Arsenal: Les Miserables

A few weeks ago Gunnerblog posted a video of staggering brilliance on Youtube. In it the usual suspects of transfer deadline day belted out One Day More from Les Miserables, a musical I have inexplicably become obsessed with. Redknapp, Fellaini and, of course, Jim White were played to perfection, but it was Arsene Wenger as the cycnical, villainous Javert who stole the show. In the light of Arsenal's implosion against Bayern last night the image of Arsene as Javert seems all the more fitting, his side rapidly becoming the eponymous miserables of the musical as he skulks in the background, desperately clinging to his dignity and his misguided principles. Javert ends the film staring down at the Seine, lamenting his regrets as the murky water swirls below, inviting him to oblivion. Wenger now must be contemplating a similar doom, fallen from heady heights to desperate depths with all veneer of heroism destroyed, now cast as the villain in the story in which, not so long ago, he had dreamed the most wonderful of dreams.

Challenge Accepted.

Should we feel sorry for Harry Redknapp? Beloved good 'ol fashioned English manager with no regard for fancy opta statistics, numerous sport scientists or even just sophisticated tactics. Hailed as the king of man management, dealing with egos, motivating prixmadonnas and charming the media, yet since his sacking from Tottenham last summer, his crown as the darling of English managers finally appears to be slipping.

New wine in the old bottles: Manchester United vs Madrid Preview

Whatever the outcome, Sir Alex Ferguson is going to be wining and dining on the finest food and drink money can buy after tonight’s game. Jose Mourinho holds the man he calls 'the Boss' in an unswerving high esteem, and the pair have traditionally shared a post-match Port ever since the Special One’s Stamford Bridge days in the mid noughties. On the pitch, however, fans can expect to see a football that falls into a new vintage – one that owes nothing to the past. Manchester United take on Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu tonight in a ‘clash-of-the-cash’ that seems certain to get the LED screens humming from here to Hong Kong. The stadiums are the same, the kits have hardly altered, but the modern Manchester and Madrid teams look set to offer up a game shorn entirely of throw-backs to ‘the good-old days’. Ladies and gents, we’re now in store for something completely different.   

Class Warfare: Bad Form

Mark Writes, Rises

Where did we go? The sudden absence of The Trequartistas, once a stronghold of conjecture and dubious predictions, sent ripples through the football blogging world. "Is this the end?", solemnly pondered The Guardian. "TREQUAR-LEFT-US", screamed The Sun, as The Mail suggested our apparent unwillingness to work should be no surprise given several of our members have immigrant roots. Yet, as Cate Blanchett whispered in The Fellowship of the Ring, they were all of them deceived. We were dormant, not extinct. Our silence, far from unexpected, was part of a greater plan. For we at Trequartistas Towers were working on a piece of meta-journalism so ironic, so dastardly, so downright radical that even we sometimes forgot what purpose our secrecy served. We left so that we might return. We left to prove that most ancient of old adages: While form is temporary, class is permanent.