The future seemed bright after the 2006 Champions League final but since then it has been a sorry saga of lies, a soulless new stadium and an absentee ownerEight-two down on aggregate, 12 minutes more to play, thousands of disgruntled fans streaming from the Emirates Stadium. For the first time, I’m among them.Highbury didn’t die for this. It’s a phrase that became almost a mantra for Alan Davies’s popular podcast – The Tuesday Club – that ended last season, a group of lifelong fans left with nothing new to say about a club determined to bring fresh meaning to the phrase stuck in a rut. It wasn’t always like this. Related: Imagine the effects of letting Diego Simeone loose in...
By the end of the 5-1 Champions League capitulation there was an air of sadness, of a wonderful manager caught in the final stages of a long goodbyeThis was a strange, decelerating, ultimately rather sad occasion for a great club and a wonderful manager caught in the final stages of his own torturous long goodbye. Before kick-off a caravan of two hundred or so Arsenal supporters had staged a procession from Highbury to the Emirates in protest at Arsène Wenger’s continued employment, a kind of Jarrow march for the parochially enraged of north London. “We want you to go, we want you to go,” they sang on the streets outside the stadium. “No New Contract,” the signs read. Which, as...
The podders discuss the bun fight for the Champions League spots – is this finally the year Arsenal miss out? Plus: Middlesbrough sink into the relegation zone and Barcelona’s mission impossibleSubscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast & Stitcher. And join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterOn today’s Football Weekly, James Richardson is joined by Barry Glendenning, Paolo Bandini and Sachin Nakrani to look back on damaging weekend for Arsenal as they were beaten 3-1 at Anfield amid rumblings of dressing-room discontent. Still, at least they’ve got a chance to put that right against Bayern Munich in the Champions League this … oh. Continue reading...
Manchester City are moving in the right direction but Chelsea run counter to the assumption that Champions League arrivistes can’t quickly break into the cartelThey say history is written by the winners, but what they don’t always tell you is that records and statistics can also come to the rescue of the less successful.Both Arsène Wenger and Pep Guardiola have been on the defensive over the past few days, pointing out that their clubs are relative ingenues in Europe and not to be compared with the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United. “It is not like Arsenal won the European Cup five times before I arrived,” Wenger said, appealing for a measure of perspective after the disappointing 5-1 defeat at...
It was raining goals in Manchester on Tuesday but where does City’s 5-3 win over Monaco stand alongside other great Champions League nights?Dynamo Kyiv’s wonderful team of the late 1990s deserved a Champions League final – but on a pulsating night at a packed Olympiyskiy they threw away the best chance they would ever have. It was exquisite fare for much of the evening and, when Andriy Shevchenko squeezed in his second goal of the night two minutes before half-time, seemed to be going precisely as the old master Valeriy Lobanovskiy had designed. Moments later Michael Tarnat’s daisycutter of a free-kick restored some doubt but Vitaliy Kosovskiy’s 50th-minute goal – capitalising on some sloppy defending – suggested Dynamo would cut...