I have to say I feel slightly envious of those who were at the Grove last night. With almost every game these days either on TV or available via a stream you really notice when there’s just no way of seeing it. The fans who were in attendance were treated to a display from a team of great talent and potential and Sheffield United just couldn’t live with them.
They had an average of just nineteen, n-n-n-n-nineteen, making them the youngest ever Arsenal side to represent the club. The opponents might have been a Championship side but they have plenty of experience, a decent manager and to put 6 goals past them is really an incredible result.
Nicklas Bendtner got the first two, Carlos Vela the next two, Jack Wilshere got his first Arsenal goal and Vela wrapped his hat-trick on his first competitive start for the club to complete the rout. You can see the goals here. Arsene Wenger says these are best young players he has ever worked with and it’s easy to see why. Again the Carling Cup has provided us with a wonderful glimpse of not just the club’s future but the present too as a number of these players showed the boss they’re ready to play Premier League football. And the boss isn’t scared of doing it either, saying:
They might be young but they don’t play like kids. I wouldn’t be scared to play any of them in the Premier League because they all have the talent to play at the top level. I knew they were good but I did not know how they would react to playing on the big stage.
Now the challenge is to keep them all together and integrate them into the first team over the next couple of years.
It’s difficult to single anyone out, especially when you haven’t seen the whole game, but in pre-season Vela and Bendtner worked very well together and that seems to have continued. And for Vela to smash home a hat-trick on his first competitive start for the club is hugely impressive. Perhaps those fortunate enough to have been there last might like to share their thoughts on the players and performances in today’s arses.
More thoughts from the manager on the official site and I suspect, after last night’s result that our next game in this competition will be televised, giving the rest of us a chance to see these kids in action. Well done to them. As much as we love when the first team wins I think there’s just a little extra glow of pride when we see Arsenal boys this young do what they did last night.
Away from the Carling Cup and the boss has responded to the comments made by Michel Platini in the French press. The woolly headed cuntbutler has made it quite clear he has a personal problem with Arsene and the comments made do not befit the highest standing official in UEFA. If he’s not embarrassed about them he should be and if there’s any kind of decency within that organisation then he should be made apologise for them.
The crux of Platini’s argument is that Wenger is a businessman, not a football man. Which, of course, is a great load of hairy bollocks. Platini’s ire should be directed at clubs who fail to be self-sufficient, who use sugar daddies owners to prop up their massive debts, not somebody who has undertaken the kind of work Wenger has. Somebody who has eschewed the idea of billionaire owners or spending big in the transfer market and has developed Arsenal with the resources at hand. He has brought through many young players of many nationalities and given them chances they would never receive anywhere else. Does that sound like a businessman to you?
And it’s a bit rich, so to speak, for Platini to bemoan money in the game when he fucked off to Italy in the 80s to earn the big bucks. Since retiring from football Platini has given little back to the game he graced as a player. Now he spouts shite about having the World Cup every two years and supports Sepp Blatter’s nonsensical and illegal ideas about ‘home grown’ players, designed purely to lower the level of club football so their precious international game can regain some standing. And that has nothing to do with them wanting their nations to be proud and powerful, it’s so they can more easily sell advertising, sponsorship and corporate junkets for the World Cup and European Championships.
Platini is nothing more than a pencil-pushing administrator. A football civil servant, a low-level, yellow-bellied, half-witted, curly-haired, local politician whose influence of the game of football is restricted to inventing crazy new laws which show him to be slow-minded and verging on corrupt. For him to call Arsene Wenger a businessman is beyond pathetic. Wenger has done more for football this week than Platini has in his lifetime. He’s quite entitled to think what he wants, the same way I’m entitled to call him a sad bastard for it, but the head of UEFA should not behave the way he has. The only good thing about it is that it will open up people’s eyes to him and what he’s really like.
Arsene 1-0 Platini (own goal).
Right so, that’s about that. Let the day’s creaming ourselves over the kids … erm … commence.
Till tomorrow.
