A Brit inconsistent: the Gunners are driving me Gaga
Published: 18 February 2010
ARSENAL’S inconsistency hit new levels against Porto.
So far this season, it’s been a simple weekly, or fortnightly trend. One week brilliant, the next rubbish, etc etc. Win 6-1, lose to Sunderland. That kind of thing.
But in Portugal, the team’s pathological obsession to be both supremely fantastic and utterly useless at the same time flipped from one minute to the next.
One minute it was comedy goalkeeping which you wouldn’t accept from a school team, then it was all rampaging confidence and searing passing moves.
Then it was back down to comic book defending, only for a recovery to bits of their best again.
You just don’t know where you stand. This drunken madness must stop.
They are like the football equivalent of Peter Kay presenting the Brits: teasing us with a few promising one-liners and then spoiling it all with some predictable autocue switcheroos about Lady Gaga. Or like a football equivalent of the British summer: a couple of sunny, hot days, but then a bucketload of rain. Or like a football equivalent of a fancy touchscreen phone: brilliant to look at and to fiddle with, but always out of battery.
So unpredictable, they are like a footballing equivalents of... Spurs.
RICHARD OSLEY
THERE’S a crisis at Tottenham, an epidemic of spot-kick incompetence sweeping through the squad.
After Jermain Defoe missed six of his last 10 (not a great selling point ahead of the World Cup), boss Harry Redknapp promoted Tom Huddlestone to try to break our penalty-taking curse. I thought “excellent, he’ll drive it hard, low and down the middle” like David Beckham once did to relative success. But no, the technically gifted tortoise had to half-heartedly place it. His boot can launch a 60-yard pass onto a postage stamp, but he can’t pick a corner of the goal and whack it in from 12-yards.
Of course, the real worry this week has been our performances. We keep finding ourselves outplayed by worse teams who simply want it more. On Sunday, the first half against Bolton actually felt like a nightmare as Johan Elmander and David Bentley’s haircut combined to leave me despondent and wretched.
On a day when my love for Tottenham should have moved me to a rash Spurs-related purchase (such as the glass coaster set for a modest £4.99) I instead found myself moved to the verge of tears.
Come on Bentley, cut your hair and let’s get back to winning football matches so that I can happily trundle into the Spurs shop and waste some money.
PIP WROE
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