Among my Golden Rules of football are :
1. A team is a goalkeeper and ten players and the keeper is as important as the ten.
2. Soft penalties are always saved or missed. If the incident doesn’t deserve to be a penalty, it won’t be a goal, nine times out of ten.
3. Second legs don’t exist.
This is my latest theory, which Barcelona will confirm on Wednesday night.
For 40 years of European club games, second legs decided most games.. So every team wanted to be drawn at home in the second leg. But now if you get ahead in the first leg, home or away, you usually protect that lead and go through.
Arsenal have done that three times now.
A RUBBISH GAME, a timid Arsenal performance.
Scoreline as predicted on Monday and Tuesday : Villarreal 0 Arsenal 0.
Campbell was OK, so was Clichy, who came on as an early sub for Flamini.
Gilberto played his third good game in a week and got away with a silly kick that would have been a red card if the ref had seen it
In 89, Clichy ran rashly into the back of Jose Mari, who dived, Russian ref Ivanov gave a soft penalty, Lehmann went early and saved Riquelme’s spot-kick.
Lehmann went so early to his left that Riquelme could have tapped it in the other side of the goal.
There was no football match to write about.There was no football match to talk about. Forlan is not very good.
But Arsenal got the result they needed.
I told everyone who phoned that it would be 0-0. I said, “That is the logical score after Juventus and Real Madrid. It’s happened twice and it will happen again.”
Only difference, Arsenal played really well in Madrid and they also played well in Turin
WHAT DID I WRITE ON TUESDAY ? THIS :
Real Madrid was the biggest 0-0 in Arsenal’s long history but by tomorrow it might be the second biggest.
Tomorrow morning the holy grail will be in sight.
Arsenal’s first European Cup Final ! Wow !
Barcelona and Arsenal. the two most entertaining teams in the world, will meet in one 90-minute contest on neutral ground.
Last season the best football match of the season was the last one, when Liverpool turned over Milan in Istanbul after being 3-0 down.
It’s very, very rare that the last match of the season is the most spectacular.