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Huddersfield Town 1 - 2 Arsenal

I must admit I didn’t quite get the link - Arsenal always play Barnet and I can see the draw of playing Juve/Madrid pre season, its even something of a tradition to play in the Amsterdam Tournement at Ajax. But Huddersfield? Is Wenger beggining to let something slip?

After last weekend’s 180 minutes 1 penalty total football display we assumed this was target paractice - we last played Huddersfield over 10 years ago and they sit two leagues below us (League 1).

However, it was all more dignified than that - Huddersfield once had this fantastic manager called Herbert Chapman who just happened to defect to Arsenal and become our most successful manager since…. the clubs inception. Huddersfield also happened to be marking their centenary and so you see it all came together rather nicely.

Most Gooners would immediately recognise Walcot, Fabianski, new signing Ramsey and precosious wonderkid Jack Wilshire. You might even remember Nassa Barazite or Henri Lansbury. These were the most high profile players however and the average age of the team was 17.6, probably skewed by old men Theo and Fabianski.

In the first half Arsenal comfortably dealt with the Huddersfield first team, who appeared happy to plop eleven men behind the ball - with an average age of 49 its not surprising. At the end of the half they all had to be stretchered off with oxygen. Huddersfield had three golden oppurtunities all of which looked nailed on - I can only imagine they were told to deliberately miss, because I’ve put away tougher chances on a rainy tuesday on a five-a-side pitch.

Huddersfield changed their entire team in the second half and the contest opened out. The Huddersfield reserve/youth team had a lot more about them going forward and with 6 changes for Arsenal the match became a bit more exciting.

A few players shone last night - Lansbury being one of them. His play in the middle of the field was exquisit and like Fabregas he appeared to have great distribution and quick vision to go with it, I’d like to see more of him. Ramsey and Wilshire had a few nice touches but appeared to be muscled out of it by Huddersfield in the first half - they didn’t appear for the second so I can only assume they feature in Wengers plans in the coming weeks, if only as the bones of the Carling Cup team.

Arsenal’s number 12 was great to - rather annoyingly they had no names on their shirts and because some of the lads don’t have squad numbers they were numbered from 1 - 20. So I’ll probably never know who he was, but he was fantastic and made the first goal.

Huddersfield scored a lucky deflection to take the lead, Arsenal pulled two back with 4 minutes to spare and the home supporters started legging it for the door. Shame considering the 19,500 crowd was projected to be the biggest this season and it was their centenary.

They obviously knew something we didn’t - taking over an hour to travel 15 miles away from the ground, Huddersfield have a lovely stadium stuck in the middle of a congested and shitty traffic system. It made me eager to return to the chaos of the Blackwell Tunnel - at least the traffic moves through there.

Filed by Kieran at August 7th, 2008 under Football