By Myles Palmer
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Arsenal 4 Leicester City 0
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Just three main points about the Leicester walkover.
Firstly,the realisation that Arsene and I seem to be on the same wavelength again.
Secondly, the boys played a different kind of football, using Pires and Bergkamp together to good effect.
I’ve always said that they best thing you can do for a skilful footballer is give him another skilful player to play with.
Thirdly, it was by far the hottest day I have ever known at Highbury.
I was thinking : Jamaican heatwave comes for Carnival weekend. I remembered a very hot sunny day at the Makita Tournament, Arsenal v Sampdoria. But that was nowhere near as hot as this.
It was so hot that I thought Arsenal, 2-0 up at half-time, might not score again. I figured both teams would tire, and Leicester would sit back, intent on damage limitation.
I had hoped that Arsene had the same views of the 2-1 defeat by Leeds as I did. As I watched that game on TV, and re-watched the video, I thought: There is something missing here. Something called intelligence.
Petit and Bergkamp, especially, gave Arsenal strategic intelligence, and Overmars also played intelligently.
When Petit was sold, and Bergkamp was dropped, Arsenal often played in a dumb way.
So I hoped Arsene would pick Dennis Bergkamp and Giovanni van Bronckhorst, which he did.
He surprised me, and Leicester, by using Bergkamp up front as a centre forward.
When Gio won a tackle with Wise in the first minute he prodded the ball to Pires, who passed to Bergkamp, who hit a shot from just inside the box.
It was a trademark shot from Dennis, right foot, a forceful sidefoot curler which went beyond Tim Flowers’s left hand. I was sure it was going in but it flew two feet past the post.
When Arsene came in I asked the first question.
“Was that the hottest day’s football you’ve ever known at Highbury?
He smiled and said, “I felt we played in Yaounde or Angola. It was African heat.It looked like we were serious in the first half, tried to get a good pace in the game. And of course we dropped physically in the second half.
“I was scared before the game because we gave a lot Tuesday
night and for some players it was the fourth game today. That’s why I was happy to be 2-0 up at half-time.In the second half ten pace dropped and we just tried to keep the shape and the ball.And finally in the last 15 minutes we got two more goals.”
When I asked him what he thought of Gio, Arsene said,”His positional play, his intelligence, was great.He still lacks a little bit the pace of the game.”
Someone asked about the red cards for Wise and Vieira.
“For me, strictly applying the rules, he could give a second yellow card. I expected the referee to calm things down. It was not a major incident.That kind of thing last year, at the begining of the season you got a yellow card, in November you got the referee calming things down. He could have gone for both. He went for the first solution And we have to accept it now.
But shouldn’t both of them have learned a bit of sense by now?
“Patrick at that stage of the game was already physically a little bit tired.He had played his fourth game in nine days and maybe he was a little bit nervous.Because he has not, at the moment, really found his game.”
It was surprsing that Arsene dropped Thierry Henry to the bench. Henry showed just how out of touch he was when he came on and pulled down a perfect long pass from Gio, and poked a panicky, lame shot towards Flowers.
Overall, as I say, it was a different style of football, with short, sharp passes, more play round the ball.
It’s as shame that they do not play at Chelsea THIS Saturday because it woulld have been nice to spend five days refining that style, with Pires working the ball forward from the right flank, and playing balls low across the six yard box, as he did for the first two goals by Ljungberg and Wiltord.
Leicester are a very poor side, but this match was significant because it showed us that Robert Pires gives Arsene Wenger a bigger train-set.
Pires can play in four positions, so the variations are infinite for the manager. He knows that Pires can PLAY creatively and productively from four positions, not just fill in.
Arsenal are a high tempo team but no team could sustain a high tempo in Saturdays heat.So the conditions AND the personnel switches combined to give us a different style of football.
It has to be said : the absence of Parlour and Henry gave Arsenal a coherence and fluidity they have been lacking. Both Dutchmen are smart team players.
Pires laid on two goals for Ljungberg and Wiltord in the first 28 minutes then sub Henry had a shot which went in off Junior Lewis (77), and Kanu nodded in a rebound at the death for 4-0.
The game, which was a no contest anyway, became tedious. During a stoppage Vieira walked three yards to lean down and put his head on Wise’s head.
My verdict on this incident?
It’s not up to Mr D’Urso to act like a boxing referee, getting between two men and shouting “Break!”. There are only two boxers in a ring. But here there were about ten players in a small area when the Wise-Vieira tete-a-tete happened.
It was a stupid thing for Vieira to do. And yet he still maintains he did not deserve a red card.
When I got home I immediately took off my sweatsoaked shirt and clammy trousers and sat in my boxers watching the BBC Nine Oclock News.
The weatherman said it was the hottest bank holiday in London since 1943.
I did a newspaper match report on the game. If you’re interested, it’s at www.sundayherald.com.
My wife Jan said she liked the line about the big cloud coming over. I told her that I wasn’t being flippant.
I said, “You had to be there to know how important that cloud was. It was the most significant cloud to ever come over Highbury. The temperature dropped ten degrees in one second.”
28th August 2001.