Carabao Football League Cup Fourth Round
at Ashburton Grove (AKA the Emirates Stadium),
Drayton Park, North London
Arsenal FC (0) 1 Extra time (2) 2
Eddie Nketiah 85, 96
Norwich City (1) 1 Extra Time (1) 1
Josh Murphy 34
Arsenal won 2-1 AET
Attendance 58,444
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| Wow! Look at the stitching detail on those Reebok boots |
On Sunday, Arsenal beat Everton 5-2 at Goodison Park, in an enthralling game that saw three goals scored (one by the Toffees and two by Arsene Wenger's side), after the scheduled 90 minutes had elapsed.
It was a result that saw Everton dismiss their manager Ronald Koeman following a poor start to the season for the Merseyside club. I won't even pretend to have any sympathy whatsoever towards the Dutchman's plight... as far as I'm concerned, he can go and stand in the naughty corner, facing the wall, with Diego Maradona and the rest of vile creatures who've ever cheated against England at football, until I've collected enough big rocks together to throw at them.
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| Happy 30th Anniversary to the Gooner fanzine. Three decades of amusing and thought provoking writing that never, ever stooped to Arse(nal) licking |
Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, Norwich City's James Maddison scored the only goal of the game in the East Anglia derby at Portman Road, to give Daniel Farke's side their fourth consecutive away win in the Championship, at the home of their rivals Ipswich Town.
These two away wins saw both sides climb the table in their respective divisions, with Arsenal moving up to fifth in the Premier League and the Canaries rising to sixth, AKA: a play off position, in the Championship.
Incidentally, isn't a distance of 45 miles, that takes over a hour to travel between two football grounds, a bit too far for a game to be considered a 'local' derby?
But, I reckon we can overlook a few miles of logistical leeway, for a fixture that has given the world the catchy title of the 'Old Farm derby'.
Having picked up the tickets (and documentation) that would afford us access to the upper echelons of the Ashburton Grove ground (AKA the Emirates Stadium) again, from whence we'd also observed Arsenal's game in the previous round of the League Cup against Doncaster Rovers, we headed off to 'The Herbert Chapman' public house on Holloway Road, for a quick brew.
The bar is named after the very successful and highly influential former Arsenal manager, who had won the following honours while occupying the hot seat at Highbury: First Division champions: 1930–31, 1932–33, FA Cup winners: 1929–30, Charity Shield winners: 1930, 1931, 1933, and paved the way for a lot more silverware, while he revolutionised the club... and, in many respects, the game of football itself too.
Sadly, Chapman died on 6th January 1934 after succumbing to a bout of pneumonia, aged just 55 years old. During the few days before he passed away, he'd attended three matches since the the turn of the new year, for scouting purposes, while suffering with a heavy cold, namely: Bury v Notts County, Sheffield Wednesday v Birmingham and an Arsenal third team game v Guilford Town.
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| Herbert Chapman 1878-1934 |
To celebrate his achievements, as well as the world famous bust that used to stand within the foyer of the 'Marble Halls' of 'Arsenal Stadium' and a bronze version that is on display at their swanky new residence, there is now a statue of the legendary former Northampton, Town, Leeds City, Huddersfield Town and Arsenal manager, stood facing their current home, that stands between the Clock End bridge (that leads from the Drayton Park station and public house) and the stadium itself.
During his playing career, Chapman played for fourteen different clubs, which included: Kiveton Park Colliery, Notts County, Sheffield United, Grimsby Town, Worksop Town and err... Tottenham Hotspur, amongst several others.
Arsene Wenger, in comparison has won the following trophy haul: Premier League champions: 1997–98, 2001–02, 2003–04, FA Cup winners: 1997–98, 2001–02, 2002–03, 2004–05, 2013–14, 2014–15, 2016–17, Charity/Community Shield winners: 1998, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2014, 2015, 2017 and saw his team lose the League Cup final in 2007 against Chelsea and 2011 again in 2011 v Birmingham City.
Since 2006, Arsenal have shelled out £390 million to facilitate their move, from the nearby 38,000 capacity ground on Avenell Road, Highbury, where they had played for 93 years, to the 60,000 all-seater Emirates Stadium, which is literally just around the corner from their old homestead.
Subsequently the removal costs have soared past the original estimates, meaning that between 2006 and 2013, Arsene Wenger has had to be very careful how he used his transfer budget.
His astute handling of the club finances became known as: ‘Wengernomics’, as Arsenal entered a period of balancing the books, meaning that the French manager had no alternative but to implement a certain amount of austerity measures, whereby some of the star players he had signed, where sold on at a profit to make ends meet.
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| Va-va-voom! |
Of course, the only statistic that a lot of people will pick out of those listed above, is that the Gunners haven't won the Premier League title since 2004.
And in spite of the North London club having qualified for the European Champions League in every year for the first two decades of Wenger's reign, they only finished fifth in the table last season.
But instead of a statue, though there is a Wenger bust stood in the entrance hall to the directors box and seating, some (but by no means all) Arsenal fans celebrate his achievements and input towards guiding the club through an unpleasant but necessary spell of financial hardship, as they speculated to accumulate, by chanting 'Wenger out!' in the ground on match days.
Wenger recently signed a two year contract extension, but that situation is being reviewed at the end of this season.
Now that Arsenal have emerged through their 'no pain, no gain' belt tightening phase and the 'Emirates Stadium' is an obvious 'loadsamoney', profit making commodity; without wanting to seem as though I am taking sides on this subject, might I be so pertinent to ask those who are calling for the head of the most successful manager in their club's history: who exactly would you replace him with?
And if you can even provide a sensible answer, would your choice of a replacement have been able to circumnavigate the financial storm in the manner that Arsene Wenger has done, while supplying far more highs than lows on the field of play for over twenty plus years?
That is, in case you haven't already noticed, a rhetorical question... and the answer is bleedin' obvious.
But all supporters are entitled to have an opinion, especially those who are paying the exorbitant and over inflated ticket prices that Arsenal fans do for a run of the mill Premier League fixture.
When all is said and done, the manager may well be the heartbeat of this club, but the fans are the lifeblood that keeps that heart pumping.
Of course there wasn't only one team at the Emirates Stadium tonight, far from it as it happened, so before we move onto the game itself, in a competition that won't be anywhere near the top of either team's list of priorities given their current league positions, lets have a quick delve into what makes Norwich City tick.
Their chairman is the retired British Labour Party and Co-operative Party politician Ed Balls, who was a former Shadow Home Secretary and actually stood for the leadership of the Labour Party when Gordon Brown resigned, but Ed Milliband won that particular contest and the rest is history.
Norwich City F.C. were formed at the Criterion Cafe in Norwich on 17 June 1902.
The club's original nickname was the Citizens, but this sobriquet had been altered by 1907 to the Canaries.
There are several schools of thought in circulation, pertaining to the by-name change.
Football folklore is notoriously based on handed down tales, that often exist on the blurred perimeters that separate fact and fiction, distorted in a manner that you would expect from a frenzied game of extreme Chinese whispers.
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| There is a fascinating interview with Tony Adams in the latest Gooner fanzine, but you have to buy the next issue to read the 2nd part of it. A neat marketing ruse. |
The first tale I heard pertaining to this subject was the Colman's Mustard business based in the city had a distinctive canary yellow packaging, and their premises were based on Carrow Road, which legend says inspired the club to adopt the colour of a local success story. When the club moved to Carrow Road, the words: 'Colman's Mustard' were painted on the roof of the stand on the only covered side of the newly built facility.
Another version of events tells of the Norwich City chairman of the time, circa 1907, being a keen bird fancier and breeder of canaries... and it is claimed that he changed the team's colours to something more in tune to his hobby and passion for cage birds, than the blue and white shirts that they had worn previously until that year.
And... yes, there's even more of this stuff: Norwich and it's surrounding landscape, has had connections with canaries for a long time, due to the Flemish weavers who had settled in the area around the 15th and 16th century who had a penchant (perch-ant even?) for importing the birds from the Dutch colonies of the Caribbean.
So all told... your guess is as good as mine.
Location wise, the Norfolk club started life at a ground on Newmarket Road, but increasing crowds meant that they had to relocate in 1908, when they moved to The Nest, on the site of a disused chalk pit. The eye-catching images of the intriguing geometry of this ground that appear on the kind of 'days of yore' websites that sad anoraks like me trawl through into the wee small hours, are quite stunning.
The increasing popularity of the club meant that they had to up sticks again, when they moved to their current ground at Carrow Road in 1935.
The joint major shareholder at Norwich City: Delia Smith, is a no nonsense TV presenter who was advocating traditional home cooking, years before fannies like Jamie Oliver and his ilk tried coining it in by cornering the market in TV chef-dom, recently introduced her own exclusive range of match day fayre at Carrow Road, but I refuse to believe the yarn that the game pies contained canary meat.
Let's be having you!
Almost 9,000 Norwich fans helped to swell tonight's attendance to 58,444, they were seated in the lower section of the Clock End and also up in the clouds, above our 'luxury level' seats and were already in fine voice, well before the Emirates Stadium match day announcer made the ever so slightly clumsy error, of welcoming "Ipswich Town" to tonight's game while introducing the starting line ups.
From the outset, it was clear that the Canaries weren't just here to fulfil any 'plucky underdogs' obligations, and as Arsenal started tentatively, passing the ball to death sideways across the pitch to little or no effect, and repeatedly squandering possession cheaply, while Norwich seemed to want it more and made their hosts look very ordinary.
Wenger had made eleven changes to the Gunners line-up from their win at Goodison Park two days ago and though his side contained a good number of established first team and international players, I reckon my learned spouse summed up what was unfolding out on the pitch fairly accurately when she commented: "I take it that none of this reserve lot are even mildly interested in staking a claim for a regular place in the first team?"
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| "On the ball City!" |
Until that point, the hosts had only really created one half decent chance, when Rob Holding headed the ball straight at Angus Gunn, who helped it on its way over the bar.
If the visitors would've had more of a cutting edge in the final third, there is no way that this game would've gone into extra time, as they soaked up Arsenal's tippy-tappy playing the ball to death approach and cut a regular swathe through the Gunners midriff with a string of counter attacks.
The Arsenal fan's frustrations were compounded as Norwich had further chances, that saw Macey push away Nelson Oliveira's curling shot with Murphy and Mario Vrancic both missing chances as the second half followed the same pattern as the first pretty much.
The home side were effectively camping out in their own half of the pitch. And while patience might be a virtue in the eyes of an astute French tactician and football purist, some of the home fans in our vicinity were far from happy with what they were seeing.
Arsenal were beginning to lose their heads as well as their shape as was clearly demonstrated when Alex Iwobi wrestled Harrison Reed to the deck to stop him taking a free-kick.
Ten minutes into the second half, Norwich launched the ball over the flat-footed Arsenal defence (who were set up in a rigid yet ineffective formation across no-mans-land) for Oliveria to run onto, he took control with his first touch and raced forward, with a clear sight of goal as it came into shooting range, while the hosts keeper advanced from his line. The crowd held it's collective breath, this was the moment that could spell curtains (and elimination from the League Cup) for Arsenal.
I suspect that if Oliveria had been slightly further forward (for argument's sake, lets say eighteen inches or so) then Andrew Madley would've had no alternative but to brandish a red card instead.
And though that moment wasn't entirely to be the turning point of the game, it had been a very, very lucky escape for both Elneny and Arsenal.
Moments later, Macey intervened to keep Murphy's cross away from Oliveria, who was free in acres of space (again), while the same two Norwich players rushed at half decent chances, in their urgency to get things done and both put the ball over the bar.
Cometh the eighty fifth minute, cometh the man... or in the case of Arsenal, cometh Eddie Nketiah! Arsenal's number 62, an eighteen year old former Chelsea youth team player, who has been scoring regularly for the Gunners development sides, but whose only previous first team experience was when he'd come on in the eighty-ninth minute as a substitute in the 4-2 Europa League away win over Belarusian side Bate Borisov on 28 September.
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| You have to squint to see it, but this is Arsenal's winning goal. |
Subsequently, the visitors imminent celebrations were cancelled and the game would be going into extra-time.
90 minutes: Arsenal 1 v Norwich City 1
The bitch-slap by the fickle hand of fate had been harsh on Norwich, but they really should've killed this game off long before now... and must've been acutely aware of that themselves.
Inevitably, Arsenal took the lead six minutes into extra time, when Nketiah, who else, leapt above the visitors defence and powered home a crashing header from Elneny's pinpoint corner.
I pondered for a moment, just how far the irate Gunners fan, who'd sat in front of us for the majority of the game, had got on his travels by now... after he'd stormed out because Mr Wenger had the temerity to introduce an inexperienced teenager from the bench, five minutes from the end of a League Cup game that Arsenal were losing against a lower league side.
If I ever see the guy again, I am going to point at him and laugh... a lot!
James Husband, the Canaries left back, broke into the area from out on the flank, but came to an abrupt halt when Mathieu Debuchy 'caught him' across the neck with his stray right arm.
But Mr Madley waved the appeals for the quite obvious contact away... and the visitors were denied a spot-kick opportunity to take the game to a penalty shoot out.
I'm sure it will be scant consolation to the travelling army of Norwich fans, but as a consequence of the referee's blatant error... at least we caught our train!
FT: Arsenal 2 v Norwich City 1 AET
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| Post match @Arsenal tweet |
