Arsenal fly out this afternoon to Bucharest, where a win will set them up to win Group H in the so-called Champions League.
Steaua Bucharest lost 2-1 at Slavia Prague on September 19, so they are under pressure to beat the EPL league leaders. Coach Gheorghe Hagi left after the Slavia defeat.
The 1-0 win at West Ham was fairly straightforward, although it was a close game in which a lovely goal by Freddie Ljungberg was wrongly disallowed for offside.
Arsenal, as expected, were the better side and Almunia only had one save to make from a Dean Ashton header straight at him. Still, it was a tough game and that’s why Arsenal didn’t demonstrate their usual fluency.
Adebayor now looks like Peter Crouch with pace. He did well on the goal, holding up the ball before making a simple pass wide for Hleb to cross for Robin van Persie to head down past Robert Green in 12 minutes. Green made three good saves and a great save from van Persie, tipping his thunderous shot onto the post.
The game dipped after Hleb was stretchered off following a wild but not malicious challenge from Mark Noble. West Ham are not thugs, Noble’s not a vicious player, and the Hammers played worse after they saw a badly-injured opponent on a stretcher. If they were a violent team they would have played better.
When one team loses a player to a serious injury, the other side often doesn’t really fancy it after the incident, even though its not them who lost the player. In the FA Cup Final, Nottingham Forest were completely outplaying Spurs until Paul Gascoigne’s disgraceful, manic assault on Gary Charles, which wrecked his own knee. The ref didn’t have the heart to give Gazza a red card while he was on the stretcher. Forest went to pieces and Spurs, with eleven men, won the FA Cup.
Having backed Arsenal to win by two goals on the Asian Line Handicap, I won half the bet and got a refund on the other half. I didn’t think Werder Bremen would beat Armenia Bielefeld 8-1, so I lost that bet. But I got a Bundesliga treble on three games over 2.5 goals. And I won on Everton and Real Madrid today, the former beating Middlesbrough 2-0, while the latter won 1-0 at Getafe with a goal by Sergio Ramos. Form has started to make games predictable.
The Big Three all won 1-0, Manchester United against Birmingham, Liverpool at Wigan, goals by Ronaldo in 51 and Benayoun in 75.
Chelsea drew 0-0 with Fulham and had John Terry taken off with a depressed cheek fracture and Drogba sent off for two yellows, the second for an accidental high boot after he had not endeared himself to the referee with dissent after an earlier incident.
Apparently, Dave Kidd in The People said that, “It’s all very well wanting to be the best team in the world but first you have to be the best on the Wimbledon branch of the District Line.”
What are the odds on Manchester United thrashing Roma 7-1 again ?
What odds on Avram Grant coming back from Valencia with a win? Does he have any idea how to turn this round? He may be asking the players to do the right things. But how can he get their respect? He can’t frighten them into playing well by dropping them. They don’t care if they’re dropped. They will go and play somewhere else.
With Grant having moved from his Director of Football office into Mourinho’s office, Roman Abramovich has apparently moved into the Director of Football’s office ! How silly ! I thought Manchester City director Francis Lee was crazy when I found out that he had his own parking space at the training ground. If a director was at the training ground so often that he needed his own parking space, Man City would fail. That was obvious. I don’t care if Lee was a former City player and an England star.
On Sunday evening the latest Chelsea rumour is Marcello Lippi.