WELL, YES WE LOST THE GAME TODAY!! Arsenal, coming in with a horrible run of form, took all 3 points away from us yet again. And yeah this game somehow always gets the best out of them. To be fair, they probably deserved it overall but not by a big margin. Either of the teams could have scored 5 goals each!! That's the beauty of this fixture...the adreneline rush...the silly mistakes...the real passion...and not to forget top-class attacking football - you would never see all of the above together in any other premiership fixture.
3 reasons we lost the game today:
- NEVER TOOK OUR CHANCES. Scoreline could have easily been 0-2 going into the half time break. We did it against Liverpool but lost it as the game progressed. Today we had a much easier opportunity against an inexperienced team lacking any confidence or form. Had we scored an early goal or two against the young Arsenal team, they would have cracked under pressure and fallen apart like a house of cards. But unfortunately we gave them a sniff of victory and look what they did to us.
- NEVILLE LOOKED OUT OF SORTS. The gunners had so much pace down both flanks, and you wouldn't expect much defending from Ronaldo. But Neville proved it again to me that though he's been a fantastic servant in the past decade or so, he's past his best now. He's lost all his pace and it just makes his role of a right-back 10 times harder. Rafael is a blossoming player, who shows every skill that a modern right-back should have, and I strongly believe that he's gonna form a strong full-back partnership with Evra in the coming years. I would have taken that risk and played Rafael in today's game. We didn't and Arsenal destroyed us down that right side today. There were no strong authoritative tackles being thrown and there wasn't any right-back taking the game to Clichy's half...it just cost us the game dearly.
- FRENCH WIZARD. Finally giving the credit where it is due. Arsenal had an amazing pace and energy about them today and you can't do much when Nasri is in one of his forms as he did today. The young french came in as a ready made replacement for Alex Helb and has often been called the new 'Zidane'. Might be an over statement at the current moment, but his performance today doesn't give me any reason to think that he can't have the same influence for Arsenal as Zidane did for Juventus or Real Madrid. The superb player just took the game away from us today.
It was a perfect stage for an Arsenal-Man Utd game. Highly charged atmosphere and 2 groups of young world class players. Mannnn, we lost it today and it hurts more than any other game. Devinder went ecstatic when I told him the score at 75 mins of play...and no SMS from Bharat actually irritates me even more. It just re-affirms the fact that the bastard is silently enjoying this victory today rather than going OTT with celebrations. Only choice is to move on and wait for the 16th of May to have another go at it. We're 5 points behind the leaders now...considerable gap considering the quality Chelsea have at the moment...but as stats show every year...we play the best football in the latter half of the season. Let's hope the stats are true this season too!
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