Standard Liege 2 Arsenal 3

Jammy Wenger smuggles 3 points out of Liege

By Myles Palmer

 

Standard Liege 2 Arsenal 3

Mangala, 2 Jovanovic (pen) 5, Bendtner 45,  Vermaelen79, Eduardo 81

 

 

Lucky, lucky Arsenal !
Their 79th minute equaliser was offside AND handball.

This was a match that began in farce and ended in triumph, if you want to call it that, although I wouldn't. Both sides deserved to lose. Standard Liege looked like a sub-standard Championship outfit, the Cardiff of the Champions League.

But Arsenal's slapstick "defending" put them 2-0 down in the first five minutes.After 2 minutes, Eduardo's backheel (yes, backheel !!!) went straight to Mangala and the nearest player, Diaby, moved away from Mangala, not towards him, allowing the centreback to shoot low inside Mannone's near post. Diaby is a complete clown with no defensive instincts whatever.

That Eduardo backheel tells us a lot. It tells us what the training regime is like : Eduardo does that in training and nobody shouts at him. So he does it in a match.

Then Gallas made a challenge he didn't have to make on the edge of the box. As the sprinting Jovanovic swerved inside him, Gallas's left foot clipped Jovanovic's right shin inches inside the box and the Spanish referee gave a penalty. He saw a penalty and gave a penalty and he was right. Jovanovic made it 2-0 in 5 minutes.

On the stroke of half-time, Nicklas Bendtner raced onto a pass by Diaby and smacked it through the keeper's legs. The clock was 50 seconds into injury time when the Dane provide that lifeline.

In 79, an inswinging free-kick by Fabregas was going out of play when Song stopped the ball with his upper arm and played it across the goal to Vermaelen, who knocked in the equaliser.

Two minutes later the stunned Belgians conceded what Gerd Muller called a "little goal", when  a left wing corner was whipped into the box. The dipping ball arrived too low to head, too fast and high to kick, so Eduardo stuck out his goalpoachers knee and knocked in the winner off his thigh.

Overall, a shambles. Following on from Eastlands, Clichy's game was in tatters. With Almunia, RVP and Arshavin out, and Sagna on the bench, Arsenal relied on Vermaelen and Rosicky to hold them together. Rosicky, starting for the first time in 20 months, played well.

Standard could not believe they were 2-0 up against the mighty Arsenal. They were playing the myth and were intimidated by the myth. They were playing Tony Adams, Lee Dixon, Patrick Vieira, Dennis Bergkamp, Robert Pires and Thierry Henry. They were 2-0 up and sat back and kept nine men behind the ball and hoped their luck would hold.

If Standard Liege had realised they were playing Mannone, Zinedine Eboue, Song, Patrick Diaby, Clichy and Eduardo, they might have scraped a draw or even a win.

It's hard for Gooners to watch their heroes these days. We regularly see Arsenal players do things that footballers should never do.

Diaby was unmarked when he headed past Almunia at Old Trafford. Eduardo was showboating two minutes into a Champions League game away from home with the score at 0-0 !!!! You don't do that. You never do that. If you want to backheel a ball on the edge of your own box, do it when you are 4-0 up at home in 88 minutes, not in Belgium and its 0-0 and two minutes into the game.

This season has been like watching a compilation video of Things Professional Footballers Should Never Do.

The incompetence of individuals has become ridiculous. Why are Arsenal like this? Because nobody shouts at them in training. They are babies and babies are never told what not to do. There is no accountability in a crèche. That's what I think : There is no accountability in a crèche.

Wenger is in a bubble and keeps his players in another bubble. Reality never intrudes. He lets a player do an interview with The Guardian last Saturday and it's a player who is not even playing: Theo Walcott ! And Walcott now has a Nike commercial like Arshavin ! How does that make sense, Nike? Walcott's done nothing yet !

And since the whole of the EPL is a Sky Bubble For Millionaires, they're all in a bubble within a Bubble. If Almunia makes a couple of howlers, he's suddenly got a chest infection and taken out of the firing line.

Cesc Fabregas never looked happy last season and 2008-2009 was going down the toilet when he was injured on December 21.Then Arshavin came into the team on February 21 and turned the season round.

Fabregas does not want to be captain of the Colney Crèche any longer, so he will leave in the summer. He has not looked happy for two years.

With his mates Flamini and Hleb, Fabregas was flying. But Song and Diaby negate his talents. They make him look average. Who can blame Fabregas for going? He is captain of a team that is going nowhere, that has won nothing and will win nothing. A team incapable of shrugging off one bad result. No Premier League team really fears Arsenal now. Fabregas knows that, you know it, I know it, and Andrey Arshavin knows it.

So Arshavin will take his phenomenal talents elsewhere. If I'm watching Arshavin playing for Barcelona next season, fine. I  wish him well. He is a world class footballer and a great guy and Barcelona are a big club with real ambitions and a tradition of employing the world's finest players.

In football, as in the music business and the film business, the most exciting thing is major talent and the opportunity to work with major talent.

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 17, 2009