Daily Archives: March 28, 2015
Quick Roundup of Gunners on International Duty
So I’m hovering around my polling unit to get my accreditation before casting my vote for Nigeria’s next president. It’s a moment many Nigerians have been waiting for since February 14th but everyone is ready. I truly hope that things would be peaceful today because there have been counts of violence in the past on days like this. However, once I cast my vote, I’d get my ass back home. There’s no point hovering around to see how things pan out when you can watch it in ’em news channels.
As expected, nothing much happened on the international sets of fixtures with teams battling it out at friendlies and qualifiers. Here’s a quick roundup of the proceedings in the interlull from an Arsenal perspective.
Germany 2 (Reus 17′, Podolski 81′) – Australia 2 (Troisi 40′, Jedinak 50′)
The world champions took on a resilient Australia side and had to count on a forgotten figure at Arsenal, Lukas Podolski, to spare their blushes late on. Mesut Ozil played all 90 minutes and captained the side when skipper on the night, Sami Khedira, was substituted.
England 4 (Rooney 7′, Welbeck 45′, Sterling 58′, Kane 73′) – Lithuania 0
Danny Welbeck was the star of the show in England’s thrashing of minnows, Lithuania. Rooney opened the scoring after some brilliant individual play from Welbeck before that guy made it two at the stroke of halftime. The Arsenal forward also did well to get an assist on the night as well but everyone continued to talk about Harry Kane, as it took him just 79 seconds to get in the scoring act to crown a great night for the Three Lions.
Walcott came in late on while Kieran Gibbs was an unused substitute.
France 1 (Varane 21′) – Brazil 3 (Oscar 40′, Neymar 57′, Luiz Gustavo 69′)
With Laurent Koscielny playing a lot of games this season, I was hoping that he wasn’t going to feature in this game and my prayers were answered when Mamadou Sakho and Raphael Varane played in the heart of the defense. There was no stopping the Brazilian attacking wave despite the fact that the French side scored first. Arsenal’s Man on Fire, Olivier Giroud, came on with six minutes to go, while Koscielny and Gabriel spent the entire 90 minutes in the dugout.
Varane put the home side ahead with a header, but it was cancelled out by a toe poke from Oscar that went through Steve Mandanda’s legs. Neymar blasted a fierce shot with his left foot to put the visitors ahead before Luiz Gustavo wrapped things up with a point-blank header.
Bahrain 0 – Colombia 6 (Bacca 15′, Falcao 32, 36′, Ramos 59′, Mojica 79′, Renteria 82′)
David Ospina continued to rake in another clean sheet as Colombia took Bahrain to the cleaners. Radamel Falcao might not be getting some joy at Old Trafford but he took his frustrations out on a poor Bahrain side.
Costa Rica 0 Paraguay 0
Joel Campbell played 82 minutes for his country but it was a scoreless encounter between both nations. One may wonder what the future holds for this lad because he hasn’t really made much of an impact in Villarreal and I see the Spanish side sending him back to London this summer.
Spain 1 (Morata 28′) – Ukraine 0
Santi Cazorla came on as a substitute in Spain’s narrow win over Ukraine. He didn’t make much of an impact in the game.
That’s a wrap folks.
Time to me to continue hanging around this polling unit before I cast my vote.
Sayonara.
Gooner Daily has been nominated for the Best Sports blog category (section 22) in the 2014 Nigerian Blog Awards. Please vote!
You can download the Gooner Daily BlackBerry App to receive notifications on your Smart Phone when a post is published.
You can follow Gooner Daily on Twitter @goonerdaily. I’ll follow back
Feel free to visit Gooner Daily’s Facebook page and click on the like button.
You can also join Gooner Daily’s Mailing List to get notifications of new posts by email by clicking on the Follow button
Posted by WordPress for BlackBerry