The Monday Miscellany

A fine performance and a brilliant result for Arsenal, who beat Manchester Utd 2-1 on Saturday lunchtime, but the victory does not eliminate the many doubts over their title pedigree.

Firstly, is Nicklas Bendtner really a Premier League striker? He looked like a lost soul when presented with the ball in attacking situations; late in the game he worked his way into the box only to take an age to try to get past the last defender before flopping a pathetic left-footed shot over the bar. Surely Carlos Vela, whatever his physical limitations and lack of experience, is a better bet.

Is a team who refuse, however nobly, to merely kill the game when 2-1 up with six minutes of injury time to play, the sort of team who will grind out the results required to win the title when they are not playing as well as they did against the European champions?

How are Arsenal, who can beat Manchester Utd but also lose at Fulham, at Stoke and at home to Hull City, any different from the Chelsea side of the late nineties who played lovely football at times but were nowhere near consistent enough to win the league?

Most importantly, if Arsenal have players such as Samir Nasri, who are capable of bashing the ball into the top corner from the edge of the area, might it not be an idea to try that approach more often? Their goalless draw on Wednesday night against Fenerbahçe was a grotesque example of Arsenal’s biggest problem; they don’t put the ball in the net consistently enough. They have the talent to bag five goals in Istanbul but they are more than capable of wasting chances next time around.

In Fàbregas, van Persie, Walcott, Clichy, Adebayor and Ramsey, Arsenal have immense talent and creativity but that is only part of what’s required. You will do well to find a neutral observer who will put money on them being about Manchester Utd come May.

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Another fine performance, another brilliant goal for Kris Boyd as Rangers trounced Kilmarnock 4-0 at Rugby Park. Boyd’s international sulk remains desperately illogical – if he feels he isn’t getting enough international appearances, surely the last thing he should do is effectively go on strike – but watching goals like the Marco van Basten-style volley he scored in the Scottish League Cup at Partick Thistle you can’t help but conclude that the greater error was George Burley’s absurd decision to marginalize Scotland’s best goalscorer.

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It’s the official U.N. Month Of Football Draws; Women’s Euro 2009 (Nov 18), 2009 Confederations Cup (Nov 22), FA Cup 3rd Round (Nov 29), Under-21 Euro 2009 (Dec 3), and there are both UEFA club tournament draws to come later in December. Recent highly scientific experiments conducted in this writer’s studio involving a sheet of A4, some scissors and an ice-cream tub have proved it’s possible to conduct such a draw in just a couple of minutes yet you can bet UEFA will spin them out for all they’re worth. And just wait until the World Cup draw a year from now. If your doctor ever tells you you’ve got one day to live, try to make it 4th December 2009; I assure you it will feel like forever.

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Where on Earth do UEFA get their attendance figures from? 16,000 fans at White Hart Lane for the Tottenham v Dinamo Zagreb match would have made the stadium about half empty, which even a rudimentary glance at the highlights on Sky Sports News shows was definitely not the case. The UEFA Cup has enough critics as it is, without adding falsely low attendance figures to the cauldron. For the record, THFC’s official website records an attendance of around double the official figure and, if it’s a choice between a Premier League club or UEFA’s statistics department, I know who I believe.

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Paul Robinson was superb for Blackburn, who lost 2-0 in a monsoon to table-topping Chelsea on Sunday. But for his fine saves – keeping out first-half headers from Nicolas Anelka and John Obi Mikel before touching a brilliant Frank Lampard free-kick onto the crossbar and denying Anelka a late hat-trick goal – Chelsea could have notched up another huge win of Middlesbrough and Sunderland proportions. All the more remarkable given that the conditions would have made the ball feel like something you normally find in a Greek salad. Robinson, who could not be blamed for either goal, should be at least considered for England’s forthcoming friendlies in Germany and Spain.

While we’re on the subject of Blackburn, their attendance of barely 20,000 for a game against title challengers has attracted ridicule it does not deserve. Blackburn is not that big; Ewood Park has a capacity of 31,367 which is over 20% of the population of the Blackburn borough. The game was on TV, the quality of the opposition meant the ticket prices were as expensive as they get at Ewood Park and it was tipping it down. Another club who are often criticised for low attendances are Middlesbrough; the town has only a slightly larger population but, unlike Blackburn, has a wide catchment area of satellite towns – basically, most of North Yorkshire – and does not have other league clubs on its doorstep.

Blackburn’s problem, if it has one, is not that they get poor attendances but that their stadium is too big. Their attendance yesterday would just about have filled Fratton Park, the Premier League’s smallest ground. Conclusion; people are offended not by the size of the turnout but by the sight of empty plastic seats.

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This week it was Real Valladolid’s turn to ship six goals at the Camp Nou; at this rate, Barcelona will be champions of La Liga before April is over. They have scored 33 goals in their last eight league matches, winning them all including a tricky derby at Espanyol and a 6-1 thrashing of a Champions League side in Atlético Madrid.

Samuel Eto’o, who scored Barça’s first four goals before half-time, seems to have re-established himself in the first team having been seemingly on his way out of the club during the summer. Resurgent, too, is Eidur Gudjohnsen, who is once again excelling as a midfield playmaker as he did during his later days at Chelsea.

Another four-goal tally on Saturday was achieved by Real Madrid’s Argentine forward Gonzalo Higuaín; might Diego Maradona find a place for him in his first squad for the friendly in Scotland next week? Given that Lionel Messi will not travel, there seems to be a vacancy for an inside-right forward.

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There were some of us who worried that ITV’s coverage of the FA Cup would be a disaster, with live matches in the early rounds relegated to minimal coverage on ITV4, but our fears proved unfounded with hour after hour of the weekend schedule dedicated to coverage of Round 1. We can only hope that, come Round 3, they will choose their matches imaginatively rather than simply taking every game involving the ‘Big Four’.

On the FA Cup, it is a relief to hear that the tie between Chesterfield and Mansfield Town passed off with few unpleasant incidents, which must constitute progress given the terrible bitterness that existed between the two sets of supporters in the mid-to-late eighties following a dispute during the miners’ strike. There were, by accounts, a few idiotic fans who disturbed the Remembrance Weekend minute’s silence and the odd isolated minor incident outside the stadium but it is encouraging to note that the large majority of both sets of fans have risen above the mindless hatred that nearly consumed the English game twenty-odd years ago.

The intense rivalry comes from the Thatcher government’s ‘divide and rule’ approach to the strike in the 80s (Mansfield’s miners, for complex reasons which need not detain us here, did not support the industrial action), which is similar to the media’s approach to the credit crunch; footballers’ salaries are ridiculed far more than the surreal fairground-attraction culture which has engulfed the City of London. When trouble arrives the establishment will always make sure the working classes turn on their own rather than the super-capitalist morons who got us into the mess in the first place. Just as Thatcher made sure the miners of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire were too busy scrapping between themselves to realize that their real enemies were the contemptible Tory cabinet, so too the media will have you believe that it is overpaid footballers, not the greedy twits in the City or fat-cat utility company directors, who are causing the recession.