By Myles Palmer
Arsenal 1 Liverpool 2
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Ljungberg 73, Owen 83,88
Football is about players. If Michael Owen had been playing for Arsenal they would have won 4-0.
Instead Thierry Henry, who missed two sitters, will remember being an also-ran in the Michael Owen FA Cup Final.
If Wenger picks Grimandi ahead of Lauren, a far better player, is must be because Vieira prefers Grimandi in there.
If he picks Wiltord ahead of Kanu, it must mean Kanu is leaving. We all hope so!
Unfortunately, Grimandi did not make one significant pass or tackle in that match. And Wiltord did not make one significant pass or shot.
Even so, Arsenal were the superior team and I’m told that all the scousers who phoned TalkSport after the game admitted, to a man, that Liverpool were lucky and that Patrick Vieira was the best player on the field.
I would be sorry to see Ray Parlour go to Sunderland because he ALWAYS gives a performance, home and away.He sets the tempo of the team.I heard today from Essex that Mrs Parlour won’t go to Sunderland.
Alan Hansen was wrong to say that Seaman would have saved Owens second goal three years ago. Nobody would have saved that shot because Owen was red hot and he hit the shot early and hard and precisely in the only spot where it could have been a goal.It was a second goal – the kind you score when you’ve already scored once.
Liverpool stunk. Houllier’s attitude is so negative he makes Kenny Dalglish look like Johann Cryuff.Who wants to watch a team with four centrebacks?
They played even less football that I expected.They were horrible. Arsenal did almost everything right, controlled the game for 73 minutes and then had an attack of Bayernitis : score, then crumble.
But what a goal by Ljungberg! A pure and perfect goal designed by the Alsatian architect of narrow football, perhaps the first time in five years that narrow football has evolved to the point where one flank player cuts in and, missing out the strikers, creates a goal for the other flank player arrowing into the box from the other side.
What a pass from Bobby Pires! A fantastic pass : sudden, slide-rule, killing all four of Liverpool’s centrebacks!And giving fiery Freddie the chance to go round Westerveld, just as he went round Nigel Martyn at Highbury last week.
Then Parlour, on for Wiltord,obstructed Carragher when he was going nowhere, just after free-kick expert McAllister had come on, a mild foul that might not have been given. Sad to see Adams beaten in the air by Babbell, as he was by Carew in Valencia. Owen pounced for 1-1 and after that Arsenal could not do anything right.
Bringing Bergkamp on for three minutes? Please!
Wiltord had a nightmare and Dennis should have been on after 60 minutes.
Kanu was not interested when he came on. He did not contest the ball before it went to Berger, who launched Owen’s run for his second goal.
How can somebody score 17 goals last season and four this season? By losing interest, that’s how. Two goals in December, two in April – that is it! That is all he has done!
Kanu is beyond a joke and most Arsenal fans pray he is somewhere else next year.
Fans I have spoken to today are thoroughly cheesed off by Wenger saying he only needs one or two new players.They think he needs five or six.I think he needs four.
He needs a keeper, having failed to grab Neil Sullivan on a free because Sullivan wanted to be told he was in the team, not No 2 to Seaman. Sullivan is better than Seaman now, better than Martyn now, so that was a mistake.
He needs stopper Jens Nowotny, who might cost £20 million from Bayer Leverkusen.
He has failed to convert Lauren to right back, as he hoped to do, so he still needs a right back.
And he needs a goalscorer who can stay onside and complement Henry, which Wiltord has not done and will not do.
Wiltord plays alright with Pires, with Vieira, with Zidane (especially with Zidane, because France are not as direct or dynamic as Arsenal) but he cannot play with Henry to save his life. He takes too many touches to play for Arsenal and I sincerely hope he will be unloaded for £8 million somehere.
The job specification for the striker is : somebody young, fast, English, left-footed and already playing in the Premiership.
Francis Jeffers!
I hear Jeffers is as thick as two short planks (and big mates with Gavin McCann), but that does not matter if he can work the near post with his left foot and profit from Thierry Henry’s ability to destroy right backs and centrebacks the way he destroyed Stefan Henchoz in Cardiff.
Henchoz? A good goalkeeper, isn’t he? Two goal-saving handballs! One with his elbow, another with his trailing arm as Henry closed in. Give Henchoz a pair of gloves!
13th May 2001.