Unfriendly fire

By the time you read this, the “natural” order of things could well have been restored in the Premiership. Arsenal may have drawn level on points with Manchester United, while still enjoying the not inconsiderable benefits of a game in hand and a marginally superior goal difference.

But, watching Arsène Wenger pacing the touchline last Wednesday night, bearing the look of a man who realised he had left the gas on at home, at the time of writing I would not wager huge amounts of cash on it.
Had this fixture been played any time between August and the end of November, United would most probably have been wellied. But that was a different United back then, not to mention a different Arsenal. As it was, the away team bossed the game from start to finish, with the exception of the Gunners’ purple patch after half-time.
The increasingly god-like John O’Shea gave Lauren the mother and father of all chasings before injury took him from the field. O’Shea has overlapped and attacked so much this season that he has been a more effective left-winger than Ryan Giggs – from full-back. As John Giles used to say about Gary Ablett and John Barnes years ago, Giggs should be giving O’Shea half his wages each week.
With no calming influence in midfield after Vieira’s injury, Arsenal looked like poor forked animals for much of the game. Their squad is full of the sort of people who do well when the main guys (Vieira, Henry etc) are doing well, but can’t do much on their own to turn the tide when it goes against them. Players like Lauren, Ashley Cole, Freddie Ljungberg and Sylvain Wiltord, all of whom looked world class back in September, and all of whom are floundering badly now.
As it happens, I still think Arsenal will win the league, not least because of that final fixture against Sunderland, which is as close to three free points as you can get in modern football. But their hubris, their unnecessary showboating, their annoying tendency to take the piss out of opponents (not to mention their lack of decent defenders), have all combined to make this title race far closer than it needed to be. If they blow it, they will never, never live it down.
And while I’m at it, Wenger’s whingeing about the Sol Campbell red card misses the point entirely.
If it were a fair world, Campbell would have stayed on the pitch, and Arsenal would have lost the game.

Can there be anybody who, upon reading of the Carl Lewis affair in last week’s papers, failed to suppress at least a wintry smile, if not a full-blown belly laugh?
If you could have hand-picked one top-rank athlete to be publicly exposed and humiliated in this way, it would surely have been this sanctimonious, gloating fraud, a guy who was so establishment that Whitney Houston insisted he get pride of place in the video for ‘One Moment In Time’, the godawful dirge she sang for the 1988 Olympics.
The news that Lewis had a positive drug test covered up by the US athletics authorities provided the perfect excuse for the press to once again have a good wallow in the muck of the 100m final at the Seoul Games. Looking again at the re-published stills of the closing moments of “the dirtiest race in athletics history”, you half expect some of the pictured protagonists to be sprouting scaly growths, shoulder moustaches and extra nipples as they hurtle across the finish line.
As we now know, the winner of that race, Ben Johnson, was not so much the tip of the iceberg as the uppermost atom of the mountain. Lewis was at it. Linford Christie was at it. Flo-Jo was at it. It would probably be quicker to unearth those who weren’t at it.
Two of Lewis’ training partners, a pair of no-marks by the names of Andre Phillips and Joe DeLoach, surprisingly took gold at the Seoul Olympics themselves. Less than surprisingly, they were never heard of again. (The case of Phillips’ victory, in the 400m hurdles, is particularly irritating, as it denied the great Ed Moses a third straight Olympic gold.)
How many more of the Yanks, who never missed an opportunity to harp on about the East Germans and the Soviets at every turn, were taking the tablets? One individual springs to mind immediately, though the libel laws prevent Foul Play from naming him. This fellow took gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in one of the track events, before promptly disappearing into richly-deserved obscurity.
He shaved an absolutely massive margin off his personal best (I cannot cite the precise amount of time involved, because then he and the distance he competed in would be instantly identifiable) in the space of a few months. Then he went off to the LA Games, won his gold, and abruptly retired from the sport.
Everyone, even athletics enthusiasts (yes, there are still a few left), has forgotten that guy now, which is as it should be. Conversely, Lewis, the unchallengeable, Stars-and-Stripes-bedecked idol of those Games, will long be remembered, though not in the way he’d anticipated.