By Myles Palmer
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I SUPPOSE it boils down to four questions.
When the season started on August 14th I had four questions.
What happens if Chelsea win their first 8 games?
How can Arsene finish second with this squad?
How can he make the right side stronger?
What happens if he gets three injuries?
OBVIOUSLY, this is a World Cup season and Arsenal will start next season in the new stadium.
But if they don’t finish second the players will have to come back early from their post-World Cup holidays and play a Champions League qualifier.
And they might have to go to Bucharest or Kiev and play a big money game under a lot of pressure.
They might have to play a team as good as Villareal, who thumped Everton and sent them spiralling to 20th in the Premiership.
You don’t wanna be opening your shiny new super-stadium with a £20 million pressure game against a team that has finished third in the Spanish League.
You hope you will be luckier than that, if you finish third or fourth.
As we all feared, and as bookie Paddy Power admitted, there is no title race. It was over before everybody got back from holiday.
ARSENAL’S CAMPAIGN, conducted amid three hugely disruptive international breaks, has stuttered through August and September.
Against Newcastle, they scored two late goals after Jenas was sent off in 32.
At Chelsea, Drogba scored the only goal and traumatised Senderos again, as he had done in the Community Shield.
At home to Fulham, Lauren missed a penalty but Arsenal won 4-1 and Reyes started to show a bit of form.
At Middlesbrough, they were losing 2-0 when Reyes scored in the 90th minute.
In the Champions League they beat FC Thun 2-1 with a very late goal by Bergkamp.
Then two Sol Campbell headers beat Everton 2-0, but the goals dried up against West Ham.
A 0-0 at home to West Ham looked a little bit worrying for a team that is going to White Hart Lane on the 29th.
Which brings us to last Sunday and a deserved win against Birmingham, whose keeper Maik Taylor made some fine saves before allowing a deflected shot to spin into the net off his thumb.
So Arsenal beat Birmingham with a late own-goal.
Van Persie’s 25-yard shot was going wide before it deflected.
Reyes was Arsenal’s best player.
THE PREMIERSHIP TABLE shows Arsenal just one point behind Manchester United after seven games each :
Chelsea…. 8 -24
Charlton… 7 -15
SPURS……. 8 -15
Man Utd….. 7 -14
Bolton…….8 -14
Man City…. 8 -14
ARSENAL….. 7 -13
Wigan……..7 -13
West Ham… 7 -12
Middlesbro.. 8 -11
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Those four questions?
Well , sticking Hleb in front of Lauren does NOT make the right side stronger.
And Ashley Cole is out for a month with a stress fracture in his foot.
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LIVERPOOL do not score enough goals to appear in that table.
After they held Chelsea to 0-0 at Anfield last week I bumped into my mate Kevin at the shops on Friday lunchtime.
“When’s your manager gonna liberate his flair players from that straitjacket ?”
He said, “Our flair players arent playing well. Duff, Robben and Lampard aren’t playing as well as they can do. When they start playing, we will look better.”
After the 0-0 draw Benitez said : We were the better side, Chelsea are scared of us.
He shouldn’t have said that.
Sure, Liverpool should have had two penalties, and Drogba and Robben were poor, but he should not have said that because Chelsea came back all fired up on Sunday and stuffed them 4-1, with Drogba taking Hyypia apart.
Mourinho preferred Drogba to Crespo because he is more aggressive, put in Cole because he is more aggressive than Robben, and now has added power with Essien, who is more aggressive than Tiago.
Oddly, Essien had an average game in that 4-1 win.
At Lyon he would have been starring in a 4-1 victory because Lyon are an attacking team and Chelsea are a defensive machine who shut you down, take your measure, then pick you off.
If Benitez thought Morientes would make it, he would not have signed Crouch.
He needs to get Garcia and another wide player three yards closer to Crouch, so they can start scoring goals.
That process could take 45 minutes of football or 45 hours of football. It’s impossible to say.
By failing to acquire Figo or Simao, Rafa has left himself with a blueprint, but too few components.
On Liverpool’s bad days, you remember that Luis Garcia left Barcelona because they didn’t know what position to play him in. Is he a winger? A striker? An inside forward?
SENDEROS can take some consolation from the fact that the experienced Sami Hyypia was also turned over by a powerhouse No 9 who leads a big Blue machine that is rolling over every opponent and will continue to do so.
THIS SEEMS to be a dull week.
Last week we had big news that was not surprising : Abramovich decided not to give Russia’s oil back to the Russian people.
Instead, he sold it back to them for £7.8 billion.
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ANDREW MARR’s book is the best value I will ever get on Amazon.
I got My Trade – A Short History of British Journalism for £3.99 when I was buying three other books.
It’s absolutely brilliant.
On page 84, talking about papers in the Thirties in a chapter called What Is News? he notes, “As now, the papers realise that readers need to recognize and follow a limited cast of characters.”
On page 142, in The Dirty Art of Political Journalism, he writes, “That we no longer hear great oratory is less the fault of reporting than of the tendency of modern politics to avoid the vivid for fear of frightening floating voters. Class war produced war music. So did real war. But the Age of Shopping produces politicians who sound, most of the time, about as exciting as the recorded safety instructions in passenger jets.”
His account of Alistair Campbell’s resignation is unsatisfying, but Marr still works for the BBC. A later memoir should be more revealing.
I’ve only read 171 pages but that’s enough to say : smashing book ! Thanks Andy !
October 5th 2005