"He seems like a player built on the PlayStation," Cagliari head coach Fabio Pisacane told Sky in Italy recently. "Ninety-nine per cent acceleration and so on. He is handsome even when he runs. He looks like a panther, like a leopard." That man is Marco Palestra.
Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!While the match itself may not have been up to much, the spectacle and occasion of Arsenal’s win over Atlético Madrid on Tuesday night made it a unique and memorable evening in the club’s history. Pre-match smoke and pyro provided the soundtrack to the raucous welcome their players received as they arrived on the team coach. The rabble-rousing Over Land and Sea tifo couldn’t have looked less like its dismal, forlorn-cannon-on-a-bedsheet counterpart of yore. The unifying roar that greeted Arsenal’s gladiators as they strode out from the bowels of the colosseum they call home was off the scale. It was as if a sizeable proportion of match-going Arsenal fans had finally twigged there’s more to supporting your team than turning up five minutes before kick-off and sitting in nervous near-silence for 90 minutes. “We felt it,” cooed Bukayo Saka, in a post-match interview with the CBS Bigger Cup B@nter Show. “Since we were on the coach, I’ve never seen the Emirates like this in my whole career. It was so special. When the game started, they pushed us. It was just a beautiful moment.” Continue reading...
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