By Myles Palmer
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No Thierry, no Freddie, probably no Sol.
Can Arsenal beat Chelsea without those three?
Well, Vieira and Lehmann are in top form.
But of course you can’t compare Blackburn with Chelsea because Blackburn are 14th and Chelsea are champions and 11 points above Arsenal in second place.
Still, Vieira was fantastic in Cardiff.
He was awesome. He was the best player on the pitch and by far the coolest, despite amazing provocation..
It’s outrageous for Mark Hughes to say that Vieira spent too much time on the ground.
YOUR FOULS PUT HIM THERE !
Flitcroft, Thompson and Mokoena put him there !
They could not get the ball off him fairly, so they kicked him down and trampled on his head !
If Vieira is great in a semi-final, what does that tell us? That he can still be a giant in big games.
LEHMANN held everything from Reid’s free-kick onwards. He looked very sharp on the ground
For me, Senderos and Gilberto is a good formula for clean sheets.
And Arsenal have now won 7 in a row without Sol Campbell.
Against that, Bergkamp was poor and should have been taken off sooner.
Pires was scared to take a kick, so he was getting rid of the ball too early.
Will Arsene dare to start the stuttering Reyes at Stamford Bridge? Who else has he got ?
GRAHAM POLL is due to ref this game but has been injured.
Whoever refs the game will be better than the atrocious Steve Dunn in Cardiff.
Refs are crazy to let fouls go early on.
They should apply the laws equally throughout the game from first minute to last.
A foul is a foul after 30 seconds or 92 minutes.
WHO WILL THE KEY PLAYER BE ?
It could be Lampard. Don’t think it will be, this time, but it could be.
It could be a Terry header and 1-0.
Doubt if it will be Damien Duff, who admits he is burned out.
That leaves Drogba.
This is a big one for Drogba and a test for all the defenders trying to stop him.
But he says he’s only 70% fit and Mourinho might not even play him.
As I said early in the season, Drogba has only been a proper player for one season at Marseilles.
He is a powerful centre forward who finally realised that he can play at the top level. He terrorised Bayern Munich in that second leg.
So, for me, this game boils down to Drogba’s sprints, shots, headers and knockdowns. How many chances will come from what he does ?
I reckon that’s what this game is all about.
If Drogba has a bad game, Arsenal might win.
Arsenal’s defence has improved a lot lately..
The other thing Arsenal have going for them is that this is NOT one of Chelsea’s three big games.
Their big games are Liverpool, Liverpool and AC Milan.
So Chelsea might take a 1-1 draw and give Robben half an hour.
I DIDN’T KNOW that Che Guevara met Alfredo Di Stefano till I read the last pages of Alberto Granado’s Travelling With Che Guevara -The Making of a Revolutionary.
Guevara and his doctor buddy Granada rode,hitchhiked and sailed round South America from December 1951 and after many adventures ended up in Bogota, Colombia, where they found that Millonarios were playing Real Madrid twice.
Some fellow Argentinians, including Alfredo Di Stefano, played for Millonarios.
Two days after the first game they spent the morning with Di Stefano.
“We talked about football, medicine and, finally, the sierras of Cordoba. He gave us some mate and two tickets for tomorrow’s match.”
I didn’t recall this incident from The Motorcycle Diaries, which I read in September. But Guevara does mention it in a letter to his mother :
“Tomorrow I’m off to see Millonarios play Real Madrid in the cheapest stand, since our compatriots are harder to tap than ministers. There is more repression of individual freedom here than in any country we’ve been to, the police patrol the streets carrying rifles and demand your papers every few minutes, which some of them read upside down.”
Neither diary records the score in those games.
Di Stefano joined Real Madrid in 1953 and made them the greatest club team of all time.
April 19th 2005.
PS.
You might like to check out the most eloquent article I’ve ever read in CounterPunch.
Just paste this into Google : The New York Times in Fallujah