Birmingham City (0) 0 - 4 (2) Arsenal
St Andrew's, Sunday 12th January 2003
FA Barclaycard Premiership
First off, apologies for the continued difficulty we're having
keeping the site up-to-date. The problems will pass, please bear with us.
Timing was an issue at St Andrews on Sunday too, where a problem with the floodlights caused a half-hour delay in starting the match. The players had to leave their warm-ups to go back to the dressing room. The kind of disruption, in the freezing British winter, that might cause the overpaid foreign prima-donnas of Arsenal to wobble a bit? These days it'd take a person of overwhelming prejudice, or who just hadn't seen them play, to expect that.
Arsenal were just so much better than Birmingham that the match was a bit dull, if livened up by some nice goals. It was killed off after 6 minutes when Henry broke form the half-way line, found Bergkamp, and carried on with his run to take the perfectly-weighted return ball as he got into the box (making up about 10 yards on 2 defenders) and round the keeper before slipping it into the net. Teams do recover from early goals against them, but the class gap was just too evident.
The second came after half an hour, when Johnson tried to stop Henry getting to a high ball on the edge of the box, but succeeded only in nodding it back towards Pires. Bobby hit it first time, a thunderbolt of a volley that gave the goalie no chance.
20 minutes to go and Lauren claimed the 3rd with a header from a great Bergkamp cross from the left. It took a huge deflection off of Johnson
to make it loop over Vaessen in the City goal, but it looks like it's being given to the Arsenal man.
3 minutes later, Pires and Wiltord combined to create the chance for Henry's second, and the 100th of his Arsenal career, the same milestone reached by Dennis against Oxford. As we've been saying for ages, only injury or an utterly unexpected transfer
can prevent Thierry beating Ian Wright's record. Nice to see Henry's comments on it, saying what he'd like more is to end up being remembered at Highbury with as much affection as Wrighty.
Don't worry about it Thierry (but if you really want a tip,
work on your mad goal celebrations).
Henry nearly made it a hattrick very soon after, with a low curler
from outside the box on the left which just missed the far post.
Birmingham fans will take some comfort from the performance of
debutant Christoph Dugarry, who clearly still has some talent. But on this performance, playing him will only serve to counteract the presence of another of their new boys, Ferdinand Coly. Wow, was he bad or what!?
Reports on other sites....
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