By Myles Palmer
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Arsenal 2 Chelsea 0
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Parlour 70, Ljungberg 79
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Fantastic oppportunism and a magnificent back five won an eighth FA Cup for Arsenal at Cardiff this afternoon.
Against the run of play, Ray Parlour broke down the middle and found there was no pass on for him. So he had a pop and scored from 22 yards.
Midfield?Arsenal were outplayed.
Attack? Henry and Wiltord were underhitting passes and
Bergkamp had to come very deep to get the ball.
Ranieri got Chelsea to play like an Italian club, pushing up,closing down, giving nothing away in midfield.
They pressed fiercely throughout, with Lampard doing
remarkably well against Vieira, whose passing was shabby.
So it was a tight, tense, tactical game.
Arsenal had 40 yards of green, green grass to attack behind Desailly and his thick blue line.
Where Liverpool had defended the box last year, and allowed Arsenal the space to pulverise them with slick, stylish passing moves, Chelsea defended the halfway line and squeezed Bergkamp out of the holes and channels he uses to play his match-winning passes.
Ranieri knew that Bergkamp and Ljungberg were the biggest threats, and this was the best way to stop them.
There was a huge area that should have been exploited bywell-timed runs. But Wiltord and Henry can’t do that, so the attack was stifled, castrated, nullified.
Arsenal only got behind the Chelsea defence twice in the whole game.
Once, after 15 minutes, Vieira picked out Bergkamp’s run with a superb diagonal pass from the halfway line but his header floated over Cudicini, who came and stopped.
It was an inviting chance and DB should have scored.He headed the ball pretty straight(looping up, but straight) but he was almost level with the far post.
The goal is 24 feet wide and he must have thought he was within the width of the goal. So his header drifted two feet wide of the post with Cudicini in no-mans land.
Second time was Freddie’s goal.
He picked the ball up inside his own half, spurted forward with immense drive and optimism, beyond the blue line and into the green, green acres, holding off sub John Terry, a guy twice his size, stumbled, recovered and then Bergkamped it : he hit his shot with the inside of his right foot and it curled round the keeper and into the net for 2-0.
An incredibly gutsy effort from the little man to make his own goal, a real do-it-yourself goal, his 17th of the season, his seventh in his last seven games.
What a player, what a hero !
End of game!
Arsenal are one point away from the first League and Cup double ever to be won Cup-first !
But it was a struggle. Chelsea squeezed that game very well and that was why it took 70 minutes to score.
Chances were few.
One came after 37 minutes : Wiltord did well on the left side, crossing for Lauren, whose header nicked off Le Saux’s head and just over the bar.
Should have been a corner, but impossible for a ref to see. Hard enough to see after 4 replays.
Nothing unique or novel about Ranieri’s game plan.
We said he would copy Steve McClaren and he did. It was like
Middlesbrough, but with technically superior players.
Clearly, Hasselbaink was unfit.So the sparkling one-twos with Gudjohnsen, that can be so devastating, rarely looked possible.
When a good one-two did happen just before half time, the linesman wrongly flagged Gudjohnsen offside. Replays showed him two yards ONSIDE.
My mate Mitch phoned from a coach on the way to Cardiff airport. He said, “I could see that Babayaro blew his groin within four minutes.”
Since Le Saux had been booked so early, putting his boot into Lauren’s ribs as he ducked to head the ball,he could no longer get involved in mifield skirmishes.
It would have made sense for Ranieri to move Le Saux to left back and bring Zenden.Because Chelsea are a power team and Zenden is a power player. He crosses well and shoots hard and has bottle.
Since both teams figured the first goal would win it, Ranieri should have been more positive.
Instead, he brought on Terry at half-time and switched Gallas to left back.
Basically, Chelsea lack a playmaker so they have to play a high-tempo game, have to get it to the strikers early.
They didn’t do that, so they didn’t score. Seaman made only one difficult save, a tipover from Gudjohnsen’s dipper.
Ranieri was quite right to make his team younger, selling Gus Poyet, but they needed a Poyet in Cardiff, somebody make third man runs into the box.
For Arsenal, Manchester beckons on Wednesday night.
Fergie will have United really fired up.
It hurts them to win nothing.
Can Arsenal clinch the title at Old Trafford and rub Fergie’s face in it?
Watch this space.
4th May 2002.