By Myles Palmer
I laughed when I saw Freddie Ljungberg score on ITV on Saturday night.
It was a real Shenley goal. A perfect Arsene Wenger goal. This is what he teaches and this is what they practice every day at the training ground.
When I watched them play a six-a-side game last season it was very fast, direct and intense.
It was narrow football based on explosive breaks and scisssor moves between Kanu, Henry and Ljungberg.
We don’t give Thierry Henry enough credit for his assists. As well as being a lightning dribbler he can be a very creative cruising dribbler, waiting for someone to make a run behind the defence, and that is a rare talent in a striker.
Not many have the skill to play such perfectly-weighted passes as the one that gave Freddie Ljungberg the chance to poke that ball into the Ipswich net after only five minutes.
Freddie didn’t overcelebrate because he was looking for that pass and looking for that first time left-foot shot.
As RAF pilots tend to say after a bombing mission, “It was just like our training.”
Freddie’s goal was just like our training. He does that three or four times a day, every day. And he has become very good at it.
His five goals against Leicester,Fulham, Schalke, Man United and Ipswich were all THE FIRST GOAL OF THE GAME.
And Arsenal won all of those games.
His five goals so far came in the 17th minute, the 17th minute again, the 33rd minute, the 48th minute and the 5th minute.
Good shooting and good running off the ball!
Freddie chested a bouncing header off the line.
Then, as he raced onto a Pires through pass, he was clattered by Mark Venus for the penalty that made it 2-0. The challenge was a tackle right out of the NHL or the NFL- it wasn’t football. It was from a different sport.
Fast Freddie was racing towards the goal and Venus could not reach the ball so he bodychecked the little Swede and sent him flying through the air like a skittle. Henry scored from the spot.
The first goal came from a fantastic pass by Henry, maybe his best pass since the nutmeg pass that set up Silvinho’s brilliant goal in Moscow.
Nobody in the Liverpool team could have scored that goal. Nobody in the Leeds team could have scored it, even the great Fowler, who isn’t quick enough to have reached the pass.
Nobody in the Juventus team could have scored that goal either.
Juve score a lot of their goals from crosses, headers, knockdowns, volleys and half-volleys.
David Trezeguet is tall and tough and powerful and a very good target man of a type French football rarely produces.
He gets on the end of things and smacks the ball into the net.
To stop him you have to stop the crosses coming in or get to the cross before he does.
If Trezeguet gets to the ball first on Tuesday night he will score. He is on fire at the moment. He has scored 15 goals in all competitions.
I’m sure Arsenal can score gainst Juventus. So that is not the issue. This game is not about that.
It’s about how Arsenal defend and I think Arsenal will defend by playing at a high tempo, as they did against Man United.
But not allowing their opponents to score against the run of play from their first attack, as United did on that Paul Scholes goal.
Tactically, an interesting game.Davids versus Vieira. The pitbull against the colossus.
Marcello Lippi has won one out of three European Cup Finals and a win at Arsenal would send out a signal that Juve are now good enough to win it again.
Bayern could not win at Arsenal and neither could Valencia.
This was the Juventus side that beat Perugia 2-0 on Saturday after Perugia had player sent off in the 24th minute
Buffon; Birindelli (Davids 46), Thuram, Montero, Pessotto;Zambrotta, Tacchinardi (Zenoni 74), Tudor, Nedved; Del Piero,Trezeguet (Zalayeta 78)
2nd December 2001.