Viola Crash The Merseyside

By: chris | March 12th, 2008

Well at least Fiorentina is fighting strong for the Italians in the UEFA Cup, after an extraordinarily lackluster showing in the earlier rounds from the peninsula (I’m looking at you, Empoli - not that you had any business being there in the first place). So it’s nice to have at least one club make a prolonged run. And Serie A now with two clubs still remaining in European competition.

Strolled in casually around the 80th minute and didn’t realize I still had about a third of the game in front of me. Seb Frey, beast that he is, made a rare mistake and allowed for Andy Johnson, who looks like something of a slimy fetus who was left out in the sun too long, to score the first off of his face and then Mikel Arteta, who is still on the blue side of Liverpool for god knows what reason, put it just in the right spot for the second. In fairness to Frey, the British navy could’ve docked their entire fleet in the space Arteta was given to run with the ball before his goal. And then, Roberto Mancini ran out onto the pitch and said that he’d be signing for Evertonia as a player-coach in the upcoming season.

So tied 2-2 the game headed to extras, where Fiorentina looked fairly frazzled, and lashed out with a clinic on committing fouls in volume. Favorite moment was when Martin Jorgenson got kicked in the giblets, and was then handed a yellow for being late in getting his giblets kicked. Give the guy a break, would ya? A whole lot of pushing back and forth and they were headed to penos. Roll call:

Gravesen: Fired hard, threatened the crowd with one finger. 1-0
Giampaolo: Solid to the left, just off Howard’s fingers. 1-1
Yakubu: Way too nonchalant, flicked it off the post, still 1-1.
Montolivo: High and straight, looked like he’d just maybe soiled himself afterwards. No celebration. 1-2.
Arteta: The pseudo-spoon up the middle. 2-2.
Osvaldo: Pulls out the dipsy-do, hop-a-roo on his way to a weird penalty. 2-3.
Jagielka: Frey makes a huge save on the ball to the left, essentially clinching matters. enough can’t be said about the guy. 2-3.
Santana: 2-4, and that’s all she wrote.