshere. Both looked first class last night and I thought Charlie Nicholas (who couldn’t stop smiling, bless him) made an insightful comparison between Wilshere and Deco. Both are midfielders who seem to do everything required of the modern midfielder. Let’s hope that, like Deco, Jack leads his team (us, that is) to two European Cup triumphs. Let’s also hope that, unlike Deco, he doesn’t become a whingeing, cheating git who regularly competes with Cristiano Ronaldo at major international tournaments for the title of Most Despicable Human Being.

Finally, seeing Eduardo sitting on the bench in Arsenal kit made me feel all warm and nice. As would a crushing Liverpool victory at Shite Hart Lane tonight, come to think of it.

Tags: Aaron Ramsey, Carlos Vela, Jack Wilshere, Terrible Titus Bramble

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 1:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.