As I said yesterday, Sunday’s match was a lot of fun and Arsenal are second in the table.
The team is young and improving, and it’s a reconfigured side, and it’s very early in a long season with four trophies to play for.
I hoped that game would tell me a lot and I drew five conclusions from the 3-1 victory.
1. If David James had not made such a rash challenge to concede that early penalty, it might have been a completely different game.
2. Portsmouth were amazingly poor and may not be that bad again this season.They were disorganised and didn’t seem to care.
3. Arsenal without Henry have a lot more collective bite and hunger. They’ve become much harder to beat, they run for each other, and Flamini set the tone by throwing his body in to block two rocket shots, just as Dixon, Bould and Winterburn used to do. I love to see that passion and bravery and firmly believe that Arsenal will win at Spurs in their next game.
4. However, Adebayor does not have enough skill to play for Arsenal. He is not good enough and he will never be good enough. He limits the team. He’ll improve but as long as Adebayor is in the team he will limit what Arsenal can achieve. Why sign a big African striker who is no more skilful than a journeyman British striker ?
5. Robin van Persie is an improvising goalscorer who can beat defenders and slam shots past goalkeepers from any range or angle. But he doesn’t have a football brain. It’s not natural for him to pass the ball in the final third. By the time he decides not to shoot, the pass is no longer “on”. When Arsenal counter-attack, he doesn’t know where to run. In a lot of what the team does, and tries to do, RVP is peripheral.
Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Frank Rijkaard is backing up what I said on ANR for six years.
He is playing Henry on the left wing, with Ronaldinho at centre forward, Messi on the right. Eto’o is out injured for two months.
I’ve always said that AW is the only manager in the world bold enough to play without a centre forward and the only one who would build a team round a virtuoso sprint-diva like Thierry Henry.
Rijkaard will not do that. No other manager would.
Arsene doesn’t get much credit for his originality. Since I wanted that to be one of the themes of my book, I spent about 100 pages out of 376 in The Professor trying to give him credit for his originality. But, in retrospect, that theme did not really come over as emphatically as I had hoped. But it’s still my best book.