whew!

i haven't seen this chelsea team in a long time...and i'm pretty sure i haven't seen them since mid-december. manU didn't have a chance. chelsea had complete control of the ball for what felt like 85% of the time. passes were crisp, shots were accurate, and the killing blows were beautiful.

gallas opened up the scoring within the first six minutes of a game off a lampard corner kick. lampard aimed for drogba (i think, it could have been terry), who got a piece of the ball, but out of nowhere (or at least nowhere on my tv screen), gallas cuts across the crease and redirects the ball with a beautiful header into the top right corner. the keeper never had a chance.


at 61 minutes, it was my favourite who maneouvered his way through manU's defence knocking a right kick past the keeper as well. that was when the mayhem broke loose. there's no way that manU could possible score 3 goals in the remaining 29 minutes. cole ripped off his jersey (much to my delight, but not to the ref's as he got a yellow card for it), and the crowd started celebrating.

when cole set up carvalho's goal at the 73rd minute...it was official.

i'm glad i got to see the win. with meetings on tuesday and all the final games on sunday at 8 a.m., it was going to be tight.

the only big worry? rooney's foot injury and terry's kick to the shins. chelsea's bid may be over, but now i'm in full force england mode for the world cup.

in the mean time, i wish i was in south-west london right now. what a party they will have indeed!

have you seen this man?

he occassionally blogs...but we haven't physically seen him in a while...has anyone seen mateo?

finally, someone who shares my opinion

i normally don't speak up like this because i'm still not quite confident in speaking definitively about football, but this person said it too, so i can't be that far off the mark...

IT'S NO WAY TO TREAT JOE
Oliver Holt

I FIND it hard to share the growing antipathy towards Jose Mourinho. I don't care how much money he has spent. It takes an awful lot more than money to win back-to-back Premiership titles. Just ask Sir Alex Ferguson who has spent more than £100m on a team that hasn't won the league for three seasons.

But the one thing I do think Mourinho has mismanaged dreadfully this season is his treatment of Joe Cole. Cole had responded magnificently to everything Mourinho asked him to do and has been Chelsea's best player for much of this season. But just when he was playing his best football and earning rave reviews, Mourinho decided he wanted to humiliate him.

He dragged him off in the middle of the first half at Fulham and has marginalised him ever since. And he wonders why Cole missed his last-gasp opportunity against Liverpool on Saturday. It might just be something to do with the fact that Cole has been treated so badly his confidence is shot to pieces.

i had a conversation with bananas after last week's defeat to liverpool, and we both concur: its mourinho that has to go.

A Sport With A True History

Michael McGinnes, curator at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, holds the oldest-known soccer ball in the world Tuesday in Stirling, Scotland. The ball is believed to be nearly 500 years old.
Photograph by : Danny Lawson, Associated Press

i'll just leave it to arsene

on the penalty kick:
"I felt frankly that it was a generous decision. Then I thought to myself, if it is our year, Jens will save it. Maybe the strength of character of Jens was important because I knew he would not be beaten easily. There was a lot of pressure on Requellmie and he had fatigue, but Jens had determination and class, and he showed again what a great goalkeeper he has been this season."

the god of highbury

Hooligans 18, Blazers 0

centre street hooligans started their spring 2006 season as if they had been playing together for years and not minutes. playing the solid 1-3-1 formation, the hooligans finessed their way goal after goal for each 45 minunte half.

each teammate held their own with goal contributions scored by brian wiffen-peters, brian woychuk, rob franzon, melissa franzon, taras netsko, reza sadeghian, and spare luis navarre (forgive me if i have forgotten ANYONE - there were just too many goals to remember who scored what). net minder brad simkulet was stunning, diving for everything and anything in the dying minutes to record the hooligan's first shut out.

fantastic performance by the hooligans. they may have to move up to the rec plus league if they continue to shame the other teams like this.

lying sacks of shit

so i rewatched the collision between eboue and gilberto that led to keane's goal at highbury yesterday, and i am now convinced (and i wasn't at first) that carrick is a lying sack of shit. watch the replay and you can see carrick standing near the touch line looking from the fallen gunners to his own men rushing to attack. he chose attack. to pretent he didn't see eboue down is a joke.

now, what carrick did isn't illegal, but it is piss poor. and everyone else on the pitch knew it. if you've ever watched edgar davids play and compete you would know that if what the spurs had done was clean he would have turned on jens lehmann and robert pires when they came in to complain. he didn't. he just walked away and tried to ignore them. and if you've ever seen robbie keane score a big goal, which that goal surely was, you would know that a cartwheel, shoulder roll and guns a blazing finger gestures were destined to follow the ball striking the back of the net. he made the wise choice and barely celebrated. surely carrick, davids and keane all knew what was going on and they ignored it.

and when i consider how many times the arse have done the gentlemanly thing when we could have scored...well it makes me hate the spurs even more than i did. what a bunch of cunts.

p.s. it appears in the replay that jol may have missed the collision. but i couldn't tell for sure. so maybe he, at least, isn't a liar. but then it did happen right in front of the benches and if he was following the ball he'd have to have seen the collision since that's how his team got the ball.