Trotting Home - Owen Get Your Gunners
Author: ratbert / Date: Friday 15 January 2010
The first match of the shiny new era: Arsenal. But where the was discord, will Owen Coyle bring hope?
All hail the conquering hero, who has descended from the netherworld in the bleak hills, traversing the moors, to arrive at the Middlebrook Plain by the Mount of Winter to preach the gospel of total football to the masses starved of it. Lo, he will say, I will relive your famine, using tippy-tappy passes and crowning the shire horse with not one, but many tiaras.
Been quite a few weeks, hasn’t it, especially when you consider that there’s been naff all football played involving Bolton Wanderers. Instead we have had as big a managerial saga as could have been had, with all-round favourite of this parish Owen Coyle kicking all the hate and spittle invoked by (sorry to mention him) Gary Megson into the nearest available bedsheet and dumping it in the River Croal.
Getting the man we all wanted has come at a cost, however. From some of the drivel written by such fatheads as Brian Woolnough and Stan Collymore (even the odious Piers Morgan got in the act) you’d think Bolton were fielding a first eleven that included Peter Sutcliffe, Gary Glitter, Jeffrey Archer and the ghosts of Harold Shipman, Fred West and Vlad the Impaler. In fact, we’d get a better press if they did play for us, but then, as long as we’re keeping ‘real’ Premier League teams like Leeds and Newcastle out of the top drawer, it’ll happen. Man changes job, shock horror probe!
Anyway, as the snow finally turns to slush, we can get back to the actual business of playing football. There’s little doubt that Owen is chomping at the bit to get weaving and it’s hard to imagine that not spreading to the team and a crowd not mired in a slough of despond for once in goodness knows how long.
The opponents are Arsenal, who, after several false starts, we finally get to play this season; like buses, two games are coming along at once. Once upon a time we were something of a bogey team for the Gunners, but the surrender-to-the-top-four mentality of the previous regime looks likely to be swept aside by a man who did one over Manchester United in his first Premier League game as a manager. Same again? It’d be nice, and it could happen, and the live TV screening’d be the perfect place to start. Arsenal have a few injury niggles too, but are in form nonetheless. Expect the unexpected… and I’m sure it won’t be dull.
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