Remember, you can only lose an unbeaten run if you’ve won a lot of games
LIVERPOOL conveniently forget that it has been 17 years since they won the league when they crow on about winning the Champions League. On penalties. Moan United crow about how they won the league last season but are a little foggy about the last time that they beat Arsenal.
Chelsea crow about winning back-to-back championships but they rarely own up to the embarrassment of having to pay £900 million to buy that hollow success. And Top Four
Tottenham have the bizarre boast that they have the ability to play in the Champions League – while fighting out a relegation battle.
But none of these also rans have stayed undefeated this season for as long as Arsenal. Even Ricky Hatton had been decked and was covered in cuts and bruises by the time Arsenal finally lost a game on Sunday.
When Hatton saw the Middlesboro result, he probably thought Mayweather had done some damage.
Arsenal did lose but the result just goes to show what an amazing achievement the club had when they finished their immaculate season in 2004 without a single loss in the defeat column. Teams are always likely to slip up after being asked to play four away matches in a row, about 12 London derbies in a season or with your best players injured. You can’t complain. That’s the challenge of the Premiership.
To have come through unscathed for so long, for a whole season, just goes to show what a great team the Arsenal invincibles really were.
However you measure success, no other team has achieved such brilliance.
SO, just when it seemed it could stretch on for the whole season, the run came to a glorious end. They said it might never happen, but it did: Spurs managed to get a lucky break. Pascal Chimbonda’s goal may have been a tad illegal but right now we’ll take whatever’s going thank you very much. Then the ref got a sending-off decision at the Lane right for a change before Defoe scored the winner to remind Sven what he missed by taking an Arsenal reserve to the World Cup.
That really should have been the proverbial icing on the cake but, in a strange upside-down cake sort of a way, it had already been applied earlier in the day. For one couldn’t help noticing that the other team in north London, having been unable to knock over Fat Sam’s boys in midweek, also failed to survive the precarious trip to the mighty Middlesboro, from where even we came away with a point. In fact we would have had all three if one of our old boys hadn’t been over keen to show us just what we’d let go.
Yes, who’d have thought that the old nonsense about some players not fancying cold wet days in December in the north east might actually be true. And while it may not officially have been a six pointer, Sunday’s game was definitely a six pinter. In fact it was a 12 but after a while who’s counting?
Spurs win and Arsenal lose on the same day! Occasions like these don’t come round often enough – more’s the pity – so when they do they are well worth savouring.
