A lot has been said and will be said about the result on Sunday, but now that some of the dust has settled I feel a bit more comfortable talking about it. On the walk (which feels longer every time you do it – weird) from Highbury and Islington to the Emirates I was saying, in a rather un-fanatical way, that I’d be happy with a point. Obviously we always want the Arsenal to urinate on United from a great height, but realistically it’s not always possible, and with the results as they’ve been this season the way we’ll win the league is by taking three points from all of the crap sides rather than duffing the big boys. Leagues are really won in this way – by consistently beating the mediocre sides – winning twice rather than drawing against crap teams is worth more than losing to one of the big sides, though the latter will invariably get the profile.
As it happened, we lost. In the event it looked comfortable for them, and we were certainly ragged at times – particularly when our heads dropped just before and after half time, but I don’t think the game was a foregone conclusion. We weren’t nearly as bad as some of the newspapers would have you believe. Arshavin had a couple of great chances at the start, and if those had crept just the other side of the post the game would have looked very different. It galls losing to a side with an entirely ginger backbone: Brown, Scholes, and Rooney, and particularly one which considers Jonny Evans to be a first-team centre back, but you must remember that this is Manchester United we’re talking about. Even the apparently rather successful advent of 3-D coverage doesn’t begin to approach the hideousness of seeing Wayne Rooney close-up. Marking him must be quite the most onerously disgusting task this side of mythology. It was also a bit unreasonable for Nani to suddenly decide that he can play football, having spent most of this season wandering around like a hapless extra in some disastrous Iberian soap opera.
Song, Fabregas, Arshavin, Vermaelen looked good. Que sorpresa. Others looked a bit off. Nasri and Clichy looked hopelessly weak – the former particularly is really not progressing as you’d have hoped from a man who arrived under the ‘New Zidane’ banner beloved of those whom the gods wish to destroy. He’s got a nice touch, but he neither imposes himself physically on games or mazily dribbles his way through them. One hopes that as our midfield makes its Singer Sargeant esque return from the Triage tent the competition for places will make him pull his socks up. I have fewer fears for Clichy – he just needs a run of games.
A note on John Terry: ha ha ha. I hate international football (particularly England) so I couldn’t really give a hoot either way, but I would say that the real question is surely whether the pleasure one derives from knowing that Wayne Bridge has been cuckolded is greater or less than the misery of John Terry sleeping with a lithe French underwear model(among others) It’s tough, but I think that the fact his liaisons varieux have come to such epic grief compromises them enough that we can celebrate. Well done John! Great cuckolding! Great morale! Great leadership! On which note, do we know yet whether he prefers to lead from the front or the back?
That’s your lot for now, and our hopes for a quick recovery against the Blue lot. It won’t be easy, but don’t despair. Remember last season how we pulled off all those great results when we were against it? Yes. There you go. Soothing. And if not, Liverpool are as self-doubting at the moment as Terry’s PR guy, so that’ll be fine.
What do you reckon?
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