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Sunday, November 26, 2006

Arsenal 1 - Bolton Wanderers 3

Due to the vagaries of sports programming, Setanta Sports decided not air this week's Gunners match verses the upstart Bolton Wanderers.

Given last week's tie against lowly Newcastle I had this insight: At this point any team in the English Premiereship can get a point off of Arsenal. The Gunners have the aura of a powerhouse but they are a bit of a paper tiger (this year.)

True to form, Bolton apparently manhandled Arsenal.

from the International Herald Tribune by Rob Hughes

At home and abroad, the French are back at the heart of what makes soccer a bewilderingly brutal as well as a beautiful sport.

Less than 72 hours after a policeman shot a Paris Saint-Germain supporter to death on the streets of the capital after the team lost a UEFA Cup match at home against Hapoel Tel Aviv, nothing seemed to be stopping soccer.

Despite the tensions, despite inflamed feelings fueled by racism, nothing stopped PSG from traveling to play a league match in Nantes on Sunday. The security nightmare simply moved some 400 kilometers, or 250 miles, west.

Before then, however, French players and coaches were involved in games on foreign fields. Not least among those was an intriguing duel in Bolton, an English industrial town close to Manchester. The most breathtaking goal of England's season so far was scored Saturday by Nicolas Anelka, an errant son of a Paris suburb. A former PSG player, a protégé taken at 17 to London by Arsenal's manager, Arsène Wenger, Anelka scored twice Saturday for Bolton Wanderers against his former mentor.

Read more here.

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