Another Sunday Afternoon

What do you do on a Sunday afternoon when it is raining?

In winter you watch the football on television, but this is the height of summer and there is no football on television. Fortunately for me, my wife and daughter decided to go shopping at the visiting 'foreign market' so I had the place all to myself and my wife had insisted that we buy the Arsenal video "49 The Complete Unbeaten Record" so I watched that.

The beauty of this particular DVD is that I could watch the Arsenal play knowing that we were never going to get beaten - all afternoon - no danger of defeat - there might be the odd nil nil draw and there was but I knew I could enjoy every game with no risk of depression setting in. One of the major problems with maturity is that rather than be carried high on emotion when your team win and digging the depths when your team lose you learn to treat both those imposters just the same (I borrowed that) AND YOU MISS OUT ON THE HIGHS.

I am writing this the day after Thierry Henry announced that he is leaving Highbury (or rather The Emirates Stadium) for Barcelona. Good luck to him. He was truly world class while at the Arsenal and made many goals from nothing, but watching the DVD both he and Robert Pires never gave up the chase and could often be seen rushing in at the far post to score.

Arsenal will find new strikers and the team will go on. It will be rare to get the likes of Henry, Pires, Freddie Ljungberg and Dennis Bergkamp playing together but all of them knew how to thread the ball like a needle through a pack of defenders. We may have to rely on the likes of Cesc Fabregas and Tomas Rosicky coming through from midfield but just perhaps the likes of Theo Walcott will come through quicker as a result of the departure. I do remember that it took Thierry Henry a little while to get going.

So there go my thoughts on this particular very wet Sunday Afternoon.