Juca Kfouri: It looks like Arsenal will be Carnival champions – 02/19/2023 – Juca Kfouri

The journalist is Brazilian and has the supreme defect of not liking Carnival, an almost mortal sin for anyone who likes football.

What explains liking one so much and not the other popular manifestation more ingrained in the national culture?

Patience. This has always been the case and it will not change from now on.

The journalist could sleep later on Carnival Saturday, but at 9:30 am he had his eyes on the TV because the Premier League leader was playing at Aston Villa.

The journalist likes the revolutionary Pep Guardiola so much that he exchanged the greater sympathy he always had for Liverpool (You’ll never walk alone) and started rooting for Manchester City, which disputes head to head the English title with Arsenal.

When Guardiola was at Barcelona it was easy, because the Catalans have always loved the journalist. And when he went to Bayern Munich, everything happened naturally, as there was no preferred club.

The game at Villa Park, in Birmingham, had not even reached five minutes and the hosts took the lead.

Arsenal’s defeat, with a game in hand, would allow City to move definitively to the lead of the championship, if they won the game that would start at noon, against Nottingham Forest, newly promoted to the main division.

Arsenal tied, Aston Villa scored 2-1, there was a draw again and, in extra time, the Italian-Brazilian Jorginho kicked the crossbar, the ball bounced back in the goalkeeper’s head and gave victory to the Londoners – who still made it 4 to 2 when the goalkeeper of the own goal went to the rival area to try to favor and allowed another one with an empty goal.

The citizen journalist was somewhere between perplexed and delighted at the rapid turn of events that would allow Arsenal to keep a potential three-point lead behind City.

City who dominated Nottingham Forest until they opened the scoring at the end of the first half, with a shot by the Portuguese Bernardo Silva, after the German Gündogan had wasted two very clear chances.

The second half, then, bordered on the massacre, with loads of wasted opportunities and an especially supernatural one.

The Norwegian Haaland, top scorer in the Premier League with an astonishing 26 goals in 23 games, kicked the crossbar, took the rebound in the small area, killed the ball and kicked it into the clouds. The eventual loss of the championship will be attributed to him, although City’s possible third championship will hardly be awarded to his merits alone.

Because it didn’t take long and, in Nottingham’s only sure finish, “Robin Hood’s team” tied 1-1, took two points from the rich Arabs and handed them over to the equally millionaire North Americans.

That ball kicked by Jorginho, which bounced back on the goalkeeper’s head, looked like a witch. Haaland’s command of the heights, however, has suddenly transformed her into a queen.

Prostrated, the journalist asked himself how many times in his life he had seen, in the space of two hours, two such unusual moves and found no answer.

I had seen a goal against the goalkeeper, a penalty hit the post, the goalkeeper’s back and enter (Carlos, Brazilian team, Brazil x France, 1986 World Cup) and even King Pelé missed a goal, but not all on the same day, almost at the same time and for the same championship.

It looks like Arsenal will be the champions of Carnival.

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