Pat Rice Reflects On Last Night – “It Was Too Stressful For Me”
Pat Rice took charge of Arsenal last night while Arsene Wenger watched on from the stands, and he can be satisfied with his teams performance. It was not something he liked doing though, but he will have to go through all of it again when Olympiakos visit the Emirates in two weeks time.
Speaking after the game Rice said, “Did I like it? No. It has never been one of my ambitions to be manager of a football club. It was too stressful for me and extremely strange not to have the manager with me. He is normally shouting in my ear. It was a strange decision by UEFA for him not to be on the bench. But we battled really hard and we knew it would be a hard game.”
Rice went on to add, “I don’t think many teams will beat Dortmund. Dortmund are a really good side. No question. From our point of view, we wanted to win the game. We were so close. We were very near.”
When asked about Dortmund’s goal Rice said, “Their player could try that 35 or 40 times and he would hit it wide. It was a great goal. Very much so.”
It was a stunning goal and if a Barcelona player had scored it the footballing world would be in raptures today. There is absolute no disgrace in conceding a goal like that, it was just a shame it was against us and in the last few minutes of the game.
Rice was then asked if he thought Arsenal had started to turn the corner. He replied, “Particularly the game on Saturday when we beat Swansea. It seemed as though it was our start to the season after uncertainty. The players we have signed are very good, contrary to what other people have said. I am sure they will show it in the games to come.”
Exactly. They need time to gel. I couldn’t agree more. Some people expect new players to come in and turn it on straight away, but we know that it is never that easy.
Rice then went on to talk about Robin Van Persie. He said, “Robin is the club captain and we encouraged him to be verbal on the park and off it. He was asking me one or two things about what we could do better and I was saying one or two things which could make the team better. As for the goal, it is nothing unusual to see Robin do that. It was a great run by Robin and a terrific ball through. It was unusual to see Robin hit it with that foot but it proves he is not a one-foot footballer.”
All in all it was a good performance from the boys. Not particularly in a footballing way, but it showed we have the guts to dig in and defend. We now travel to Blackburn at the weekend and we should go there with confidence higher than it has been in a while.
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why will pat rice say it was too stressful? well, he should know dat it is his duty to manage the team if the head manager is not on sit.i think it is a point earned.
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d team used 2 hav an imbalance where gunners were 2 good offensively and very poor defensively.now after seeing d team defend yesterday,dat balance seems 2 hav shifted 2 d defence and d teams luk better……..
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eat great spirit. great defence!! well, i hope arteta gets d message now that CL gets bloody sometimes. its should’ve been 3pts for us, bt they’re lucky. song, chezzy, evrybdy played their hearts out. kudos guys!!
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would have loved to see park play some minutes yesterday.. it’s been a while since i’m not worried with the GK position.. the midfield n attack needs to gel, n i cant wait to see wilshere back, we missed him.. go gunners!!
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this guy is useless he made the worse subs n tactics EVER, when we should have been pushing 2 get some1 2 score n kill the game off he added more pressure to the team by taking off our 3 MAIN ATTACKING THREATS walcott, gervinho n van persie n replaced them with a CDM (frimpong), LB (santos), n a tree (chamakh) he is a bafoon compared 2 arsene, some1 PLZ call bergkamp from Ajax n kick pat out his as f#cking useless as chamakh, p.s. i’m gonna shoot myself if i ever see chamakh play in front of park, afobe or vela i’m gonna shoot myself, if arsene was in charge he would have made better changes n we would of won that match 2-0 regardless WELL DONE GUNNERZ, VERY PROUD, UP ARSENAL
Opinions divided. What do you think?
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plz feel better soon wilshere n verma i’m hoping u comeback so we can give spurs a real whippingin a couple of months
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I think arsene should give the Park a chance to try his faith in Blackburn match instead of Chamack
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Pat rice did well, our team did well and most importantly the result was a good one, especially when you look at the facts seperating us from the germans. we have a new team settleing in together ok whilst they are settled, we struggled towards the end of last season whilst they won their league, as well offcourse we lost some key players whilst they have held on to theirs and last key disadvantage we had was we played away. however we still performed and i still reckon many improvments will be made by our team as a whole as the season goes on, we even didnt have a few of our star players whilst they had their best players availerble. so i am very pleased for our team folks and i hope you guys are too, we almost won it, and im pretty sure at full strength in the return match at emirates with TV5 and wilshere in the team we should win in style. well done to us.
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@paddy dortmund lost sahin (the fulcrum of their side) to real marid n he went 4 only a 1/3 of fabregas’s price, barrios did not play n his pretty much their van persie (although nowhere as AMAZING as our flying dutchmen) but then again we add the excuse of an assistant manager in charge who’s as stupid as a peanut n 4 10minutes we had a tree (chamakh) n 7 defenders on the field so u could argue we weren’t organised enough but dortmund was not 100% either, although if both teams play their strongest sides at the emirates arsenal would win 3-0 minnimum
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I was really proud of 5-6 of our players work rate. They put themselves on the line. The passing wasn’t great at times and we did seem to get out numbered in midfield but it was a good hard earned point. I did feel There was 3-4 players that were carried by the rest, which made it that bit more difficult. This isn’t arsenal of old, people need to realize this and we will have to work hard to get the points and get the passing game back.
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generally it was a beautiful game of football. we showed we can take as much as we can give. dortmund is no easy side, we could easily have won it if d asst. manager knew what changes to make.chamakh had no business on d field
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How come de whole f**kn world can clearly c dat Chamack is COMPLETELY USELESS, BUT ONLY WENGER CANT C IT?
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