april 13th
16.55 – Sheffield United 0-1 Arsenal (Ljungberg)
Shades of last year’s semi-final against Boro in terms of performance, you’d have to say. Sheffield United were well up for it, pressuring Arsenal all over the pitch, not letting us settle and certainly not letting us play our football.
This led to them cancelling out our attacking threat, and as they didn’t have an attacking threat in the first place, it made for fairly dull viewing.
Of course, when Graham Poll is the referee, you can be sure there’ll be some kind of incident to keep the headline writers happy – and true to form, the Ming from Tring was involved in the game’s biggest incident.
Sheffield United striker Wayne Allison tumbled under a Sol Campbell challenge, I don’t really think it was a foul. However, the replays showed he got a kick in the bag as Sol tried to play the ball and then stayed down. The ref said ‘play on’. So we did. He then made the kind of blocking move that an American footballer would have been proud of, getting in the way as the Sheffield United player went to get the ball.
After some nifty play Jeffers squared for Wiltord whose dinky shot hit the post, he followed it up, whacked it again, it came off the arse of the Sheffield defender and Freddie tucked away the rebound. 1-0 to the Arsenal.
Sheffield manager Neil Warnock was furious that Poll didn’t stop play for the injured player. Now, I’m all for stopping play when a player gets seriously hurt, but there was nothing much the matter with Allison, so I reckon playing on was fair enough. However, I do understand how pissed off he must be about the blocking incident. He said “He was their best midfielder in the run up to the goal”. heh.
Quite why he was that close the play is beyond me, but all the same, we’ve had so much crap from Poll over the last couple of seasons this makes up for it. Sorry Sheffield United, you were committed and full of running and brave and courageous and all those other things that lower division teams are when they play a top team, but these things happen. Anyway, to make amends, Poll seemed to give every single decision their way for the first half hour of the second half.
Arsenal can give huge thanks to David Seaman as well, who made the most incredible save in the last 10 minutes. Sheff Utd had a corner, it got knocked back in, there was a mis-hit volley, Seamo went one way, the ball went the other, Peschisolido nodded it towards the empty net and somehow Spunky managed to change direction, and get enough of a hand on the ball to fling it away. Unbelievable. In the BBC studio, Peter Schmeichel called it one of the best saves he’d ever seen.
So it’s a 3rd successive final for Arsenal, we can forget about the cup, and now the focus can change to Wednesday night’s game against Man Utd. It’ll need a much better performance to take 3 points against United, but you can’t read too much into a game like this one. Well done the lads.
