On this day: Ferguson, Almunia, Pulis, Walcott

Morning, it’s still v quiet, so let’s do a bit of an On This Day Interlull post.

October 17th 2004

Alex Ferguson has decided to open his big fat mouth about next week’s Arsenal v United game and has spoken about last season’s contretemps at Old Trafford. According to him, “What Arsenal players did that day was the worst thing I’ve seen in this sport. No wonder they were so delighted at the verdicts. They conveniently forget things, that mob.”

It’s funny to look back on it now and imagine that for one second he thought that was the worst thing he’d ever seen in football. It wasn’t true then – it was clearly about ramping up the rivalry and firing up his team for the upcoming game. What none of us knew back then was that it wasn’t so much about his team, but his 12th man, Mike Riley.

That was the game when our unbeaten run came to an end, the game when Rio Ferdinand and Ruud van Nistelrooy should have been sent off, the game when Wayne Rooney dived to win a penalty, and the game when Riley’s refereeing performance was the one that still sticks with me as potentially corrupt. Don’t believe me, watch it again. Trigger warning: you will get triggered. For all the complaints about VAR, it was days like this that made it seem like a good idea back then.

I wonder what Ferguson might think now is the worst thing he’s ever seen in football. Roman Abramovich? Man City? The European Super-League debacle? Man United spending £90m on Antony?

October 17th 2005

There’s some guff in the papers this morning about Sp*rs being better than us all of a sudden. Jermaine Jenas has been mouthing as has manager Martin Jol. Go find it for yourselves, I’m not linking to it.

The more things change, the more things stay the same, eh?

October 17th 2009

There’s some chat about who will play in goal between Manuel Almunia and Lukasz Fabianski:

Personally I think Almunia will play but he knows there’s absolutely no margin for error now. Not only does he have competition from Fabianski, who was given a new contract last summer, but also Don Vito who has shown he’s got potential too when thrust into the team in recent weeks. I do wonder if there’s been an element of Almunia being sent away to get his head right or something but if he does get back into the team he knows he’s got to perform if he wants to stay there. And that is probably no bad thing.

Almunia. Fabianski. Mannone. With all due respect to those chaps, we really didn’t look after the goalkeeper position as well as we could have in those years, did we?

October 17th 2010

Tony Pulis has his say on non-English managers:

I’ve got nothing against foreign ­managers, they are very nice people. Apart from Arsene Wenger.

After the Graeme Souness comments last week about Wenger not being a football man, it’s worth remembering they don’t exist in a vacuum. That kind of low-level xenophobia was something he had to deal with throughout most of his Arsenal career, and while it’s a bit too complicated to get into this morning, I think by extension it had an impact on how Arsenal were viewed by sections of the media, other fans, and officials.

Arsenal is a London club, but I think we were viewed as ‘foreign’ too, and that kind of garbage from the likes of Pulis was a big part of it. I’ll also never be dissuaded from my belief that the horrific injuries to Abou Diaby, Eduardo and Aaron Ramsey were a consequence of this. No other team ever has suffered three leg-breakers like that in such a relatively short period of time, not before or since.

I don’t know what Tony Pulis is doing nowadays, but I hope he has an incurable case of worms.

October 17th 2015

After his return from an ACL injury, Theo Walcott was quite vocal about his desire to play as a centre-forward, and Arsene Wenger obliged. He had 7 games there between early August and October, including one with two assists in a very enjoyable 3-0 win over Man United. The manager was cautiously optimistic. I wrote:

It’s something he’s going to have to work on in every game because this is not what comes naturally to him, and as good as he has been recently, it’s impossible to make a definitive judgement after so few games. Let’s hope we see it again and again and again, because the manager is right: if he does play like he did a couple of weeks ago, he’s going to cause defences all kinds of problems.

We did not, dear reader, see it again and again. He started up front the following week in a 3-0 win over Watford, but then picked up a calf injury and as far as I can tell, that was the last time he played there. He added just 3 goals in the next 24 league games, playing on both wings to be fair, but the Walcott centre-forward experiment was a short-lived one.

It was mostly Olivier Giroud from then on, whose 16 Premier League goals sound reasonable enough in a side who spread the goalscoring around quite well, but a 15 game barren streak between January and May played a significant part in our inability to pip Leicester to the title when every other ‘big’ club had fallen away.

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Right, there you go. I’m sure this post has left everybody cherishing those old memories, but they’re part of what made us who we are to this day. And perhaps a reminder to enjoy the good times while they’re here.

Till tomorrow.

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