Sven had made the trek to White Hart Lane to watch Defoe score the cracker of a goal that he'd fluffed for England in midweek, while Robinson kept the best of Boro at bay, his deftly patrolled clean sheet surely consigning David James to more time with his Playstation during international windows. Watch out, by the way, for the dream pairing of the Man City keeper with Ricardo Carvalho in a forthcoming celebrity edition of Who Wants to be more of a Millionaire, both trying to outdo the other in terms of low IQ remarks in the week just gone - actually I think James' admission that he didn't think he'd bother warming up properly before taking the field and shipping a ridiculous number of pretty ridiculous goals just about pips Carvalho's for daftness, since at least the latter's assertion that he should be the one playing instead of Gallas and he doesn't know what his manager's thinking of could at least be construed as ambitious. Boro were curiously ineffective, Hasselbaink atypically fluffing a couple of chances, and Boro looking better after the break when Mark Viduka came on and contributed a gutsy providing role, albeit that his teammates failed ot convert any of the chances which he served up for them. Viduka playing hard for the team, what am I saying? This is truly the stuff of National Enquirer articles.
Buoyed by this result, you'll no doubt find any nearby Spurs fans are full of optimism right now, having acquired the once great but now somewhat faded Juve midfielder Edgar Davids, who himself was replaced in Turin by the somewhat fading Vieira, perhaps not quite noticing that this second-generation hand-me-down manoeuvre is the closest they have ever come to pinching a captain from Arsenal rather than the other way round. So seize the opportunity to place a bet with them on relative finishing positions in North London, or when St Totteringham's Day will fall in 2006.
Steve McLaren's team may have gone home with nothing, but elsewhere in the Premiership it was a tale of ex-Man U staff doing pretty well for themselves and their new teams, and we may as well start at St Andrews where the aforementioned David James had a hand (or rather didn't) in Birmingham's opener from Nicky Butt, before Joey Barton took sufficient time off from inflicting ABH on his Academy juniors or from appeals to family members to surrender themselves to the police to get Man City level, and where the match was eventually settled by a wonder volley from Andy Cole (on his wrong foot). I can't help wondering at how a Keegan Man City side would have imploded after conceding the opener in contrast to the determination provided by Psycho Power. Let's hope he runs on Duracell.
At St James' Park, Graeme Souness was sulking again (what a coincidence that my impartial Microsoft spell checker insists on suggesting Sourness as an alternative word for his name); having last weekend moaned at how the referee consigned his away side to defeat after a rashly brandished red card depleted their numbers, he was on the other side of the equation as West Ham were unjustly deprived of Paul Konchesky's services for most of the second half, yet managed to hold the Magpies at bay for a point - cue Roy Carroll playing an unlikely blinder in goal for the Hammers (how will he do against Spurs later in the season, we all wonder).
Fittingly enough, then, it was a player cast off by Sounness in the close season that got on the scoresheet to lead a Pompey fightback, albeit that Laurent Robert's goal was only a consolation as Bryan Robson continued the ex-OT success story with West Brom making it four points from the opening six courtesy of Geoff Horsfield's brace. Not a bad rehabilitation for a player I last saw close up (under Sounness and Dean Saunders' tutelage) while he was propping up a bar in Cardiff the day before getting overrun in an FA Cup semi.
There was no harm being Bent for either Charlton or Everton this weekend, both sides notching single goal victories courtesy of their similarly named strikers at the expense of Wigan and Bolton respectively, even if the Trotters did manage to hit the bar and have a goal of their own disallowed.
Luck fell in with Liverpool on Saturday as they crossed the path of the Black Cats, Xavi Alonso's precise free-kick proving the difference between the sides, while Sissoko survived a fairly plausible Mackem penalty appeal for handball in his own area. Captain and general all-round Mr Fantastic Steven Gerrard however picked up a knock which will keep him out of the scousers' midfield Four in their final Champions League qualifying game, though he should be ok by the time the meaningless Super Cup comes round on Friday. Watch out for Jose Mourinho in the near future moaning that Arsenal get a few days off after defeat at the Bridge courtesy of the evil Premiership fixture computer having scheduled the Gunners next game to be away at Anfield the day after this, meaning that this fixture's been deferred for a while.
At Ewood Park, Fulham fell behind to Blackburn as managed by Mark Hughes, who prior to Drogba was the last Chelsea player to score a winning goal over Arsenal in the league, and whose striker Pedersen capped a good week for the Danes by producing an exquisite volley in off the underside of the bar despite the ball being played into his shins. Although the Cottagers briefly rallied through a scrappy McBride equaliser just after the break, Hughes was clearly - if unwittingly - drawing on his ex-Man U lucky charm rather than his Chelsea one, since his side eventually took all the points once Tugay - another player, incidentally, discarded by Sounness as a Newcastle possibility despite his having bought him into two previous clubs as the lynchpin of the side - hammered in an even better one from waist height.
With all this good Old Trafford karma running around, and with one last-gasp draw for the away side there in a week already (Australia in the cricket, in case you've been somewhere remote and unfeasibly incommunicado), I guess it was no surprise to find Man U themselves squeaking a win with a typically long-range effort from Ruud van Nistelrooy (about four inches at my guess), though we should perhaps have known that Aston Villa's inability to have ever mustered an away win against Alex Ferguson was not going to drive the surprise result of the weekend and overturn a decade's worth of head-to-head form.
Which leads me back to where I had, with a light touch born of recent grief, started at the beginning of this roundup, and the Chelsea-Arsenal result.
Unlike the 2-2 at Highbury in the Title run-in last season, this was by no means an advert for the Premiership, as both sides stuttered onto the field and then failed to get much better.
There was, however, some entertainment to be found. Now, I'm no expert at identifying male streakers at a distance, but I think it was the same guy that took the field early on in last week's Arsenal game who streaked onto the park during the goalless first half at the Bridge. He didn't have his white cap on this time (perhaps it was confiscated last week), but he did do some similar backflips and forward rolls, and he once again went to shake Kolo Toure's hand (better watch out there, Kolo). Unlike at Highbury, where the stewards had had qualms about taking the field in pursuit, or perhaps more appreciation of how silly they'd look running around after him, the Chelsea stewards were game for the chase, and duly tottered after him in their huge dayglo jackets while he pirouetted around them. Eventually, one particularly ungainly custodian got lucky in that he stumbled on a divot and crashed into the interloper, who was thus stunned and escorted from the ground. One Lehmann save with his face aside, it was probably the most prolonged disruption of either side's defence in the first half. I wonder will the streaker be bailed in time for Wednesday's floodlit game against Fulham, and will the turnstile operators be issued with descriptions of his various identifying marks?
After the break, it looked for a while like the game had 0-0 written all over it. A curiously subdued Thierry Henry had a couple of chances along with the lively substitute Robin van Persie, who narrowly failed to repeat his near post flick past Shay Given from a week before, but otherwise Didier Drogba was closest to scoring when he hit the upper tier of the Mathew Harding stand while Lehmann stood chippably far from his line (this prompted a lively debate with a Chelsea fan near the front of the crowd, who was decrying the finish). The midfield battle was pretty evenly matched, if possibly being bossed for most of the game by a very slender margin by Fabregas and Gilberto, with Chelsea club record signing Essien coming on too briefly to really assess his style.
And then a free kick was awarded wide on Chelsea's right by the ludicrously awful Graham Poll (note: this is not my own view of the official's competence, necessarily, but that of the Blue-clad football intelligentsia with whom I was sitting incognito. Just so you're aware the home fans thought he was crap too). Initially, this seemed unthreatening, and certainly Drogba did not intend to trap the resulting long ball forward by having it bounce crazily off his knee.
Lehmann, however, was coming forward while positioning himself to narrow the angle from the spot where Drogba no doubt actually intended to shoot, and was caught out by the fluke deflection, which carried the ball into the net just past his reflexively extended left hand, a shame considering his otherwise very effective game. I am led to understand that Drogba went back to try to find the barracking Chelsea fan who'd dissed his earlier deliberate finish, as if the fluky goal would win him round, but the man had mysteriously vanished. Funny that, in the Abramovic world.
A few half chances and a bit of corner flag chasing aside, that was about that, with the Arsenal fans therefore all left to wonder in the queue for the tube as to whether a three point lead for the defending Champions was already unassailable, even while there were still a further 108 for their side to play for. Personally I reckon it's a bit early to be giving up just yet, which is why I'll be looking forward to my appointment this Wednesday to pick my new seats at the Emirates Stadium.