Full Ham and Beef Wellington + Central Coast Mariners vs. Wellington Phoenix – Bluetongue Stadium

UPDATE: Scroll down for match report for Central Coast Mariners vs. Wellington Phoenix

I’ve realized something. I’ve looked around for other Sydney blogs to no avail. I think Cannontime is the only blog biased towards Sydney FC and that is awesome for a blog that’s been here for about 3 days.

I was too sleepy to bother posting in the morning and the Mariners game is in about 1 hour. It’s a decent if only a bit dark day here in Sydney but honestly I thank the lord for that hole in the ozone layer above us. I’ll have this post updated with the Mariners and Wellington game match report. Arsenal also play Fulham at 2AM real Australia time (Adelaide and Perth excluded).

Honestly I’ll catch the replay at 2:30pm as it’s a Sunday. Of course tomorrow we’ll probably have the first Arsenal match report for the game against Fulham which is a nice little segway. So stay tuned – tomorrow you’ll have your match reports of Arsenal vs. Fulham, Sydney FC vs. Melbourne Victory and Queensland Roar vs. Adelaide United. That’s 3 match reports you greedy mongrels. On to news.

 

ARSENAL:

Arsene Wenger says Walcott will not make it according to the Independent.
Arsene Wenger says Walcott will make it according to official sources.
To be honest – I don’t want to sound like a broken record here but Arsene should play Diaby and Walcott through the middle even though Diaby is playing like a lazy gorilla at the moment. Apparently Walcott got a dropkick from Wenger, can’t imagine Wenger pulling a drop kick off but back in his Strausborg days Arsene looked like a badass.

Wenger also rules out buying the Russian guys Dmitriev and Andrei Arse-shaving. I don’t think Wenger is a racist by any means but because of the whole Alisher Usmanov thing there might be a bit of stigma around signing any players from the former USSR. You know the whole equality thing.

 

Abramovich as finance director o’course.

Van Persie/Van Kewell goes back to Holland for rehab, honestly his story is playing out EXACTLY like Harry Kewell’s! When Kewell-o was 24 he got hit by some septic thing that forced him to go back ‘ere for rehab. As I’ve said before, when we get to the Champions League final at 3-0 down to Milan he’ll come off after about 30 minutes with fans booing him. Robin will then proceed to score against Croatia bla bla bla. Wenger admitted Van Persie was rushed into the first team. Fair play.

Diarra makes some fans at Pompey by calling the club a stepping stone. Too bee hoonest everyone around him just wants him to shut up. I think he was the rejected retarted child who couldn’t get anything quite right and looked to his other classmates for affirmation and acceptance through his own weird fantasies and ways because he was brought up by an egg which largely contributed to his shaped head. Long sentence.

On to match news, Brede Hangelande was not signed in time to play against Arsenal. Not that it would make much of a difference anyways. Our hit-list includes Van Kewell, Djourou altough Rosicky could maybe might should return against Fulham. Nothing much else to say, if you want bold crazy predictions, the exact match squad and what formation, style, way we should play you should probably go to another blog. Alls I have to say is lets hope Lehmann doesn’t have a bad game against Fulham as we need to get a good heads-up start to the season. Oh wait.

 

OTHER PREMIER LEAGUE GOINGS ON:

HD-DVD Version please.

Keegan calls himself Geordie-messiah or summin else.

 

A-LEAGUE NEWS:

The Hutch says the Central Coast need a miracle to take the title. The Mariners season has gone waaaaaaaaaaaay downhill since the 5-4 and even before that. As a Sydney fan I take great pride in this. Although McKinna honestly is one of the better managers in the A-League in terms of not kidnapping a person from Brazil and forcing them to play.

All his signings are local or youth players and some players like Matty Simonsays are quality. Honestly the Roar and the Coast have the best youth by far – the big 3 of Sarkies, Burns and Djite have had a really average season by their standards.

In terms of Wellington, nothin really doin. I would expect Daniel to start, as well as Barbarouses. Yellow Fever’s chant of “Nothing rhymes with Barbarouses” is particularly brilliant. The Nix want to avoid any sort of spooning which is fair enough, they deserve it. Aaaaaaaaaaaand Steven Old-but-fairly-young goes back to law school.

 

Schapelle Corby defence team!

In all honesty the Mariners have it all to play for and Wellington nothing to lose. I’m seriously thinking these two factors will play a part. So I call a 2-2 draw. Aloisi, Jedi, Smeltz, Smeltz for scorers. All the other A-League news is irrelevant until I have to to a crappy half-arsed match preview for the last 2 games of the round. I’ll voice my opinions on Vidmars coaching and the good old media hype around “Cities that should be the capital of Australia instead of Canberra” derby – I’ll report on all the articles of Fourfourtwo and TWG tommorow when the news is relevant.

Sorry for the lack of crappily photoshopped today folks. Having a bit of a mental block creatively. The match report will have some more imagerati to compensate.

Again, will update this post with matchday report.

____________________________________

CENTRAL COAST MARINERS: 2
WELLINGTON PHOENIX: 0
Statistics

To the 5 or so Jets fans who were at Gosford just to taunt the Mariners – I applaud you. You went down the F3 with your banners and your uniforms and probably looked a bit stupid when you paid the admission fee for your ticket but, that’s just hardcore.

Apparently Daniel was injured for more than was expected and didn’t travel with the Nix’. Nothing rhymes with Barbarouses started against the Coast and was probably Wellington’s most energetic player. The weather threatened to cancel the game which would’ve made things fun but nope, props to the groundsmen/women for keeping the pitch decently playable. Although the pitch looked really patchy at the start and it stayed really patchy.

 

Basically what Bluetongue looked like.
Replace the SWFC with CCM, take that end

stand and replace it with Palm Trees.

In terms of interesting tidbits this is the first time 2 brothers have captained their respective teams. Johnjohn Aloisi and Rossabouttoretirebutdidntandwenttophoenix Aloisi for the Coast and Nix’ respectively. Simon got a start as well but then proceeded to get injured not unlike – and I keep repeating this – Harry Kewell. You get a rare start then get injured, but unlike Kewell this isn’t the 500th time this has happened to Matty Simon.

Kevin Docherty, the youngest referee in the history of the world clocking at 98 years old had a decent game besides the last 25 or so minutes although we’ll get onto that later. The game got off to a fast start and what was great was unlike other games, the ball was kept on the ground instead of the longball crap we usually see (yet they did go longball later on).

 

Pim and Baan were at the game.

Alot of crunchy sort of tackles in the early 10 minutes of the game. Jedinak was the standout for the Mariners even though he missed a couple of free headers early on. Barbarbouses picked up an upfield ball by Lochead and did well to create space to open up the goal (although Vukovic came out when the defenders might of had it covered) – Barbarouses proceeded to miss. The majority of the first half played out like this:

 

The double D is intentional I swear.
I mean, it’s not like I didn’t realize it was there

and then uploaded it mistakenly thinking everything

was spelt right. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaah.

The Wellington defence looked they’re usual Middlesborough like selves and obviously the Mariners had around four times more chances than the Nix. Jedinak got a yellow which means he’ll miss one finals game. One thing that was impressive about the Nix was the style of football they played. Short pass short pass short pass – it wasn’t very effective but hey, it was fun to watch. Matty Simon went off injured and was replaced by Gumprecht to great applause. Too be honest I got kinda bored during the second half. Like the Perth Newcastle game it was like this:

 

It’s funny because of the Australian Open being on.

Aloisi scored, your typical clinical striker goal with the forehead. Yadayadayada Kwasnik goal in the 94th minute which bodes well for the Coast’s goal difference. Elrich and Felipe came on faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too late to make a significant enough impact. Elrich looked rather lively on the ball and Felipe didn’t get well, any touches at all. Should’ve done the subs in the 60th minute Ricki! The latter part of the game also went down to nutty crunchy tackles.

 

Chewy too.

Nothing else really interesting coming from this match besides the return of…

 

Central Coast Bag Pipe Guy

Central Coast are now 1st on the ladder.
For all you Sydney fans all we need now is a win over the Victory by 3 goals and a draw or loss by the Roar at MINIMUM.

So thats it for today people,
Until that crazy day that is tommorow, Seeya.