THERE WAS little of the exuberance of the traditional post-Christmas fixture evident in the preliminaries to yesterday’s match in Arsenal’s corner of north London. The crowd ambled in, talking quietly among themselves, and 15 minutes before the kick-off the stadium was barely a quarter full when Frank McLintock, the captain of the Double-winning side of 1970-71, came out to take a salute on the eve of his 70th birthday.
Cesc Fabregas, the current captain, had gone through his preparatory routine with the substitutes. He was starting the match on the bench after straining a hamstring against Burnley at Turf Moor a fortnight ago, an injury that forced him to miss the intervening 3-0 win at home against Hull City. Did the 22-year-old Catalan glance at McLintock and wonder whether, in five decades’ time or so, he might be coming back as a figure from the distant past?
McLintock was a great leader, but not even he could have exerted such a decisive influence on a single match as Fabregas wielded yesterday after being thrust in the 57th minute into a contest that had only just woken up from a somnolent stalemate between an Arsenal too caught up in their own pretty patterns and a functional but uninspired Aston Villa.
For a meeting of the clubs placed third and fourth in the Premier League at a pivotal point in the season, this was shaping up to be a serious disappointment for a holiday crowd. While Arsenal fluttered ineffectively against a solid Villa defence, the visitors created little that enhanced the reputations of the five England forwards included in their starting line-up, and were always ready to interrupt the home side’s flow with surreptitious trips and nudges.
In the 55th minute, however, the match mysteriously flared into life. A series of minor fouls and misplaced passes roused both sets of fans, and as Ashley Young was shown a yellow card after diving over Alex Song, finally the encounter acquired an abrasive edge. Eduardo da Silva had a free-kick beaten away by Brad Friedel and an Andrey Arshavin corner ping-ponged around the panicking Villa defence before Carlos Cuellar cleared off the goalline.
When Fabregas came on to replace the toiling but largely ineffective Denilson, the change in mood was complete. Now the afternoon was ablaze with action, virtually all of it in the Villa half. When Stilian Petrov brought down Eduardo 35 yards from goal as the Croatian dribbled across the field, Fabregas smashed a range-finding free-kick narrowly over the bar.
To an Arsenal midfield that had been all description without plot, Fabregas brought narrative coherence. Suddenly their flow switched from the lateral and the diagonal to the direct and the dynamic. The captain was turning and driving towards goal when he provoked a mistimed tackle from the straining Dunne, and got up to strike a sumptuous 25-yard free-kick that curled home past Friedel.
Sixteen minutes of virtually non-stop Arsenal attacking later, Fabregas was there to guide a shot calmly beyond the Villa goalkeeper after Theo Walcott had sprinted on to Traore’s crossfield ball and measured a perfect pass. While keeping pace with the speedster on the right wing, however, Fabregas had stretched his hamstring again and he was quickly withdrawn by an anxious Arsene Wenger.
The memory of yet another distinguished former Arsenal captain was evoked when Abou Diaby completed the scoring in injury time with a 20-yard drive that had observers recalling the exploits of Patrick Vieira at his most imperious, but there was no escaping the crucial nature of Fabregas’s contribution. In the space of 27 minutes he determined the course of the afternoon, delivering a result that Wenger described, conventionally enough, as “massive” but also reminding the manager, the players and the supporters of what they lack in his absence.
- Guardian Service
