april 3rd
So we moved back into second place, on goal difference, after a fairly easy 4-1 win afternoon in the sunshine against Norwich at Highbury.
It was pretty much all Arsenal to begin with. Playing nice fluent football we created a couple of decent half-chances until with 20 minutes to go we opened the scoring. Flamini found Pires on the edge of the box, he slipped it to Henry who made the Norwich defenders look like proper amateurs before driving his shot into the bottom right hand corner.
A couple of minutes later he had the ball on the left hand side, came into the box, made the Norwich defenders look like a pair of Stepanovs before finishing, with the help of a small deflection, into the far corner of the net. 2-0 and we were cruising.
Then we got a bit sloppy. Norwich got a corner, Jens was held back by one of their players and went stomping off towards the ref to complain, meanwhile the ball came back to Huckerby (who spent all day moaning the little cunt), Le Bob’s attempt at a tacke made the Norwich defenders look like Paolo Maldini and Jens was nowhere as Huckerby smashed it home to make it 2-1 and left us making harder work of it than we should have.
The second half was only 5 minutes old when we made the game safe, Ljungberg heading home Lauren’s cross and about 15 minutes later Thierry got his hat-trick when he stabbed the ball home from close range after José had been felled in the box. That gives him a grand total of 181 Arsenal goals, just four behind Ian Wright’s record, and who would bet against him breaking it this season?
When you consider he hasn’t played for three weeks and was nowhere near 100% today it was quite a performance.
It was nice to see Gilberto back too although he does look strange with all that hair. Mathieu Flamini went off after about 25 minutes and Cesc and Gilberto picked up where they left off at the start of the season. They look a good partnership. All in all we never needed to get ourselves against first gear but to be fair to Norwch they tried to play football at least putting some other, bigger clubs to shame when you compare their tactics.
Away from Arsenal the Bowyer-Dyer punch up has to be one of the most entertaining things I’ve seen in years. The look of sheer hatred and little-boy-lost-his-temper on Bowyer is just classic. Videop clip here – in hurdy gurdy but it’s not the commentary that matters. Hilarious stuff. Way to instill discipline, Souness.
Right, that’s it. Have a good Sunday.
