Morning:
8°c
Seldom in its short life has Emirates Stadium been known, even by the standards of its sedate predecessor, as a deafening arena. Yesterday, for the gloomiest of reasons, it made the Highbury Library sound like a Black Sabbath gig held in a passport photo booth the night a mischievous Ozzy Osbourne stuck megaphones in front of all the amplifiers.
Judging by the acoustics, at least three of the stands had been given over to the Noise Abatement Society for its annual conference.
Both sides must have been thankful for that. Cacophony is the last thing they needed when still nursing hangovers from those grievous midweek disappointments. When all they wanted was to slink away and lie down in a dark room, they had to play what Arsene Wenger acknowledged as the Champions League third-place play off.
There was sound reason why broadcasters at one time stopped showing the World Cup third-place game, which is a mixture of intrusion into private grief and supreme irrelevance. Small wonder, then, that even Sky's distinguished hypemongers were subdued. They had a vague stab at beefing it up on the grounds that a win would give Arsenal an outside shot at pipping Chelsea to finish third place in the League, thereby avoiding a Champions League qualifying tie potentially made trickier by UEFA's decision to no longer seed it. That didn't really work, though, while the tagline "The Pride of London" only reminded us that pride is supposed to come before a fall, not four or five days after.
Whatever precisely the overhanging atmosphere was - part pre-season friendly, part wake attended by two sides of a warring family whose natural belligerence is restrained by their melancholy - what it clearly wasn't was the crackling aura of a competitive fixture between ferocious Big Four rivals.
This was as sepulchral a fixture as you will find outside the Undertakers and Pall Bearers League Division Three, but the teams put a brave face on the grief to produce a less dismal game than the occasion deserved or a misleadingly lop-sided scoreline might suggest.
In fact there was little between the teams, and certainly nothing like enough to justify a three-goal margin.
Arsenal started strongly, full of pace and intent, but were undone by atrocious finishing. Time and again in the opening 20 minutes, they created shooting chances with which they (especially the surreally inaccurate Theo Walcott) interrupted the slumbers of those in the upper tiers or wobbled the advertising hoardings on ground level. Meanwhile, Chelsea, after a typically slow beginning, shook off the lethargy impressively and were clinical enough to score twice against the balance of play.
There was a poignant familiarity about their opener, as Alex's header hit the identical square millimetre of cross bar as Michael Essien's staggering volley on Wednesday before bouncing up over the line. Eleven minutes later, with half time gently approaching, Nicolas Anelka ended all doubt about who the Pyrrhic victors would be with a swerving strike Lukas Fabianski might have saved.
With that the decibels descended from first morning of a county championship cricket match at Guildford to Uttoxeter on a sodden February day as a 66-1 shot lands over the last 20 lengths clear.
When Kolo Toure introduced a welcome touch of slapstick by bundling in the own goal that made it 3-0, a Benedictine monastery during a laryngitis outbreak came to mind. There was some noise when Nicklas Bendtner - at least that's what the shirt said (I couldn't recognize him at all, what with a garment covering his knickers) headed Arsenal's lone reply, and this was the shrill, gutless, courteous cheer that greeted an England goal against Scotland in a Wembley schoolboy game from the 1970s.
Arsenal blew another bundle of chances before Florent Malouda prodded Chelsea's fourth. Once or twice Didier Drogba rolled across the turf clutching something or other in mock agony, and thought about summoning the physio in his ritual manner, but frankly he couldn't be arsed. No one even had the energy to complain when the ref ignored Emmanuel Adebayor's dubious claim for a penalty for losing his footing after rounding Petr Cech. After the poor decision in Arsenal's favour on Tuesday and the indescribable shockers from the Norwegian dunce the following night at Stamford Bridge, the hunger for spot kick controversy remained sated, and there was very little for anything else.
I hope there isn't much appetite for Wenger's blood after a wistful fixture in which Arsenal were vastly improved from the feeble makeweights who surrendered to Manchester United. This is the time not for sour recrimination (Tuesday night was the time for that), but for polite applause for both teams. After what they endured last week, it was jolly decent of them to bother showing up at all.
