by : Bill Urban
Arsenal’s style, in contrast, is like that of Real Madrid: dazzle opponents with devastating speed and inch-accurate one touch passing, and score more goals than conceded. And make it pretty. It’s that simple. It is often a winning formula (if one has a team with enough skill to play it), but the plan fails when the strikers are stifled by an equally superb defense. And that game tends to be ‘the big one’. It is a lesson from which they have yet to learn. To ignore it any longer could cost them their Premiership crown and yet another chance of glory in the European Champions League.
Remember, last year’s European Champions League winners? It was the uninspiring but brilliant in defense, FC Porto. That Portuguese team’s manager, Jose Mourinho is now the boss at Chelsea FC. He is cocky, outspoken, ruthless and arrogant. But is Arsene Wenger’s refusal to pay attention to the failings of his defense amidst the brilliance of his midfield and attack any less arrogant? No. History should be a lesson here. In 1998, France in the World Cup Final blew the Brazilian national team away when the latter ‘assumed’ that their wonder strikers would win the day. They were wrong, just as Real Madrid in La Liga were wrong last year. Ironically, the heart of that French World Cup Winning team play for or have played for Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Real Madrid. Few play or played in France. Of note is that the defenders, by and large, play(ed) for Chelsea, the midfielders and strikers, mostly for the other three.
No matter the player’s nationality, Arsenal still boasts some of the best defenders in the world. Individuals aside, however, it is Chelsea’s defense that plays better as a unit. And now, with Arjen Robben displaying the power, deftness, and pace of Thierry Henry, and Frank Lampard almost on a par with Patrick Vieira, Chelsea are scoring goals too. True, Arsenal have scored 37 goals to Chelsea’s mere 21 in the first 13 games of the season, and the wealth is spread around at least 4 high scoring players (Henry, Pires, Reyes, and Ljungberg), but the Gunners have conceded 16 to Chelsea’s impressive 4 and that is where they will come unstuck if their strikers hit a dry patch. The championship could come down to goal difference---goals scored minus goals conceded---and on that score (no pun intended), Arsenal better Chelsea by a mere four.
True, Patrick, it is too early to predict the next championship team, but with each of these two football clubs looking likely to hold or beat the rest of the league, if things don’t change at Arsenal’s rear, Chelsea may beat their London rivals again if only for the second time in twenty one attempts. Those three points, however, might mean the difference between being champions and runners-up.
Jeremy Goodwin
15/11/2004Football supporters, those who watch and those who feel moved to write about the teams they support, are often given to indulging in bouts of emotional speculation, particularly when events take a turn for the worse. Unfortunately, because supporting football clubs is such an emotional past-time, supporters’ solutions to the problems their teams are experiencing often border on the ludicrous and downright fanciful.
Liverpool Football Club have endured a nightmare run of injuries this season, testing the patience, fortitude and forbearance of all the supporters of the Mighty Reds, including my colleague at Squarefootball.net, Rupen Ganatra. Rupen’s proposed solution to the striker crisis at Liverpool, outlined in his article, Liverpool Should re-sign Robbie Fowler, however well-intentioned, is a perfect example of this pervasive problem of thinking with the heart rather than the head when it comes to enduring crises in supporting one’s football club.
It is a fact that Liverpool, after starting the season in promising fashion under new boss Rafael Benitez, have a real crisis at the striker position, taking into account the departure of Michael Owen to Real Madrid before the start of the new season, the sale of Emile Heskey to Birmingham, the horrific broken leg injury suffered by new signing Djibril Cisse against Blackburn, and the hamstring injury suffered by Milan Baros while in action for the Czech Republic against Macedonia in a World Cup Qualifier. This left Benitez facing the match against Boro last Saturday with two recognized strikers, Florent Sinama Pongolle and Neil Mellor, neither of whom are ready yet for an extended run in the Premiership. A make-shift strike force of Harry Kewell and Luis Garcia simply did not get the job done in a 2-0 loss at The Riverside Stadium.
With Baros out for a projected four weeks, which could easily turn into a much longer period of time given the capricious nature of hamstring injuries, the prospect of a run of poor results in the Premier League and elimination from the Champions League at the Group stage is a very real possibility for Liverpool and Benitez to confront.
Except for the analysis of Sinama and Mellor as not yet representing Premiership quality strikers, the above is a series of hard facts. Here is another fact: on his day, Robbie Fowler was one of the most naturally-gifted strikers ever to appear in British football, a phenomenally talented finisher who was lethal in his ability to conjure spectacular goals out of nothing on the pitch.
Unfortunately for Rupen, here is a third, rock-solid, unavoidable fact: Robbie Fowler is a washed up shell of the brilliant player he once was, a sad, slightly pathetic example of the effects of indiscipline, a lack of guidance, and an at-best tenuous relationship with common sense on a Premiership footballer’s career prospects.
Proposing the fat, out-of-shape, out-of-touch, both with ball and reality, Fowler as a solution to Liverpool’s striker crisis is akin to believing that re-appointing Bobby Robson as England Manager would result in another Semi-Final appearance in World Cup 2006. Except that Sir Bobby would probably have a better chance of managing England to the semis than Fowler would have at producing anything like his old form.
In his passionate advocacy of the merits of Everything Robbie, Rupen wrote: “Robbie knows the score, he knows what the club need and he knows what the fans want, so why not ?”
Well, for starters, and closure as well, the ability no longer exists.
The analysis by Rupen of Fowler as “God,” a wise real estate investor, and even a future owner of Liverpool FC itself, I’ll set aside. If we are considering Fowler solely as a solution to the striker crisis at Liverpool, he comes up short on all the counts that matter: lack of form, lack of fitness, failure to reproduce his Liverpool form at either Leeds or Man City; in short, the primary currency upon which to evaluate a striker, namely the ability to stuff the ball into the net, is trading at a premium when Robbie Fowler is subject to analysis.
