It was Dennis Bergkamp Day at Highbury today, as the last real opportunity to dedicate a game to the great man, before he retires. The message was, wear orange in tribute, and from early in the day, there were dozens of orange-shirted people milling around in the streets outside - quite a few crazy Dutchmen amongst them. 10,000 free t-shirts given away to fans added to the strange colouring inside the ground.
Of the 4 remaining games at Highbury, this was by far the least important in a football sense, so maybe it did need an added diversion to keep the interest going. Towards the end of Highbury, there have been many attempts to make each game a real event, but enough of them recently (Madrid, Juventus), and in the near future (Spurs, Villarreal, Wigan) are looking like very big events, even without anything happening off the pitch.
With West Brom struggling for points, and Arsenal's eye on the Champions League semi final in midweek, this was never going to be a classic. A first half where Arsenal huffed and puffed, ended with an eventual breakthrough when Alexander Hleb scored a well-worked goal.
The second half started with Dennis Bergkamp coming to warm up on the touchline, to a standing ovation from the whole ground. The amount of orange was very impressive, probably helped by the warm weather, which encouraged people to bare their colours. Eventually, with about 20 minutes to go, he came on as a sub. Less than 30 seconds later, West Brom equalised. Not the fairytale that was expected.
Dennis wasn't going to let such a bad team (albeit one that did beat us at their place earlier in the season) ruin his day though. Good work to set up Pires for Arsenal's second, and then the icing on the cake - a beautiful 25-yard shot from the man himself, to seal victory. A classic Bergkamp goal, to provide perfect finish to Bergkamp day.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment