Football is about players and goals and winning.
And it’s about improving from game to game.
Right now, Arsenal are quite close to being a good team. But it looks a bit fragile, as if it could go either way. They need more goals, more wins, no injuries.
On Sunday many Gooners used up all their emotion before the end, as you do. They thought the game was like last season : we should have won 4-1, we had 67% possession but didn’t score till the 83th minute, we’re just papering over the cracks, Toure and Gallas can’t play together. All that stuff you’ve heard 700 times before.
For me, Arsenal started the Fulham game badly but ended it well with late goals by Robin van Persie and Hleb. Three points, no injuries. A decent first day. I want to see their next 10 games. It’s different without the narcissistic ballerina. It’s healthier, more compact, more motivated.
LEHMANN made a schoolboy error in the first 30 seconds. He tried to be clever with Clichy’s backpass. You don’t try to be clever in the first minute of your first home game. You pass that ball to the unmarked Sagna. Instead, he gifted Healy a tap-in.
HLEB was creative and his pass into Fabregas’s run was sublime. Chopped down by Baird, Phil Dowd refused the penalty. With six seconds of normal time left, Hleb scored the winner from a pass by Fabregas.
ROSICKY’S five shots included three one-on-ones that he hit straight at the keeper. He will do better in Prague, his hometown.
SAGNA thinks like a proper right back. Very impressed with that covering header to clear a cross from Healy, beating Simon Davies to the ball. Sagna has tightened up the defence.
GALLAS found Eboue with a left-footed 50-yard diagonal pass. Ronald Koeman, eat your heart out. More of that, Willie !
BENDTNER made an impact when he came on, Walcott didn’t.
VAN PERSIE took a great penalty. He can do things for himself but doesn’t pass to better-placed colleagues in the box. It’s a team game but he is not a team player. He scores great goals but he rarely combines as you would hope. He’s a bang-bang player who has days when he goes phut. When RVP did play an assist, Hleb hit the keeper. RVP never shirks a challenge, which is good, but he could get injured at any time.
TOURE had a good game.
FLAMINI played in central midfield. That’s my verdict, really, on the first game : Arsenal beat Fulham 2-1 with Flamini in central midfield.
BOCANEGRA is a linebacker. His bodycheck on Toure was an NFL bodycheck.
DAVID DEIN was at the Fulham game in a box.
The weekend’s Premier League games were quite lively and colourful.
Sunderland beat Spurs 1-0 with a late goal by Chopra and gave hope to the underdogs. On the first day of the season I’ve never seen a manager appear as shell-shocked as Martin Jol was after that defeat. He looked as if he had been beaten up before he got to the TV interview. With his “midfield”, I’d fear Everton at the Lane tonight.
ROTATION makes me dizzy but Rafa loves it. Rotation is a lottery. If you buy three tickets, you might win. But rotation works better in the Champions League than in the Premier League. I reckon Rafa is a contrary character whose season starts in Moscow in May (Champions League Final) and goes from there to April to March to February to January to December.
WITH SIR ALEX you always worry that he’s gonna have Nani, Giggs and Ronaldo on the field at the same time and that’s what happened in the 0-0 draw against Reading after Rooney broke his foot. Steve Coppell decided on Thursday morning to mark man for man and they practiced that. It worked but other coaches are not imaginative enough to copy Coppell.
WEST HAM were so bad they made Manchester City look amazing. After winning 2-0 at West Ham, Sven’s revenge on the hacks was eleven words. Asked why he didn’t play that formation with England, he said ” I don’t think I had a player like Elano with England.” Elano has vision and can finish with both feet, so he’s not like any England player.
DAVID LACEY is our most droll football journalist and has been for 30 years. In Saturday’s Guardian he ended his column with a paragraph on Manchester City :
Meanwhile Sven-Goran Eriksson, studious England coach of yesteryear and now City’s manager, has bought a new team of foreigners having apparently watched most of the players on video. Lonely men have purchased wives from the Philippines on a similar basis.
ENGLAND ? Forget it ! Steve McClaren is re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
ON SUNDAY one of my friends was offered the use of box at Stamford Bridge. Did I fancy it? Could I bring a pal?
We drank champagne, scoffed salmon salad, saw four goals in the first half, then came back into the box and had white wine and cheesecake. The party included a lovely pair of girlish women who were polite enough to laugh at my jokes. One had met, through work, Freddie Ljungberg : “A real sweetheart. Very nice and quite funny.”
Second half, Essien made it 3-2, several good chances were squandered. Chelsea had more width than last year but were more open. Two of their goals were gross blunders by Birmingham keeper Colin Doyle.
I said Malouda was a rugged, reliable journeyman but I was wrong. Malouda is a far better player than I thought he was.
Overall, an entertaining battle and a fun afternoon.The box is near the halfway line, so we had fantastic seats.
Amazing that Chelsea have no right back.
After Chelsea had won 3-2, we had a cup of tea and watched a bit of Man Utd v Reading.
Then I went home and changed from smart casual to country rock and dropped down to Kilburn to see my mates Chip Taylor and John Platania.
Chip once gave me a marvellous interview for The Scotsman and I first met John when he played in Van Morrison’s fantabulous Caledonian Soul Orchestra. Introducing the band, which includes blonde singer-fiddler Kendel Carson, Chip mentioned that John played with Van in Montreux last month.
Indeed, John can be seen on vanmorrison.com playing the very same Stratocaster he was playing on Sunday night.