Posts Tagged ‘Shoot Outs’

Reluctant hero Jagielka seals final place

• Phil Jagielka scores decisive penalty to reach final
• Sir Alex Ferguson blames pitch for fielding weakened team

David Moyes revealed he persuaded Phil Jagielka to take the decisive penalty that swept Everton into their first FA Cup final for 14 years at Wembley and shattered Manchester United’s ambitions of winning an unprecedented quintuple.

The England international emerged the reluctant hero of Everton’s passage to a final with Chelsea on 30 May, having harboured reservations over taking part in a dramatic penalty shoot-out ­following his ordeal in the Uefa Cup last season. Everton exited against Fiorentina as a consequence of Jagielka’s penalty miss in a shoot-out at Goodison Park. However, after Dimitar Berbatov and Rio Ferdinand had their spot-kicks saved by the former United goalkeeper Tim Howard, the defender stepped forward to beat Ben Foster and a side weakened by, what Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager, admitted, was a direct result of the Wembley pitch.

“I don’t think Phil was entirely keen on taking one, but he had scored in training this week and that stuck in my mind,” Moyes said. “I asked who wanted one and there were a few heads nodding. I looked at him and said, ‘You all right for one Jags?’ I think if he’d got his way he might not have taken one, but I didn’t have too many takers on the day.

“James Vaughan went up and he’s not played for four months, and Jags missed his last one against Fiorentina. There weren’t many to pick from to be honest and then when Tim [Cahill] missed the first against United, who are probably the world’s best at shoot-outs because they have done it so many times and won the European Cup on one, you fear the worst. But good on our goalkeeper, he made two excellent saves. It took great courage for James to go up – and Jags after what happened to him in the Uefa Cup last year. Jags has grown as a player and to take that pen shows how much he has come on in recent years.”

Jagielka was also the key figure in an otherwise drab semi-final’s major talking point, when he tripped the United forward Danny Welbeck inside the penalty area only for the referee, Mike Riley, whose appointment Moyes had questioned before kick-off, to wave play on. “I did touch him,” the Everton defender admitted. “I don’t know how much that contributed to him going down. Maybe I got lucky, but we’ll take that luck.”

The Everton manager had asked the Football Association to review Riley’s appointment last week, alluding to an alleged leniency on the part of the ­referee towards United. Ferguson said Moyes’s “mind game” might have influenced Riley’s decision, but insisted he had no regrets over ­resting several main ­players for an FA Cup semi-final.

Ferguson, who insisted Wayne Rooney should recover from an ankle injury in time to face Portsmouth at Old Trafford on Wednesday, argued: “It might have had an effect. You can’t be certain, but all that nonsense about [Riley] being a Manchester United supporter is just ridiculous stuff. Someone put that in David’s head at a press conference. You never know if it influenced him or not. All I would say is he’s got to be 100% certain to give a penalty in a big game like this. If he sees it again he’ll know he’s made a mistake but why would the lad [Welbeck] go down when he’s gone around the goalkeeper and left him stranded? It was a clear penalty.”

The United manager left Cristiano Ronaldo, Edwin van der Sar and Michael Carrick out of his squad and revealed he would have started with Berbatov, Paul Scholes and possibly Patrice Evra, who were all substitutes, had it not been for the state of the Wembley pitch. “When I saw the pitch in the semi-final yesterday I decided I didn’t want to go to extra time with my strongest squad and that we had to be bold with young players with fresh legs. This club is built on giving young players a chance and they didn’t let me down today. I now know that I can use any of them in the important games we’ve got left this season.”

The Everton captain, Phil Neville, who scored against his former club in the shoot-out, admitted the FA Cup final would represent one of the high points of his career. “It’s one of the proudest moments of my career – to lead the team out at Wembley in the FA Cup final,” he said. “They say your next achievement is the best and that is certainly how it feels. We’ve beaten the best side in the world – it’s just a really proud moment. We’ve done it the hard way.”

The defeat was Ferguson’s first in an FA Cup semi-final as United manager and Moyes dedicated the victory to the club’s raucous support. “They were incredible and they willed us on to victory.”

Richard Williams: Arsenal and Emmanuel Eboué suffer the curse of the £1,000-a-season fan

Emmanuel Eboué's tears shamed everyone except the player himself. The only sensible response, as he headed for the touchline with a devil's symphony of jeering in his ears, was to place a large question mark against currently fashionable theories about the wisdom of crowds.

Arsenal's supporters have one of the finest new stadiums in Europe, still within walking range for the traditional fan base. They have a manager who is not only transparently dedicated to their cause, but universally regarded as one of football's handful of genuine visionaries. They have so many wonderfully gifted young players that the game's governing bodies are trying to change the rules in order to make it harder to compile such an aggregation of super-talent. They have not just a long and glittering history but a glorious present and the sort of potential of which others can only dream. And yet on Saturday afternoon, by booing one of their own players until he wept, they acted in a way that dishonoured themselves and their patrimony.

As he left the pitch with the arm of Emmanuel Adebayor around his shoulders, the 25-year-old Ivorian looked a broken man. Not even players who miss penalties in World Cup final shoot-outs are reduced to such a state of helpless distress. What could have made so many of his own team's fans turn against a player who has been a member of Arsenal's first-team squad for the past four years?

Rusty after several weeks of enforced inactivity, and thrust into an unfamiliar position on the left of midfield, Eboué was having such a terrible match that Arsène Wenger was left with no alternative other than to remove him in the final minute, irrespective of the noise from the grandstands. Several passes had been damagingly misplaced, and the final straw came when, in a burst of ill-directed enthusiasm, he nicked the ball off the charging Kolo Touré's toe and played a square pass directly into the path of an opponent perfectly placed to launch a goal-threatening counter-attack. These errors, however, were not enough to excuse the howls of derision that came — as I am reliably assured from Arsenal fans who were at the game — from a considerable majority of the crowd of almost 60,000.

There have been times during his career in north London when Eboué has not done himself credit. There has been the occasional high tackle, although if the fans do not remember defenders with questionable methods of parting opponents from the ball, then clearly their fathers have remained mute on the subject of Peter Storey. There was also the dive that procured the free-kick from which Sol Campbell headed Arsenal into the lead in the 2006 European Cup final, a piece of chicanery so blatant that Wenger found it appropriate to apologise afterwards. In general, however, Eboué has done everything required of him by the manager, accepting the move from right-back to right wing, to accommodate the arrival of Bacary Sagna, with good grace. And had Henry accepted Eboué's gift of a scoring pass in the third minute of that 2006 final, history might have looked different.

We have all cursed players by whom we feel let down, sometimes on a regular basis. But as long as they are in our colours they remain our players, and it seems stupid to comfort the opposition by making public our internal disaffection. The behaviour of the Arsenal fans, however, appeared to be driven by something more than old-fashioned frustration. It was the self-expression of the new breed of football fan, with his £1,000 season ticket and his increasing sense of entitlement.

What they did to Eboué is not as bad as filling a plastic cup with urine and pouring it on to the heads of away fans in the lower tier, or throwing coins at the opposition's best striker, or engaging in pitched battles in the streets. But it is nasty, and it needs to be stopped.

Mosley can do Titanic jokes but he's the one with the jet

Max Mosley came up with an amusing analogy the other day, comparing formula one to a sinking ocean liner whose passengers are wasting their time worrying about the colour of the wallpaper in their cabins rather than heading for the lifeboats. But while we can all admire the characteristic adroitness of his phrasemaking, we might also remember who steered the ship towards the iceberg in the first place.

Mosley can crack as many sarcastic jokes as he likes while making clear his disapproval of £10m gearboxes and £800 wheel nuts, but no one better exemplifies formula one's culture of excess and exploitation than the president of the FIA, who uses a private jet to commute to meetings from his homes in Monaco and London, and his old sidekick, Bernie Ecclestone, whose daughters attended the Bal des Debutantes in Paris a few years ago, the modern equivalent of being presented at court.

It was Mosley who granted an unprecedented 100-year lease on formula one's commercial rights to Ecclestone, who succeeded in selling those rights on not once but twice — first to a German media company which went bust, and then to a private equity group which is taking more than £200m a year out of the sport's profits to pay the interest on the loan with which it leveraged the deal.

Not long ago every other major sport was looking at formula one, with its vast broadcasting revenues and ruthless approach to globalisation, as the example to be followed. Now that it has become the first to suffer from the worldwide recession (and the withdrawal of Honda is a bit like, say, Aston Villa or Harlequins closing their doors), perhaps Ecclestone and Mosley don't look so clever, after all. Although, of course, it will be a long time before either of them is feeling the pinch.

Cuddly McEnroe still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth

John McEnroe was one of the seven or eight best tennis players I have ever seen, but I could never find a good reason to warm to him as a man. A lingering distaste for the way he attempted to create an advantage by abusing umpires and line judges still colours my instinctive response to his Wimbledon commentaries. And he just goes on making it worse.

"I always thought it funny, people saying I intimidated umpires," he said last week. "If you call him a moron he isn't going to give you the next point. You know you're wrong half the time before you ask, anyway. Only six calls in a match are really marginal." It's nice that he's managed to reinvent himself as a cuddly, grey-haired uncle but I can't help remembering the officials he exposed to humiliation, and the opponents from whom — whatever he may say — he extracted points by gamesmanship.

Elephant polo goes on the charge for global audience

Elephant polo is thriving in Nepal, and the sign that it is truly ready to join the ranks of major global team sports came in the weekend's televised report of a recent international tournament at which Scotland were the favourites. When their manager spoke to the BBC's reporter, it was with a distinctly Antipodean accent.

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