By Myles Palmer
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JANUARY was about Middlesbrough and Hutton.
February is about Chelsea and Chelsea.
March is about the Champions League quarter-finals.
I had hoped for an honourable draw at the Riverside, but Keown’s dismissal made that difficult and Arsenal lost the Carling Cup semi-final second leg 2-1.
In the circumstances, the team played well and made a close contest of it.
Chasing the game, Arsene took Clichy off from his left midfield position.
Soon after that, racing back to a position where Clichy would have been, Reyes scored an own goal.
Arsene said the boy had been ill, had not slept, and he only decided to play him at the last moment.
Reyes spent Wednesday in bed and Thursday in Seville tidying up loose ends.
Last week he flew to London without his boots, which came later by courier.
OVERALL, ARSENAL ARE IN GREAT SHAPE RIGHT NOW.
They have the greatest athlete in the Premiership in Kolo Toure.
They have the greatest playmaker in Pires.
They have the greatest midfielder in Vieira.
And they have the greatest spurt player I have ever seen in Henry.
They have a fiercely determined keeper in Lehmann.
And they have a dozen other players who know their jobs and know each other.
HAVE YOU BEEN following the Coolmore mafia v Sir Alex saga?
The real guilty party is the horse. The horse was not supposed to be that good. The Irishmen were amazed when it won its first race.
When it won seven straight races, they were completely gobsmacked.
The horse was not supposed to be so fast.
Can’t see the dispute going to court in Dublin.
As you may know, Vincent O’Brien is God in Ireland.
And his daughter Susan married John Magnier. And they decided that Sir Alex and Susan would co-own Rock of Gibraltar for the crack.
So the legal situation is this : A court case in Dublin, between a Protestant from Glasgow and a billionaire who is God’s son-in-law.
I wouldn’t fancy the Pope in a Dublin court case against God’s son-in-law !
The best article on the Coolmore mafia was in The Observer.
Just type Magnier and Cal McCrystal into Google.
DID YOU SEE LABOUR MINISTER Peter Hain on Question Time last night?
The whole audience was laughing every time he tried to defend Blair’s position on Iraq.
I’ve never seen such derision from a studio audience. Astonishing and hilarious television.
Shame for Hain, who in 1968 led the Young Liberals and was good on green issues, South Africa and everything else.
Now he finds himself stupendously embarrassed as he defends the indefensible.
WENT TO THE GYM yesterday. Alone in the steam room, I started wondering about the Chinese guy.
A while back I had a swim and there were two Chinese men in the steam room.
One was about 30, the other bald and over 60.After a couple of minutes the old guy went out.
The young guy was handsome and had an incredible physique : very powerful shoulders, colossal arms, bulging thighs, and a smoothly muscular torso. His body was amazingly symmetrical and perfect, like nothing I have ever seen.
I was thinking, “This guy has been drawn. He’s come off an art director’s desk. If you took a rapidograph and drew a super-athlete, this is exactly what he would look like.”
I don’t usually talk to people in the steam room or the sauna or the jacuzzi, unless they speak to me first.
I’m not nosy, not consumed with curiousity about other people’s lives. I respect their space and hope they will respect mine.
But this guy was different. And he had a friendly, open vibe about him.
“Are you a weightlifter?” I said.
“No, I’m a stuntman.”
He told me he worked on Tomb Raider in North Wales, China and Kenya.
He also did the last Bond film. He hurt his wrist doing a 100-foot jump in Tomb Raider, but it wasn’t broken, only sprained.
He said he was in the Chinese kung-fu team, did film work in Hong Kong, came here 12 years ago, is married, and had his first baby, a son, two weeks ago.
“Did you meet Angelina?” I asked.
“Yes, a nice girl. A very nice girl, very kind. And I met her son,her adopted son, Max. He’s two years old.”
February 6th 2004.