The game started for me with a 7am check in at Stansted, for the Arsenal Travel Club flight to Madrid. The trouble with not doing these things independently is that everything moves at the pace of the slowest person, which with the Arsenal Travel Club, can be extremely slow. To do something simple like a coach transfer, you have to wait for everybody to sort themselves out, which meant that Tuesday morning was a series of frustrating queues.
In Madrid and on the loose by mid afternoon, a tour of some local bars was undertaken, ending up in an Irish bar close to the stadium, which looked extremely impressive from the outside. Eventually getting in around an hour before kick off, the stadium itself is one of the best I've been to, anywhere. Fully state of the art in terms of facilities, and the view when you get into the seats was incredible - truly incredible.
The Arsenal section was full with 3,500 Gooners, most without the highest of hopes. Missing players including Campbell, Bergkamp, Van Persie, Cole, Lauren, Clichy, Adebayor, and Cygan (OK, so maybe not a huge loss there), my hopes were to score, and to limit Madrid as far as possible - but a 2-1 defeat wouldn't have been a bad result in my eyes. Others seemed to feel the same way - a score draw is a good result away from home in any case in Europe; but with our missing players and dodgy form, and the form and reputation of the opposition, a draw would feel like a win.Instead, we became the first English team ever to win in the Bernabeu. Every player played fantastically well, Henry getting the headlines for scoring, but Reyes and Fabregas in particular were outstanding. No player had even anything as bad as an average game in my view. Every time there was a ball to intercept, an Arsenal player intercepted it. Madrid weren't at their best, but a large part of that was because of the way Arsenal played - controlling the game pretty much from start to finish, and not really allowing Madrid to play. Arsenal could have scored more, probably should have, and may live to regret that later. Arsenal did to Madrid precisely what Premiership teams have been doing to us away from home all season.
A fantastic result, made all the more remarkable by the youth of some of the players - Eboue, Flamini, Senderos, Toure, Fabregas, Hleb, Reyes, and 2 of the subs are under 25 years old. Also remarkable because of our bad domestic form away from home - but then again, teams in Spain don't kick lumps out of you like teams in England - if we moved to play in the Spanish league, we'd possibly be better off than we are in the English league at the moment. Towards the end, the home fans obviously started to get frustated, and started leaving before the final whistle, to amused shouts of "Adios, Adios, Adios" from the Gooners.
A very large session in the pub followed this game, and a significant hangover the following day. Seeing the game again on TV the following day, it was excellent to see how the Arsenal-hating ITV presenters were eating their words - it looked like they only covered the game so that they could show Beckham and his mates turn on the style. How very disappointing for them!!It is easy to compare this to the magnificent 5-1 win in Milan a couple of years ago. It was as much a priviledge to have been in the Bernabeu as it was to have been in the San Siro in 2003, and for me, this trip was a better one overall - just because we really needed a display and result like this to show that we can still cut it with the very best.
1 comment:
Great game, great night out afterwards, and good to read your report on it - sounds like you enjoyed it as much as I did! Up the Gunners!
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