Betalogue

Well, it had to happen sooner or later… No team without unlimited funds and squad replacements can be expected to sustain a never-ending winning run. The Arsenal game wasn’t televised here in Canada, but it sounds like the Arsenal squad that was available on that day didn’t do much wrong. They conceded a stunning goal by Shaun Wright-Phillips and then managed to snatch an equalizer, but no more.

Maybe it was precisely one of those days where Vieira and Henry should have taken a leading role, and they didn’t. I don’t know. It sounds like an awfully young and inexperienced squad to me. Hoyte, Senderos, van Persie, Fabregas, etc. — these are all promising players, but you can’t ask for the impossible.

Ten points out of 12 is not a bad record at all. Chelsea got all 12 points. No surprise here. Based on Middlesborough poor performance last week against Manchester United, I didn’t expect anything. The bottom-line is that, if Chelsea keep on winning, there is simply nothing that Arsenal or Manchester United can do about it. But this has been true for weeks. It’s nothing new. It just got a bit worse, but Arsenal still need Chelsea to slip up. They just need them to slip up a bit more. Oh well. We’ll see.

Elsewhere, Manchester United were extremely lucky to get a point at home against Tottenham. Tottenham did very well, and Manchester United had a rather poor game. And then Mendes kicked a speculative ball from 60 yards out and… Roy Carroll let it slip through his hands. The ball was 2 feet inside the goal. Roy Carroll still tried desperately to make it look like he had prevented it from crossing the line. And it worked! The referees were fooled. Good grief. Even on our pokey TV screen from 5000 km away we were able to tell that the ball had crossed the line — and not just barely!

To Tottenham’s credit, their manager was extremely gracious about it. It’s hard to imagine that Alex Ferguson would have been able to contain his fury had the same thing happened to his team. United were very, very lucky here. We are probably going to see some kind of video-assisted refereeing implemented at some point down the line. As one of the commentators said during an earlier game, though, how do you decide when to stop play and look at the video? It’s a tricky thing. But something has to be done. Maybe instead of blabbing about the off-side rule yet again, Sepp Blatter should devote his energies to this issue.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at 2:12 am and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.