By Myles Palmer
READING Tony Adams’s comments in The Observer today I was starting to think about Ray Parlour and the midfield balance before Tony even mentioned his buddy.
Great minds think alike, and simultaneously.
And of course when we think about last time, Arsenal-Valencia, the quarter-final in April 2001, we think of that Ray Parlour goal.
I figured I could remind you of that exciting night with an excerpt from The Professor, but my computer’s misbehaving.
Cannot access 8000 Sent Items that are still there, can’t find my Word documents(I work in Works).
But I’ve just found a version of that chapter which is very similar to what is in the book.
HERE IT IS :
Arsenal’s first Champions League quarter-final was against Valencia at Highbury.
They had beaten Deportivo La Coruna and Nantes and Lens and Sparta Prague and Shakhtar Donetsk and Moscow Spartak and Lazio, but could they beat Valencia? Could the team that could only draw with Lyon beat Valencia, last year’s finalists?
This was, of course, knock-out football, not a mini-league, so away goals would count double if aggregate scores were level. A clean sheet would be vital.
Wenger dropped Lauren, the only player he had who was used to playing against Spanish opposition, and brought in Ljungberg on the left against tough veteran Angloma, and put Parlour back in central midfield, which turned out to be highly significant.
(TEXT MISSING HERE)
When Pires placed a left-wing corner to the far post, Vieira headed against the bar from two yards, a bad miss, and Valencia then replied with a Kily Gonzalez cross which deflected off Dixon and went behind the outcoming Seaman, but just past the far post. After half an hour Arsenal
seemed to have run out of ideas and Seaman had to save superbly with his foot aften Carew went round him.
After 40 minutes a scrappy goal came after two players headed the ball at the same time.Mendieta crossed into the box and Dixon headed one side of the ball at exactly the same moment as a defender headed the other side of it. The ball could have squirted anywhere but it went to Ayala, who volleyed expertly past Seaman.
Valencia were 1-0 up at half-time and Hector Cuper, UEFA’s coach of last season, had his men very well-organised at the back, with the two giants, Carew and Pellegrino, marking Vieira at set-pieces.
Would be this be Arsenal’s first Champions League defeat at Highbury ? Dutch referee Dick Jol, one of Europe’s best, was sensibly letting quite a lot go, and was guilty of no very bad decisions, but he was having one of those Watch-me-I’m-no-homer nights, giving every 50-50 decision to Valencia.
For the second half Wenger switched to 4-3-3, bringing Wiltord on for Ljungberg, and Arsenal raised the tempo, but their free-kicks were so poor that Valencia obviously did not care about conceding them.
Then Vieira burst past Aimar and Mendieta and fed Wiltord on the left and he cut the ball back to Kanu, whose touch failed and the ball went loose towards Pires, who was running away from the goal when he backheeled it neatly to Henry, who spun and banged it in from ten yards for 1-1.
Then Vieira, fouled in midfield by Angloma, took a quick, short free-kick to Kanu,Ray Parlour burst onto the ball, past Kanu, skipped sharply beyond Kanu’s marker, the huge Pellegrino, with an explosive change of pace, and slammed a 27-yard thunderbolt high into the net.
Highbury went bonkers : two goals in 107 seconds had the old East Stand rocking on its foundations, a slightly alarming new experience for this reporter, who had been sitting there in an apparently solid structure through dozens of jump-to-your feet goals for twenty years.
Vieira was a towering presence in the second half and when he released Henry a semi-final place looked certain if Henry could slip the ball past Canizares’s legs, but he swerved round the keeper, and in doing that,had to slow down and Angloma’s toe just reached the ball first.
Still, this was Wenger’s biggest Champions League win, a quantum leap forward, and the fact that they had come from behind was impressive. Arsenal were worth a 3-1 win but 2-1 left the tie very finely balanced indeed. Parlour’s most important goal ever for the club was also his best, even better than his dipping shot to the other side of the goal against Sparta Prague.
Arsenal had failed to support their strikers in the first half, as the manager had said they should, but in the second, when they played high-energy football, pressurising ferociously, it worked because that is their most effective way of playing.
They cannot play cagey cat-and-mouse football like Bayern Munich. They are the princes of coming-at-you football but the dunces of wait-and-see football. Their game is based on speed and energy and skill and momentum – power, but not brainpower, not craftiness.
Robert Pires told Alex Hayes of The Independent,”What a racket! I’ve never heard anything like it. The Arsenal fans never cease to amaze me.It’s wonderful to play for a club where every man, woman and child screams for you at the top of their lungs.”
Last season Pires had been captain of Marseilles, a club with financial and political problems and a disappointed, hostile crowd, so he was enjoying happier times.
He said,”It’s an unbelievable sensation to be standing on the pitch when the whole crowd erupts. When Ray scored
the winner on Wednesday, I thought Highbury was going to collapse. As a Frenchman, I had never experienced that kind of support.That’s why I sometimes stand back and just look around me.The intensity is such that I often think the fans are about to pour on to the pitch.”
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Personally, I do occasionally wonder what it feels like and sounds like to be a pro footballer at such moments, and on such dramatic nights.
Going back to Ray Parlour, I wrote quite a bit in the book about him when I was describing the unique high-tempo game that Arsenal played in 1998, and how Ray became so effective as the third skirmisher in central midfield with Petit and Vieira, and how his relationship with Bergkamp developed as the teamwork evolved and imporoved during that Double season.
But it now seems long ago, because football moves on so fast.
The Professor seems at times like ancient history, even though it describes seven years of recent football.
So I’m glad I captured that period in my 330 pages, if only as a souvenir, something to read under a palm tree in ten years time.And I’m glad I managed to say about 90% of what I was trying to say.
Also, I’m delighted that it’s a best-seller in Hatfield and Walton-on-Thames.
This morning I was reading a round-up of Xmas football books by Norman Fox in the Indie on Sunday online.
He mentioned The French Revolution, the book I promised to review here.
Norman is a pal, but I mislaid his phone number, so I couldn’t ring him up and get his address and have Virgin send him The Professor.
Xavier, I haven’t finished your book yet.
And I don’t review books I haven’t finished. Many hacks cheat, but I don’t.
There’s a thousand ways for journalists to cheat, and I don’t know half of them, but never pretend to know about things I don’t know about, or review CDs I haven’t listened to, or books I haven’t read.
I WILL read the whole book soon, and review it here, as promised.
It contains some interesting quotes from Tibource, the fitness/rehab guy Arsene uses in Antibes.
December 8th 2002.