By Myles Palmer
ARSENAL is a far better club than Tottenham because the people who own the club know what they are doing.
Gooners thank their lucky stars that AFC has never been owned by Alan Sugar, run by Tel and Eddie Ashby, and taken over by ENIC.
I like Spurs and have had a lot of happy days and nights there and I have written about the team a lot and had plenty of fun up there since 1967.
I even co-wrote a book about Spurs with my friend Mark Jacob.
What’s The Story? Boring Glory was not a big seller like The Professor because people do not want to read knocking books.
I’m 100% sure that THFC will never be successful while it is owned by Sugar and ENIC.
That is why I did not bother speculating when Hoddle was sacked six games into the season.
It does not matter who manages Tottenham. What matters is who owns the club.
Allegedly, Levy spoke to Abramovich, asked for too much money, and the Russian went to Chelsea.
If that is true, it is typical Tottenham.
CARETAKER Pleat’s young team did better than Hoddle’s team when the two sides met twice in three weeks.
And Robbie Keane is always tricky,brave and sharp.
However, Arsenal have more class, more pace, far more power in midfield, a Swede who is slowly coming back into form, and TH14, who has destroyed Spurs in the past.
Arsenal can win this game with quick sprinting and eye-of-the-needle passing, their usual style of play.
BUT IAN GRANT is quite right to say they should mix it up more.
John Hartson is the king of knockdown football, the master of the flick-on, and he had three assists for Celtic against Anderlecht.
Arsene sold Hartson to remove that option from his defenders.
He wanted his team to play out from the back ALL THE TIME.
If he removed the option of hitting it long for Hartson they would have to pass the ball into midfield positions.
If Hartson was there they might be tempted to lump it long when things were not going well in a game.
A couple of years later Arsene found himself with an oddball firm of strikers: Bergkamp, Henry, Kanu and Wiltord.
That is a very strange, weird,unbalanced quartet of strikers.
And Wiltord was so erratic that the £13 million Frenchman was soon understudying a £3 million Swede on the right side of midfield.
THE KIEV GAME was very high-tempo and the Kiev players pressed fiercely at times as well as defending deep at other times. I had predicted that.
PIRES was everywhere.
Sprinting, shuffling, thinking, performing at the outer limit of his abilities, using everything he has learned as a footballer these last 12 years.
And Bergkamp was having to use everything he has learned in the last 17 years.
He was having to use his strength and his bum to keep hold of the ball and he was having to flick first-time passes because he did not have the space to do anything else.
Arsenal had to work very,very hard all over the pitch.
ASHLEY COLE and Huysev had a good tussle and one chance each.
Just after Pires missed a header, Huysev stabbed at an inviting ball when he was unmarked and scuffed it wide of the post. Rebrov used to bury those.
In both games, Kiev proved to be very good markers and very good tacklers and able to bring a huge amount of energy to a highly organised system.
Unfortunately, they lack the big personalities they had in 1999.
Shevchenko, Rebrov and Luzhny were vital players.The goalscorers and the captain were very important in the Kiev side that reached the semi aginst Bayern.
FREDDIE had three jack-in-the-box moments, hitting the keeper’s foot early on and going head-over-heels as he boldly challenged big Shovkovsky for a 50-50 ball after Henry had crossed blind and low from the right.
He also had a header over the keeper which was kicked off the line.
So Freddie is beginning to fire again, at last.
THE MARVELLOUS KOLO TOURE is still producing Roy of the Royers stuff, or maybe just Roy McFarland stuff.
Roy of the Rovers was a comic book footballer, Roy McFarland was a very athletic, left-footed centreback who was great in the air and played for Brian Clough’s Derby and England in the Seventies.
If McFarland was around today, Arsene would sign him for his pace, his passion, his energy, his air-power.
Toure is having a fictional season, improving in every game, making a great block in one penalty area in 56 and being clattered in the other in 86.
The defender played the ball, but he kicked Toure’s shin first. A tough one for the ref to spot.
VERDICT? MIX IT UP MORE !
I think Arsenal hit only five high balls into the box in the second half.
Those five high balls were in 48 and 61 and 62 and 88 and 88.
On 48,Henry nodded down for Bergkamp, who shot straight at the keeper.
Five years ago or 10 years ago Dennis would have scored and nobody knows that better than DB10 himself.
On 88 the first ball was cleared and Wiltord hit it diagonally into the box and Henry jumped in front of Federov’s face and the ball glanced off the top of Federov’s head towards the far post and Ashley Cole dived to head home from five yards.
Cole was playing box to box in the last five minutes and had just made a superb tackle on Rincon at the other end.
He is a great reflex player, very sharp and brave, and a phenomenal athlete.
Indeed, the athletic output of the whole Arsenal team was tremendous.
They were able to sustain a high tempo for long periods, although you saw both teams tiring badly at the end of the first half, giving away balls that they were keeping ten minutes earlier.
As I said on Wednesday morning, winning headers in the box is 25% of football.
If you only use 75% of the available tools, you become predictable, so you will never win the European Cup.
SO FAR, it has been Ashley Cole’s week and it might be his weekend as well. He could score against Spurs.
And his good friend Ledley King would hate that. They grew up on the same street in Hackney.
When Ashley scored that header I immediately thought back to the Valencia second leg in 2001,the game where he really made his name.
Cole had played for England after 8 Premiership starts, against Albania, a 3-1 win where he got hit on the head by a metal lipstick case thrown from the crowd.
But the Mestalla was the crucible where Ashley Cole proved he is the real deal.
“In the final minutes, when Adams was playing centre forward and Valencia broke three against three, Cole took the ball off Zahovic with a tremendous covering tackle in the box when Keown was beaten, just as Winterburn would have done. He was now, clearly, a better defender than Silvinho.Arsenal had lost a quarter-final but found a left back.”
The Professor, page 284.
7th November 2003.