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Camden New Journal - CROW by RICHARD OSLEY and PIP WROE
Published: 5 November 2009
 
Demolition derby: Will the real top four team please stand up?

SILLY Robbie. It’s like having an argument with a five-year-old who keeps repeating the same answer to whatever you say.
Kids will just say “why?” over again until you want to scratch your own eyes out and tell them that they don’t deserve an education and should get to work sweeping chimneys. Or they say “no” repeatedly. Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, the five-year-old debater will keep stonewalling you.
Kiddio, the sky is blue. No. The capital of France is Paris. No. Three plus two is five. No.
Cheryl Tweedy really deserves to be number one. No. Ok, I’ll give you that one. Smart kid.
Reason and logic goes out of the window for the five-year-old. Just like it clearly has for 29-year-old Robbie Keane, who maintains that Top Four Tottenham have a stronger squad than Arsenal.
We’ve got a stronger bench, puffed Keane, we have, we have, days before the Gunners hit them
3-0. So strong that Spurs’ bench. So strong that when three first-teamers got injured and suspended, the patched up team crumbled. The graceful thing for £20million Robbie to have done would have been to say afterwards, ok, I got it wrong. Instead, we all we got from his colleagues was kidspeak: No. No. Spurs are still a Champions League team.
They are. No. No.

SO we lost the north London derby and deserved to.
At times the performance was so woeful it reminded me of Newcastle United’s season last year or Liverpool’s this time around.
Saturday’s game was supposed to show how far we had come since last year, yet we played with no spirit and no plan and looked much the same.
We pumped long balls up to our lonely giant so relentlessly it seemed almost cruel at times and, of course, had the pleasure of witnessing perhaps the worst kick-off routine in football history, suitably punished by Cesc Fabregas.
It’ll take a lot more than that moment of complete, blind panic to dent my opinion of Wilson Palacios.
Of course, Arsenal will do their usual crowing, claiming that this performance shows they can win the league and that this illustrates the gulf between the clubs. But this was simply a bad day, kind of like the day United spanked Arsenal out of the Champions League.
It can happen to the best of us.
True, it was premature of Robbie Keane to claim equality – he should have waited to see if we would turn up first. All we can ask is that when Arsenal come to the Lane, we show some real passion, and perform like the Top Four side we know we are!

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