the 370Z.com OFFICIAL football (soccer) thread

[phelan]

arsenal related rant:

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Red: were we watching the same match? Koscielny was shite for the first 30 minutes, as was Frimpong. Kagawa and Gotze repeatedly got into the box - from whose side? Oh...Koscielny's. And he kept giving away the damn ball outside of our box! He at least recovered some...er, form at the end of the game, though. I wanted to smack Frimpong every time he misplaced a pass. Which was...a lot of the time. We were rubbish and couldn't hold possession when we were attacking. The possession stats were stupid because we kept playing the ball back to Szczesny!

Credit to Robin van Persie, excellent dispossession, then the quick get up and go mentality to latch onto a Walcott through ball (!!!!!!!!) and score with his chocolate leg.

Mertesacker should have done better on Dortmund's chance at 6 minutes, but it's refreshing to see an Arsenal defender just head the ball as far away as possible from crosses in, instead of trying to play it out like we always do. Still, Mertesacker is walking artillery - very slow, but positionally sound. We are defensively better than last year - like I said a while ago, we're more of a George Graham side now, than Arsene Wenger.

Benayoun has not played in a long *** time, give him some time.

Arteta probably was leggy from the match over the weekend against Swansea.

Gotze was an absolute TERROR. I mean it, he ripped our defense apart time and again with little flicks and tricks. If Kagawa had his shooting boots on we would have been down 3-1 in this match. I want him in the red and white. Badly.

Enough about the Dortmund game, I'm still going "OMFG" over that volley, but we've waxed lyrical over it already. Next week will be interesting, Olympiakos looked fairly ordinary...and made Marseille look good haha. One other game that was ridiculous - anybody see that Hulk screamer from 35+ yards? Holy ****, it's like the Alex free kick last year; if not for the net, it'd still be going!

Today there's lots and lots of good games.

Fun betting punts would be Napoli to win a high scoring affair with Man City 5-4, with neither team playing defense. Also causes Mancini to reapply the handbrakes in the EPL and Man City become boring again.

Benfica to hold a hungry United team to a 1-1 draw, Rooney went in for a haircut and had too much cut off, resulting in a loss of form

Bayern to get SMOKED by a hat trick from Guiseppe Rossi. Gomez misses four clear cut chances by side footing wide and above the bar twice apiece (<3 blue)

Joe Cole to score an absolute screamer for Lille, before limping off with a hamstring injury from a ridiculous celebration

I don't know enough about Ajax to joke about them. Now if they were Feyenoord...