Things started off badly this afternoon when the channel on which the Champions League final was on mysteriously went out fifteen minutes before kickoff. Believe me, I was approximately 100x more distraught about that than about the minor Hitlerian hissy fit of the past few days or my recent discovery that WND decided to belatedly edit last Monday’s column.
But I quickly located a bar with the game and settled in just in time to see Lehman commit an egregious foul and get a red card in the 16th minute. It should have been a Barca goal, too, based on the Advantage concept, but the referee cocked it up and only awarded a free kick, which Ronaldinho missed.
By the way, Ronaldinho is breathtakingly good. His through pass to Eto’o on the red card play was phenomenal.
I was sitting near three Sicilian Barca fans, who, upon discovering that I am an Arsenalista, immediately invited me to join them and passed along the first of many glasses of prosecco. Eboue took a dive and drew an undeserved foul, which Henry and Sol Campbell immediately converted into a textbook free kick, header and goal. One nil to the Arsenal! The Sicilians and I conferred and decided that a) the goal was pretty, but undeserved, b) but Barca was up a man and if they couldn’t score in the remaining hour with a man advantage they would deserve to lose, and c) we urgently required more prosecco.
Arsenal went into a defensive shell once going up a goal, but gradually became more confident and actually began seriously attacking between the 60th and 70th minutes. Hleb blew a nice opportunity and Henry could have put the game away on a one-on-one with the Barca keeper but failed to do so, and sadly, the Gunners began to run out of gas. Eto’o scored a lovely goal in the 76th minute thanks to a perfect pass from Henrik Larson – I got very nervous when I saw him come in as a sub, presciently enough – and that wretched Swede created a second Barca goal that was essentially an own goal off Arsenal’s replacement keeper that won the game for the Spaniards in the 81st minute.
So, as injury time wound down, we drank a salute to the victorious Barcelona squad, another to an Arsenal squad that was noble in defeat and a third to whoever busted Moggi and the crooks of Juventus. Suffice it to say that a very good time was had by all.
I can’t wait for the Mondiale.