By Myles Palmer
When your team has 22 shots and Bolton have seven and the game finishes as a 1-1 draw you are very disappointed.
Arsenal also had 15 corners against none.The fans were very frustrated and the team was booed off the field, which is very unusual at Highbury.
The equaliser was, as Arsene said, naive defending.
So this is a depressed and introspective moment for Arsenal fans. It’s a time when I’m talking to myself. Asking myself questions like :
Will Vieira ever be the same player?
I doubt it but we shall have to wait and see.The summer was tectonic, a shifting of continental plates. He wanted to go and that was an earthquake.
Patrick Vieira has been the Rocky Mountains for three years and now he is the San Andreas Fault.
Most people I talk to think he has a short time left in a red shirt – October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May.And then he will go.
So if Arsene Wenger can massage and conjure eight good months out of him, eight months of PV playing at 95% of his ability, it will have been worth keeping a reluctant superstar.
But if Vieira carries on as he is now, off-form, not concentrating, then everyone will eventually say that Arsenal should have sold him in July 2001.
It’s always a problem when a player becomes bigger than the club.It’s usually a mistake to keep him and try to paper over the cracks.
Vieira’s body language suggests he is doing Arsenal a favour by turning out.And that is regrettable.
He may be the best halfback in the world, but he wants to be somewhere else and it shows. It can’t help but show.
He disguises it, just as the club disguised what happened in the summer, when his agent Marc Roger tried to force Arsenal to sell Vieira in one of the most crude and despicable tabloid episodes ever seen in British football.
Is Robert Pires the best Arsenal player now?
Easily the top man at the moment. I suggested last week that he might be rested in the Bolton game.But I did not think he would be. Arsenal struggled to produce an incisive pass without him and the manager had to bring him on to create the goal.
And Pires could have scored himself. It says a lot about Pires that he did not shoot from such a promising position. Instead, he squared it to give Jeffers a tap-in.
He was saying : here you are kid, score your first goal. A nice gesture from a lovely guy who understands Jeffers’s frustration at not starting and not scoring.
Why does Wiltord divide the fans?
Because he is the wrong partner for Henry.He is a terrible partner for Henry, an impossible partner for Henry.It has never worked and will never work.
Wiltord huffs and puffs, nearly scores, nearly makes a good pass. When he gets a free header from six yards against Bolton he butts it against the bar.He has played various roles, done OK at times,scored some goals, but never really won the crowd over.And he will never be any better than he is now.
But the fans like his work-rate?
Yes.Wiltord is fast,energetic,tough, persistent and has a very powerful shot.
He was a goalscoring star at Bordeaux, a far more prolific finisher than Henry ever was at Monaco, where he was a winger.
But now there is very little end product. Against Schalke he had a foot in the first three goals – two for Arsenal then the stupid dummy which gave the ball to Andy Moller who crossed for the goal that made it 2-1.
That was imbecilic and it is hard to believe that a pro footballer can do what Wiltord did.Dummies are for the edge of their penalty area, not 20 yards from your own goal.
There again, it is hard to believe what Bergkamp and Van Bronckhorst did with that indirect free-kick against Bolton.DB tapped it sideways to VB and, incredibly, VB carried on protesting that the wall was not ten yards away.
So the Bolton player took the ball off him and VB had to tackle him to get it back. Then he lost it again and Bolton launched a counter-attack while Tony Adams was still down the other end of the field. Farcical!
Why has Arsene Wenger not signed his contract?
I don’t know but that has not bothered me until recent days.When I was doing interviews about The Professor I was always asked about this. How long will Wenger stay? Why hasn’t he signed? And I was pretty cool about it. I usually said : he is the Arsenal manager and he will be there for another three years.
But now you have changed your mind?
I just wonder if he wants to manage Japan for six weeks next summer.I think Japan would take him on June 1st. And since he will be there for four weeks doing French TV work anyway, what’s the difference?
So he might be asking David Dein for six weeks off to coach Japan in the World Cup Finals.I don’t usually make wild guesses on ANR. And that is a wild guess.Such a scenario would be hard on Troussier, but stranger things have happened.
Didn’t you say to Brian Hayes on LBC that you don’t get involved in speculation about the distant future? That, to you, football is a topical pleasure? That you prefer to enjoy this match and anticipate the next match?
Brian asked me who might follow Sven as England manager five years from now. I said I was the wrong person to ask. I said that if football is going to be fun it has to be enjoyed from match to match.
I think punditry is an overcrowded profession.But I was a football pundit at school and at university.I was always opinionated, I couldn’t help it.
I was a pundit long before football was fashionable and long before punditry was fashionable.I can remember Match of the Day before it had Alan Hansen, before managers were interviewed after every game.
Panathinaikos?Any prediction?
Matthew Upson to head the only goal of the game.
They are due a bit of luck after being denied a late penalty when Nadal tripped Henry in the box in Mallorca.
25th September 2001.