Come May, we might owe Sven a lot
1 comment February 11th, 2008
Arsene Wenger can join David Beckham, Michael Owen, and The Fake Sheikh in the list of people who probably owe Sven Goran Eriksson a beer sometime. The Swede yesterday completed the extraordinary feat of beating Manchester United home and away in his first season as Man City manager.
That’s six points that could prove absolutely vital come the end of the season. As it stands, we’re two points ahead of United, and five in front of Chelsea (who also failed to win yesterday). A win tonight at home to Blackburn would put us in a tremendous position. Still, you wouldn’t know that if you were watching Sky’s coverage of the footy yesterday: perhaps not wanting to draw attention to our fixture being on rival stations Setanta, they barely mentioned us in the title race.
I feel that we’ve been somewhat disrespected by the media over the course of this season. Despite leading the table for the majority of the time, the press have talked a lot of rubbish about our inevitable collapse and United’s impending triumph. Well, United needed a stoppage time equaliser to draw with Spurs last week, before yesterday’s defeat with City.
Meanwhile, with certain sections of the media claiming the African Cup of Nations would decimate our ‘thin squad’, we’ve won our last three league games, scoring nine goals and conceding just one. Hopefully the fact that we seem to be continually written off will only serve to further motivate our squad.
In last night’s ACN Final, Alex Song was withdrawn with an injury just twenty minutes into Cameroon’s defeat. Nevertheless, he deserves praise for an excellent tournament.
It’s hard to predict what kind of team we’ll put out tonight, with up to 11 players injured and Toure and Eboue having barely had a cup of tea since touching down at Heathrow. Hopefully the players will smell blood after United’s defeat, and go all out for the win.
