By Myles Palmer
Sol Campbell has a sore Achilles.
Ashley Cole is recovering from a hernia operation.
The elderly David Seaman is injured, yet again.
But Arsenal’s crocks do not seem, somehow, that important on this Monday morning.
Not with George W. Bush’s pilots ready to vapourise thousands of Iraqi children.
The imminent event they are calling a “war” is hanging over me like a huge poisonous toxic cloud.
First of all, it’s NOT a war. I wouldn’t call it a war.
Secondly, it’s already started. Bombing has already started.
Thirdly, Bush was not elected. He stole the election.The five Supreme Court judges who installed him are the scum of the earth.
So the world needs need regime change in Washington. Our future depends on it.
Normally, I click on The Guardian Unlimited Football and Yahoo World Sports all the time but lately I’ve been reading www.WhatReallyHappened.com and www.aljazeerah.info and Citizens for Legitimate Government and loads of stuff like that.
Football, to me, is the most important unimportant thing in the world.
So I’m still following it. But without my normal enthusiasm.
On Saturday Arsenal produced their worst performance of the season and lost 2-0 at Blackburn.
That ended a run of 20 games unbeaten.
Without Cole, Vieira and Sol , they might still have survived.
But when Keown went off after 18 minutes they were a shambles.
Cygan looked clueless again.
Gio is a midfield player who was given the runaround by KeithGillespie.
Blackburn were also without regulars like David Dunn, Andy Cole, David Thompson and Lucas Neill.
Arsenal have been conceding bad goals lately and the first at Ewood was a shambles.
Parlour dribbled in the last third (something George always told Rocky to never do) and lost the ball to Flitcroft.
Damien Duff missed his first volley but Tugay’s shot was deflected back to him off Yorke, and he blasted the ball past Stuart Taylor.
Second half, Duff found Tugay breaking forward and he buried a low shot as Cygan backed off.
Martin Keown and Totti?
A Gooner friend tells me that Totti punched Keown on the neck,off the ball.
The ref didn’t see it. The cameras didn’t see it. Because play was at the other end.
So Totti, as I suggested, could not imagine himself playing 90 minutes at Highbury that night.
His head was not right. Maybe he was carrying an injury which was making him bad-tempered.
After that unseen assault , Keown decided to take a dive when Totti jumped into him and slapped his ear. He made a meal ofthat foolish challenge and got Totti sent off.
On Saturday morning I had not realised that Aston Villa-Man United was on Sky.
I watched the first six minutes and saw that Villa could not win. Far too workmanlike. A Graham Taylor team will always lack fluency and finesse.
So I switched off and carried on reading Nick Tosches’s biography of Dean Martin.
Was later amazed to find it was only 1-0.
Villa had 18 goals attempts while United had four.That’s Graham Taylor: lots of huff and puff.
So Man United had reduced Arsenal’s five point lead to two.
And Arsene needed a win at Blackburn in his 250th Premiership game.
Failure would open up the title race.
Unfortunately, Arsenal had too many key defenders missing.
And the loss of Keown for the next three weeks is a severe blow.
Keown was attacking a low free-kick at the near post when he pulled his hamstring.
Surely Freddie or Edu should have been sprinting for that low cross?
17th March 2003