CL Group H Thread - Arsenal - Sevilla - Steaua - Slavia

A good confidence boosting result and we still don't seem to be playing as well as I know we can.

Derby at the weekend anyway. We need to get focussed for that now. Wouldn't want it to be a banana peel

WOW! 3-0, NEVER NEVER NEVER expected that. Fabregas' performance also f@cked my fantasy team because many others had him

kas wrote:WOW! 3-0, NEVER NEVER NEVER expected that. Fabregas' performance also f@cked my fantasy team because many others had him

surely you should of seen it coming after his great start to his season.

6 goals this season

Fabregash has indeed been awesome.

OH MY GOD DID I JUST PRAISE AN ARSENAL PLAYER !!!!!

Fabregas has been decent. Not as good as the Cescxy...

Just got in from the game, via a couple of hours of celebrating. What a brilliant result. We didn't even play particularly well, but we have beat one of the best teams around 3-0 which is a fantastic performance. The team will gain so much confidence from this, they have done superbly.

Can't believe Cesc will be credited with that goal.

It was even curling the other way.

He did play well though.

Parks lives wrote:Can't believe Cesc will be credited with that goal.

It was even curling the other way.

He did play well though.

Has he been given it? Definitely was an own goal from what I could see, but he had a good game. How did Man Utd play? I saw the half time highlights, and VDS made a couple of good saves. Did you deserve the win?

Still up for debate I think, Sky gave it to him and then UEFA called it an own goal, then Sky said UEFA had changed there mind.

I ended up watching the Arsenal game. Went round a mates and after a big debate the 2 Arsenal fans got there way. Arsenal played very well.

I'll see the Sporting game tomorrow in full, just seen extended highlights so far. Appears we we're poor in the first half and good in the second.

all credit to arsenal they were outstanding tonight. i rated them off that they wudnt challenge for champions league or EPL this season. i eat my words way their playing i really do. wenger gets it right once again.

Thanks, I definitely need to watch the game on tv to get a fair idea of how we played. What pleased me most was that it seemed that we got a fantastic result without playing to our best. 3-0 was a flattering result, but we beat a great team whilst playing within our capabilities. Hopefully this shows that rather than peaking already, we have the ability to really challenge on a couple of fronts this season. Eight games this season and we've won seven of them so it is a fantastic start, hopefully it will continue!

Soccernet article on the Arsenal-Sevilla match:

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=464621&root=uefachampionsleague&cc=5901&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1

Poulsen was nowhere to be seen yesterday. He should of done a better job at man-marking Fabregas - every attack came through him. Surprised that Renato didn't start.

Hagi resigns as Steaua manager

http://www.uefa.com/competitions/ucl/news/kind=1/newsid=591609.html

Good news?

Sometimes teams have a resurgence after a manager resigns however.

Tweedle wrote:Good news?

Sometimes teams have a resurgence after a manager resigns however.

Hagi was/is a bad manager. An other evidence that being a good football player has nothing to do with coaching.

Still, the way this happened was not right. Becali (the owner) forced him to leave by telling him what players to send in the first 11, calling him during games to tell him what players need to come in.

A lot of fans (myself included) will not go to any home games this year, only away. Maybe the idiot (Becali) will get the messege.

But surely you'd want to go and see Arsenal

Fair play. Any idea about who you might be bringing in to replace him? also any idea on the team formation that you'll opt to play?

I guess the idea is to get Radoi to mark Cesc out of the game

Tweedle wrote:But surely you'd want to go and see Arsenal

Fair play. Any idea about who you might be bringing in to replace him? also any idea on the team formation that you'll opt to play?

I guess the idea is to get Radoi to mark Cesc out of the game

I've got my plain tickets for London already.

In Bucharest I don't think so. There is no way I'm paying a cent to Becali.

As of today our assistant coach, Pedrazzini, took over the job. This should be temporary thou but I can’t see any respectable coach that will take the team with an owner like Becali. The only one is Olaroiu (the last year coach) but he is the Middle East and has a 2 year contract with a team there.

I don't know what team we'll play but Radoi is not in it. He's out for the rest of the year.

Well the tactic with us is simple, man mark Cesc. The form he's in at the moment is incredible. In 5 premiership games and 3 CL games he's got 6 goals and 6 assists!

Tweedle wrote:Well the tactic with us is simple, man mark Cesc. The form he's in at the moment is incredible. In 5 premiership games and 3 CL games he's got 6 goals and 6 assists!

Easy to say. We have no DM that can mark Cesc. The game against UTA in the weekend will show how Steaua plays after Hagi.

So how did the "world's best RB" play against Arsenal?

Romanian Liga 1:

FCM ATA Arad - Steaua Bucureşti 1-1

57' Nicolita 0-1 83' Edson (pen) 1-1

Steaua are now ranked 8th with 12 points form 7 matches, 8 points behind leaders CFR 1907 Cluj, who played 1 match more.

Czech 1. Liga:

Bohemains - Slavia Praha 2-0

12' Skoda 1-0 85' Kunasek 2-0

Slavia are 2nd on goal difference now, with 16 points for 7 matches. Teplice top the Czech 1. Liga.

gone wrote:

Tweedle wrote:But surely you'd want to go and see Arsenal

Fair play. Any idea about who you might be bringing in to replace him? also any idea on the team formation that you'll opt to play?

I guess the idea is to get Radoi to mark Cesc out of the game

I've got my plain tickets for London already.

In Bucharest I don't think so. There is no way I'm paying a cent to Becali.

As of today our assistant coach, Pedrazzini, took over the job. This should be temporary thou but I can’t see any respectable coach that will take the team with an owner like Becali. The only one is Olaroiu (the last year coach) but he is the Middle East and has a 2 year contract with a team there.

I don't know what team we'll play but Radoi is not in it. He's out for the rest of the year.

Radoi is out? Hmmm quite like him.

The game is coming up. What is your form for the last 5 games?

Bad. We haven't won one game in the last 5 games. 3 draws and one loss.

An article in the Guardian about Hagi's departure from Steaua Bucharest:

Hagi's love affair with Bucharest ends in tears

The resignation of Romania's favourite son as coach of Steaua is the latest chapter in a saga of fiery friendships and huge egos.
-------------

He was a turbulent, charismatic coach who endured in his job longer than anybody expected, he fought constantly against the attempts of his club's owner to interfere in team selection, and he found himself out of work last week after a disappointing result in the Champions League. Steaua Bucharest have spoken often of their efforts to model themselves on a top western European team, but in this instance they probably could have done without aping Chelsea quite so closely.

No talk of mutual consent here, though. This was, without any question, a resignation, and the only surprise is that Gheorghe Hagi managed a full three months as coach before finally losing patience with Gigi Becali's meddling. "I have never been so humiliated," Hagi said on announcing his departure. "I was tortured second by second."

That is no great exaggeration. Becali is difficult in the way that Roman Abramovich is rich: that is, on a staggering, barely comprehensible, scale. As his fiery temper and profound lack of discretion made him a media favourite, he stood as a candidate in the 2004 presidential election on a far-right Christian-nationalist ticket, but took under 2% of the vote. Although he has a history of good works - funding churches and monasteries, and investing $4m (£2m) to rebuild the village of Vulturul after it was destroyed in floods in 2005 - he has also made a habit of homophobic outbursts, and has been sued three times for slander. He makes Ken Bates look like the Dalai Lama.

Hagi served as "godfather" - that is, as a spiritual advisor - at Becali's wedding, but their relationship has always been turbulent. Both ethnic Aromanians of Macedonian descent, they became friends in the 1980s, when Becali used to give milk and cheese from his father's farm to Steaua players and, although they fell out over a nightclub dancer, Hagi loaned him $70,000 shortly after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to further his business.

They fell out again in 2000 as Hagi backed Gigi's cousin Giovanni in his attempt to take over Steaua, but by 2005, they had made up and Becali was attempting to appoint Hagi as coach. Negotiations then fell down over pay, with Hagi preferring to go to Politehnica Timisoara, but when Cosmin Olaroiu was lured away to the Saudi Arabian club Al-Hilal in June, Becali and Hagi agreed terms. "Steaua was always in my heart," Hagi said.

The problem was that Becali had become used to influencing team selection. Olaroiu, it seems, was prepared to put up with that, but Hagi was not. Becali went on the offensive, publicly comparing Romania's greatest ever player to a schoolboy, and saying he needed "a good slap to wake him up". Even more damagingly, he claimed that a number of players, including the midfielder Mirel Radoi, at whose wedding he himself served as godfather, had complained to him from the first days of Hagi's reign of his supposedly unprofessional approach.

With tension building, and Steaua stuttering in the league, many expected Hagi to resign after securing Steaua's place in the group stages of the Champions League with victory over the Belarusian champions BATE Borisov, but he stayed on. Ahead of last week's game away to Slavia Prague, Becali announced he would sack Hagi if he persisted in playing the forward Dorel Zaharia and the right-back Pawel Golanski. Hagi dropped them, Steaua lost 2-1, and the next day he quit, saying he had decided to walk out when Becali offered his ultimatum, but didn't want to leave the team in the lurch before such an important game.

"Nobody will ever achieve anything at Steaua with Becali breathing down his neck," Hagi said. "He destroys all smiling. He says he loves God, but God never said you could insult people in this way. Players are nothing to him, and he is destroying everything we are trying to do."

Becali remains unrepentant. "I admit I humiliated Hagi," he said, before an alarming lapse into the third person. "It is very hard to work with Becali. You can't work with Becali if you don't get results."

He was initially confident of securing the return of Olaroiu, claiming: "He has said he is always available to me." As Olaroiu retained a diplomatic silence, Al-Hilal made clear they were not willing to let him leave, and threatened to report Becali to Fifa if Olaroiu was approached before the end of his two-year contract. "Olaroiu is Al-Hilal coach for the next two years, so he will not come back in Romania to coach Steaua or any different team before then," the club's chairman Prince Mohammed bin Faisal insisted.

So Becali has turned instead to the Italian Massimo Pedrazzini, who had been conditioning coach under Hagi - for the short-term at least. He has already told him, though, that he will be sacked unless they achieve at least a draw at home to Arsenal next week. "I will always involve myself with the team," Becali said, "because I'm spending the money. I would have that attitude with any coach."

Crisis is never far away in Romania, but for Steaua it feels closer than ever. All things considered, Mourinho may feel he got away lightly.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2007/09/25/hagis_love_affair_with_buchare.html

Steaua - Vaslui 1-0

Highlights: http://www.gsptv.ro/index/id/7105

@ gone

you're lucky that we got a couple of injuries at the weekend. I'm not so positive over the game. Hleb is definately ruled out and there is a possibility that Adebayor might be as well. Eboué and Eduardo would make returns though. Think we'll still opt for Walcott on the right wing though and if Adebayor is fit, he may well start.

Diaby should play on the left again, but I think Flamini might be dropped in the centre in preference for Diarra (who is a far better player)

Tweedle, our list of injuries is long as well. Radoi (DM), Ghionea (CD), Plesan (AM), Golanski (RB) are out and Goian (CD) plus Lovin (DM), Nesu (LB), are in doubt. We may have to play a 19 years old kid (Bicfalvi) as our starting DM because the 2 main DM are injured. The good news is that we strated playing football since Hagi left and Pedrazzini took over. Our team will probably look like this:

--------------------------Zapata
Marin-----Baciu(Goian if fit)--Rada---Emeghara
---------------Petre--------Bicfalvi(Lovin if fit)
Nicolita---------------Dica--------Surdu(Neaga)
-----------------------Zaharia

Arsenal team news

Hleb travels with the team, but faces a fitness test along with Flamini, Adebayor and Diaby.

Gallas, Song, Lehmann, Rosicky and Eduardo miss out.

With Eduardo missing out it's imperative that Adebayor is passed fit. Bendtner is an adequate replacement though having said that.

I think if Walcott plays (which he will) he'll go missing again. I'd almost be tempted not to play him, but the sheer number of midfield injuries we have will make that impossible. Unless we play Eboué there