Ponderings.
Here are some ponderings I’ve been pondering over the past few weeks. Feel free to add your own ponderings to the comments section if you so wish! (A bonus pondering: how good is the word ‘pondering’? Very.)
- If Arsene Wenger does boxing or kickboxing or super-violent taekwondo to relieve the hatey hatredness his daily chores at work must give him?
- Just how successful (if fullllllllapricks) our current squad would be if all the ‘ambitious’ super-troopers had stuck around instead of fleeing the ship like squealing, squealing Marys?
- Why is it that spots on the top part of your forehead hurt SO much?
- Exactly where on his spider diagram of ‘Ways to move Arsenal FC forward’ came the ‘Me to move to one of our most long-standing rivals’ portion of Robin van Persie’s presentation to Wenger and Gazidis? It would have been PowerPoint, naturally. I bet he left the swishy noises on, too. Arse.
- Just what his mindset is now. Juventus no. But then Juventus was a bit of a white flag anyway. Ah sure I can’t win the Premier League, so I’ll go settle for the Italian version. Manchester City no. He sort of didn’t want them anyway, but then they didn’t want him right back in his face, so that wasn’t much of a goer (he will now clearly sign for Manchester City.) And then up popped Manchester United. The ones that came a place above us last season. The ones he really hatey hatey hated for many years. The ones whose manager is one of his nearly former manager (the one he has HUGE RESPECT FOR)’s oldest of foes.
- Why he bothered banging on about his love for us all last season? Either you’ve swapped personalities with a giant douchenugget, or you were lying the entire time. Either way, I bite my middle fingers at you sir.
- I ponder just how DO these four currently play for us? Look at ‘em. Just look at ‘em! Insanity. I had heard of each and every one before they were purchased. This is a NEW SENSATION!
- How GOOD IS SANTI CAZORLAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!
- Exactly how much time and money it would take to install a ‘Slow Walking Persons’ lane on the pavements of the city? I’m sure not as much time and money as is lost by people being STUCK behind said slow walking persons on a day to day basis.
- Just what colour Olivier Giroud’s eyes actually are. I want to say blue, but then I see a flash of green and then I have to look again and then I simply can’t stop. Help.
- WHY the entire world wants to mess with Aaron Ramsey. Here’s a thought, Christopher Coleman: keep your dressing room politics out of public opinion and decide between those involved whether you thinking adding an oaf with an upside down head would improve your chances of international success.
- Why I bothered reading the Mail’s article on my above pondering, even more why I bothered reading the comments in response to said article and WHY it is simply not acceptable to drop kick stupid people right in the face for being such ignorant goonbuckets.
I expect many further ponderings will develop as the week wears on. For now I bid you goodnight.
Tim
284 days ago
Don’t sell RVP to Fergie ever!
Sean
284 days ago
Only one transfer between United and Arsenal during AW’s reign, Silvestre to us. And he was in the process of becoming a crock anyway. DON’T SELL TO UNITED.
Don’t sell Song to Barca, unless we make them take Squillaci too.
IF we sell Song, which I will be incredibly unhappy about, Sahin or Capoue or M’Vila would slide in quite nicely.
Titi
284 days ago
Wow!
A beautiful gunner, season is off to a flyer! lol! lol!
FunGunner
284 days ago
Ha ha ha – great ponderings and bang on the money.
“Just what colour Olivier Giroud’s eyes actually are. I want to say blue, but then I see a flash of green and then I have to look again and then I simply can’t stop. Help.”
I know. Blue, green, blue… I keep thinking I’ve cracked it but then I doubt myself and have to drown in Mr Dreamy’s pools of gorgeousness AGAIN. (Sigh) What can you do, eh?
Good Omens
282 days ago
Er..Hazel aquamarine.. the shade of a champion. One can only hope.
Daniel
284 days ago
- Why would you choose not to walk on the travelator/flat escalator thing at the airport?
- Has Arsene Wenger seen Jurassic Park?
- How can Robin van Persie dare to even dream leaving a team supported by you and Mo Farah?
Sian
284 days ago
- If people who stand on the left just want to be kneed in the spine.
- If Arsene Wenger chuckles watching New Girl.
- If what you and I have here is just too good for this earth, Dannerz.
Daniel
284 days ago
- Whether I was right to gently nudge that small boy who decided to stand still at the open barrier after I’d also touched my Oyster on the reader behind him yesterday.
- Is Arsene Wenger’s Sky Plus full and, if so, who gets the most percentage, him with his Premiership Years and Eurosport madness or his wife with Britain and Ireland’s NTM?
- Whether we’ll ever get to go to the moon.
malaysian gunner
284 days ago
The writing had been on the wall the last five to seven years. Wenger ignored them and continued his policy of buying wc kids until the ko blow came last season.
He had the cheek to say fans came to see pattern weaving soccer when questioned why he didn’t want to win ugly.Obviously fans want a winning team not one playing attacking or call it whateverer you want. The problem is it’s very easy to frustrate the gunners with anti soccer which abhors the fm.Well if it can help you win games why not.
As for RVP blame Wenger. He has lost faith the fm will be able to bring the gunners to challenge . That is why he wants to go. If the gunners can’t challenge for the epl and MU with RVP win the epl and cl,Wenger has to go. he has been given time the average top manager can only dream.
Regarding RVP,the red faced want him to join asap. Why not frutstrate him and let him leave on tw dead line.That is unless rf coughs up at least 25 million if he wants the dm before Aug 18.
FunGunner
284 days ago
- why we call SAF “Sir Red Nose” when in fact his entire face is red.
irishgray
283 days ago
Fungunner – I thought his name was Slur Red Nose?
iceman
284 days ago
For an educated country with good morals you must be a bad apple with all these stupid dullusions.
Would you rather we spent millions like Liverpool, play crappy football, and still not win? Or play anti football like chelsea and be a joke for the world?
We want to do it the right way, which us to do playing attractive football, within our means and do for decades. Trophies will come because we are the mighty arsenal…..
Were you moaning when we went unbeaten?
You were defenitly moaning when we signed the ox last year wernt you?
Patience my brother….. Good things come to those who wait….
Limpar's Wand
283 days ago
Yeah, enough with the dullusions already. Keep it to pondering…
The punter who ponders pandering to the pundit’s pondersome punditry ponders not the spondaic poems of the ponderable Pindar, but pondweed pinned on a panda.
More importantly, spots inside the nostril are the worst. And hands off Giroud. He’s mine.
Ps I want more from you. I like you
irishgray
283 days ago
Hmmmm……where to start!? You see now I have this weird image of Sian, stuck behind some old Biddy on the pavement, looking all kinds of frustrated with massive (and apparently very sore) pimples on her forehead, biting her middle fingers, all the while frantically asking passersby “WHAT COLOUR ARE OLIVIER’S EYES!?” before drop-kicking the poor fool right in the face because he said ‘green’ when she knows they are ‘blue’ no wait they are ‘green’, aren’t they!???? And did I mention she also hasn’t bathed in quite a while? (see end of previous comment section)
You see? Now that is a LOT to ponder!
I can’t fucking wait for Saturday!!!!!!!!
Gf60
283 days ago
Ah, the shower worked!
)
Ponder….why do we waste practice playing time on players reportedly on their way out? RvP, Marouane, Arshavin, etc on Sunday?
pirate pete
283 days ago
wrong thread. thought it said plundering
sons of pitches
282 days ago
I appreciate that to many Arsenal fans of a younger vintage, or perhaps converted to the cause by the success and high profile brought to the club by Arsène Wenger, might not remember or even know that once upon a time we had a forward called Nic Anelka.
But Anelka is important in the history of Arsenal, because he established a pattern that we have seen repeated many times since – and which we are seeing now with RVP and his transfer. A pattern which, in fact, has been the bedrock of Arsenal’s success in staying in touch with the Billionaire clubs.
In February 1997, Nic Anelka aged 17 joined Arsenal for a fee, eventually agreed at £500,000. When Wright was injured Anelka took over and was significant in the Double win in 1997/8. Indeed he scored in the Cup Final – which endeared him to many hearts, despite his seeming lack of interest in the club or its fans. ( I can remember watching Anelka score for Arsenal at Coventry, and seeing his total lack of celebration or enthusiasm as he trudged back to the half way line, saying to my mate Roger, “that kid has real personality problems.” Not my most definitive psychological profile, but one that was made long before we started calling the lad “Le Sulk”.
Having won PFA Young Player of the Year Anelka demanded a huge hike in salary (I seem to remember his brother was his agent) and all sorts of other stuff too – so Arsenal transferred the lad to Real Madrid in the summer of 1999 for £22.3 million. He won the Champs League with them, but quickly fell out of favour and started his tour of the clubs of Europe, as Real Mad threw away some money transferring him back to PSG, who in turn ended up paying about 30 times what they had sold him for, eventually selling him on once again for less.
This “sell a player on for a mega profit while bringing in the next likely lad” was new to us then and seemed curious. And what we now see as the normal “Arsenal is a selling club” nonsense, was started up by rivals for the first time.
However what us old timers remember is that Arsenal used a bit of the Anelka cash to build the new training facilities, which were the foundation of our new youth policy. Oh and we used half of it to buy Thierry Henry in the same transfer window. (T Henry worth half N Anelka! Amazing!)
The pattern has been repeated over and over again, with players coming in on the cheap and being sold on for crazy prices. Even what seemed to be pricey purchases like £11m for Henry (“pricey” it seemed because at the start he had difficulty in locating the goal) turned out to be bargains – especially when we recall that Henry, with injuries, was sold to Barcelona for €24 million – and cost them almost half a million pounds a game thereafter.
Vieira went on to Juventus, who were then relegated in a match fixing scandal – again for a huge profit. Barca got caught also with Hleb and Overmars – the latter being sold to Barca carrying an injury which eventually finished his career. He cost Barca €40.6 million (having cost Arsenal one fifth of that amount) and managed just 99 games in those four years – which when his salary is added in, worked about at around three quarters of a million euros a match.
There are many more examples – but in one case, Flamini, Arsenal were caught out by a player refusing to re-sign. It didn’t do Flamini much good – he managed 78 appearances in four years with Milan, many as sub. But his salary of 22 million euros over that time has made each appearance cost Milan over a quarter of a million euros, and helped push them into financial difficulty and a need to restructure to meet FFP regs.
Flamini of course only had one great season with Arsenal – his last – but even so Arsenal were, I believe, determined never to be caught again in this manner , and so decided to deal with players who wanted to leave, before the contract ended.
So players near the end of the contract were to be sold on but always at a massively high price, that allowed the club to bring in more money to buy more players. And it was to get this high price that supreme reluctance to sell had to be brought into the mix. No, no, no, you can’t have Nasri! No! OK, all right, because we’ve got Arteta for a lot less both in terms of salary and fee paid.
However one question arises from this ploy – namely why do the clubs fall for it? After all they must know that most of the Arsenal sell-on players cost them a fortune, and don’t play that many matches – and of course eventually get sold on for a much smaller fee (or in the case of Hleb, are virtually given away).
(Actually there is a second question – why do some people believe that Arsenal are reluctant sellers – but that’s for another day).
The answer to the first question is that the clubs are buying not just for the player’s worth, but also to impress the media and the fans. The media love transfers because it ups the level of sales of the papers. And the fans want to see their club being “ambitious” (a word introduced into the footballing vocabulary by agents who are also keen to promote their clients’ interest).
So RVP to Man U gives a chance for lots of “Arsenal in despair” stories, although very little in terms of commentary on the fact that Man U have just paid £22m plus four years of mega wages for a player who next summer they could have had for free.
Also they have just paid £22m for a player whose injury record is awful. True he played 48 games last season, but before that he was much more restricted. Of course if you are quite sure that he will reproduce that approach again this coming season, that’s good, but even so, the cost is about £60m in terms of transfer fee and salary. Is RVP worth £60m for the gamble of one brilliant season and several slipping away seasons? I doubt it.
But Man City have backed Man U into a corner over this one, through all their purchases, and Man U fans are happy because they perceive that they have got one over on both Arsenal and Man C. But in fact it is quite possible that they have done neither, tying Man U into a very expensive player who they will never be able to unload if he ever gets injured again.
Initially I had the feeling that this blog was the only place where the vision of selling players from Anelka onwards was seen as a brilliant positive move. However I was amused yesterday to see the joke going around that Mr Wenger had been arrested for stealing £22m from a befuddled old age pensioner. Maybe others are starting to see it this as another example of the Anelka Principle.
Which takes us back to Anelka himself. What was better – to take the money and spend it on Henry and our new training centre which is still considered one of the best on the planet, or should we have held onto a player who didn’t want to be with us?
Of course we don’t know if RVP will be injured in game 2 and only manage 10 matches a year for Man U (while still taking his salary). Of course we don’t know who Mr Wenger has up his sleeve in terms of the next transfer.
Time will tell, but in the past Mr Wenger has been right (think of players from Bentley to Adebayor) – little to no cost to bring them in, huge income on selling them on. The past speaks hugely in Mr Wenger’s favour – my guess is that he has indeed done it again, and that RVP’s name will slip away from the Man U hall of fame, just as the memory of selling worthless shares on the New York stock exchange will hardly be recalled as one of the club’s finest moments.
Robin Low
281 days ago
This is plagiarism in the highest form.
Word for word, cut and paste from Tony Attwood’s article. Check the url below :-
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/24356
Hate these non-thinking bastards, and try to take other’s glory.
Robin Low
281 days ago
Sorry Sian, my apologies for outburst on your blog.
Love your writings all these while, and first time posting have to be a complaint on this a@@-hole comment.
Sian
278 days ago
Hmmm, I’ve spotted that the last few ‘comments’ (not yours) have been from the same IP address, and the lengthy ones are indeed nicked from Sabotage Times/Online Gooner. What on earth is going on? Strange, thanks for the heads up!
eckleman
282 days ago
RVP move to united brought memories of losing another Arsenal great in Frank Stepleton. The only difference between them was Stapleton won a FA Cup beating united in a classic final in 1979. It was a move that went to the tribunal. Stepleton went on to play 365 games scoring 78 goals for united and won two FA cups with them. Soon and pending medical, Arsenal is going to lose another prolific goal scoring machine to a squad that on paper has the potential to win trophies. Stapleton joined Arsenal as a youth player making his debut in 1975. Losing RVP looks bad at the moment because he was (is) the captain and a top goal poacher when he is fit playing in Arsenal system. Nonetheless he is so so when donning the dutch colors. With the new recruits and with good money from united, it is hoped that Asene Wenger use it wisely to strengthen all departments. After losing Cecs and Nasri and to the lesser extent Clichy and now RVP, the morale of the team would somewhat a wee bit affected. So Wenger has to quickly rebuild the confidence to his squad for failing to win anything 1 more season will be hard to swallow even if Arsenal managed to finish second in the league. I am indeed frustrated with the trend the team has to go through. Something must have been very wrong somewhere and only the manager and the board could answer this. With the amount of incentives put on the table I don’t think any wise men would want to rethink about it especially when he is in his prime playing footie for a living. RVP is set to make united even richer if he remains fit and keep on scoring goals. We all knew that RVP has been waiting for this and when united managed to put a price to an asset Arsenal have who is susceptible to injuries, it make economic sense to accept the deal. Winning a trophy or no at the end of his contract would still means Arsenal will lose him without earning a penny at the end of the season. As for me I am already tired of him. And with podolski, giroud, carziola and perhaps sahin or yann m villa (if we also lose song) ready to line up Arsenal in the coming season, we hope to move on and quickly forget those who turn their back on us when we need them. I am nevertheless happy that at least all the nonsense about RVP has finally come to an end as we await our first game in the new season. Still the is 15 days left for Asene Wenger to put his thought right and make Arsenal great again. I wish all our players best of luck and the new set to quickly adapt the BPL and Arsenal system just like Arteta did las season. Good Luck Arsenal!
eckleman
282 days ago
we still lack an experienced back up keeper a LB who can defend and a DM who can protect the back 4 who let in 49 goals last season.Not one defensive signing that is just madness from our clueless manager.We were poor defensively last season and nothing has been done to correct it.Last season we finished light years behind the top 2 and without RVP its going to be another fight to finish top 4.The two Manchester clubs plus Chelsea will fill the top 3 spots so its us or the Spuds for 4th.What a sad state of affairs
irishgray
281 days ago
eckleman – Do you have a split personality? In your first posting you sounded reasonable and offered some sound insight, but your second was the usual D**mer shite we are all fed up with hearing. Not just because it is really annoying but also because it is wrong! How can you possibly call AW a “clueless manager”? Rediculous is what a statement such as that is.
Sian
278 days ago
Eckleman appears to be commenting under lots of different names and email addresses (I do wish people remembered the issue of the IP address), and is copying and pasting other blogs as his comments. What a strange man.
eckleman
281 days ago
behind the scenes, the club needs to examine why its big players don’t want to extend their deals. We’ve been active in the market since the last days of August 2011. But our starting line up is unrecognisable compared to two years ago; it’s been a perpetual state of flux. We are left relying on a fair few new additions hitting the ground running very quickly this season. Nevertheless, come Saturday afternoon, when it all starts again, let’s buckle ourselves in and enjoy the ride. I can’t wait
jacob
281 days ago
I’m 14 now and I don’t want to be rvp but do feel like he let everybody down. He had an interview after the barca game and he said he ran into an old man on the street in his town who told him that he’d been watching arsenal for 50 years and that night was the best game he’d ever seen. I feel like van Persie was like those people that wear the jersey but honestly couldn’t care less (you’ve all seen these people) and rvp has been pretending for the last 2 years. He thinks he’s bigger than the club but he’s not and he’ll realize that when he comes to the emirates on the same bus as Shrek and giggs. Arsenal is my team and they have a world class team not 11 world class players.
eckleman
281 days ago
Yes Im annoyed that RVP has left us and I for one think Utd have done better out of it than us, mainly because Wenger won’t replace him. But what I am most annoyed about is that our last 4 captains have wanted out of our club for other top teams. RVP, Cesc, Henry and Vieira all wanted to leave and we sold them to our rivals. That is the most worrying thing for me.
ryan
281 days ago
So RvP leaves via the exit door and another one bites the dust, so to speak. The list of quality players that have left the club in recent times gets longer and longer with every passing summer. Who will it be next time round? Well I guess a strong clue will be in whoever is made the new club captain. Adios TV5 in summer 2013, then.
The reported fee doing the rounds of £24m, including add-ons, for RvP aged 29 with his injury record is a hard one for the club to turn down considering he was within twelve months of walking away for nothing. Can you blame the top brass at the club for cashing in? Well, the answer is a clear ‘yes’ in my mind.
We have signed Podolski, Giroud and Cazorla to sweeten the blow of yet another captain leaving us this summer. But surely the real question we fans should be asking is why did we not sign anyone of this quality last summer when Cesc and Samir were clearly eager to leave? At that time, RvP could have been persuaded by some top-notch signings to sign a new contact extension with us. We needed to put down a clear marker of intent to the likes of RvP within that squad last summer, and what we actually did was bring in the likes of Ju Yung Park, hardly a moment of pure inspiration if ever I saw one. It is easy to forget these facts and think that we have done well this time round to get in replacements before RvP left the club, but, in all seriousness, would we be having to sell him to United now if we had shown more urgency last summer?
To the so called gooners who now wish RvP a timely injury to start off his new career, I would honestly say that, as fans, we need to be better than that. What is the point of wishing a player bad luck when he has already left the club? If RvP gets injured, are Hernandez or Welbeck never going to score the same chances that RvP would have been provided with? To all of you who also choose to boo the likes of Ashley Cole, Samir Nasri and now RvP when they return to our stadium, will you ever really get the reality of the situation we are in? The true people we should have been booing all this time are the suits upstairs who run our club and make the kind of decisions on a daily basis that lead to this quality of player wanting out of our club.
I for one do not blame RVP one jot for leaving. Do I care that he has signed for Manchester United? No, not really; in reality, he is merely moving on up the food-chain. There is no way on earth the same thing would happen the other way round, so we have to admit as football fans that he is joining a bigger club, one that is more likely than us to be lifting the trophies that matter next May. It is that simple, even though it hurts us as fans to accept it.
Does the fact that the player has decided to join Manchester United at this time alter his playing record with our club? No, it does not; the games played and the goals scored will forever be written into the history books and, for me, RvP will go down as yet another top-quality player who was let down by the overall lack of quality around him at the time of his career with us.
We have made some very promising signings as a club this summer, possibly twelve months too late for our captain to have possibly extended his stay with us, but I guess you do have to take the positives out of the situation. We have already replaced the man leaving town this time round and can clearly look forward to a promising season where, if we can make one or two more signings before the window closes, we could surprise a few people.
eckleman
281 days ago
Wenger is a liar. I have suspected it in the past but there has never been any solid evidence….but there is now. We sign Giroud and Podolski and he claimed that they had been signed to strengthen the squad. He claimed that he had no plans on losing RVP. Now that RVP leaves, he states that Giroud and Podolski were signed as replacements. So that means that HE DID KNOW that RVP was leaving. The man is such a liar it is a joke. And to top that off a day ago he said that there had been no contact for song and that there was no truth in it. Now he says that he doesnt know what will happen and what song will do. I just cant believe anything this man says anymore. He used to be great, but he is not great anymore. He has done a wonderful job along with the board of lowering the expectations of every single Arsenal fan in the country to point where we are now satisfied with finishing 3rd and 4th every year. He has manipulated and manufactured this along with the board and nobody seems to see it.
eckleman
281 days ago
I think Song has greatly improved but despite his assists, his lack of defensive discipline and idiotic tackles in dangerous areas have been very costly to us. What I find astonishing is that with three years left on his contract we don’t have to agree to a sale and Wenger said as much earlier in the week “that nothing was going on with Song.” Now, it seems likely he’ll go, it beggars belief. Did Wenger suddenly realise that Song was dispensable, if so why has no-one been lined up or already purchased? I hope no-one suggests Diaby or Ramsey can fill the void. The former cannot tackle and is lazy, and Ramsey is more b0x-to box and cannot assume Song’s role. Despite Song’s limitations at the highest level, he is our best tackler, so on the eve of the season, yet more disruption- if not deemed good enough, why wasn’t he sold much earlier, not at this late stage? We’ve already having to integrate three new players, now the possibility of another new player having to come in to a vital position beckons. That was the problem last season and now we’re there again. The lack of planning is appalling and Wenger’s lying gets worse by the day. Remember towards the end of the Euros he said “I am certain Robin will remain with us” when addressing Italian journalists and lambasting their League as inferior to ours as a reason why the Dutch mercenary would not join Juventus.
Alan
280 days ago
Pondering no 1 – What would the new season be like without Siany’s blog? Answer ‘s obvious – unbearable.
Pondering no 2 – How will we do without a greedy Dutch bellend? – Answer to this is also obvious – Who cares?
Onward and upward. Up the Arse!
eckleman
278 days ago
The doom which follows pre-season optimism was ushered in yesterday, as the cretins of the English media wailed in delight in ‘analysing’ Arsenal suffering the ultimate humiliation; losing nil-nil at home on the first game of the season.
“ARSENAL plunged into crisis last night in the wake of Robin van Persie’s £22million move to Manchester United”. So screamed The Sunday Sun. No, of course I don’t read the rag either, but I was pointed to their opening dig and use it here to highlight the stupidity.
They continued, “New strikers Lukas Podolski and Olivier Giroud failed to impress”. Write them off. Do we still have the receipts?
They weren’t alone. The dinosaurs were out, roaming the summer sun kissed days with their dark age views, self justified by someone, somewhere, somehow deeming them worth paying for.
As Giroud missed the game’s best chance, Match of the Day trolled out the predictable “Arsenal fans will be thinking that is just the kind of opportunity from which Robin van Persie would have scored”, institutionally naive to the fact that the Dutchman was capable of missing chances too, particularly when a yard out and three nil up against Milan.
“If you were an Arsenal fan you would be worried”. Of course Gary, desperately panicky we are. It’s all gone wrong. One game in, and we look envious at your old club Spurs, with their lone striker, whilst Hansen’s worry ought to have been fully consumed with the laughter emanating from Liverpool.
As much as there is no reason to read The Sun, if Paddy Barclay is missing from Sky’s Sunday Supplement line-up, you’re better off in bed, rather than awake to the lazy, miseducated opinions of the arrogant.
“Santi Cazorla is a poor man’s Cesc Fabregas” rambled one. Santi showed enough on Saturday to excite. Whether he is better than Fabregas is a ridiculous argument without point.
Every player could be deemed worse by comparison to another. Is Fabregas a poor man’s Iniesta? Does it matter or undermine the actual talent in question?
Over the last few seasons the growing prominence of Sky’s La Liga coverage has promoted the intelligent analysis of top British journalists based in Spain. When Sid Lowe and Graham Hunter talk glowingly of Cazorla, it means a damn sight more than John Richardson of the Daily Express, a p*ss poor version of superior journalists.
After the game, Arsene Wenger surprised me with his preference for playing the first game of the season away from home. Whilst it’s easy to say after firing a frustrating blank, you only have to look at the first goal Chelsea scored at Wigan yesterday to understand his point.
The hardest part of the game is to create and convert chances. That’s hard enough when teams visit the E******s without any intention to score. It’s harder still when the means by which you breakdown a ten man defence is not sufficiently sharp. When the new players already here are bedding in, and those on their way have not yet arrived. A ridiculous round of pointless internationals during the preceding week doesn’t aid our efforts either. The better sides will still find a way to break through such barriers, and so will Arsenal in time.
In contrast, Chelsea travelled to Wigan, who were encouraged to attack by the limited home support, and promptly conceded on the counter attack within two minutes, as the gaping space they neglected to defend was exploited by Hazard finding Ivanovic.
If any of the above has been interpreted as an excuse, you wrongly assume that a draw on the opening day of the season merits one. It doesn’t – and I haven’t even mentioned the sweltering heat in which the game was played…
I’m merely tired of the gun-shot over reactionary nature of those who are paid to know better.
I’ve seen Arsenal get beaten at home on the first game of the season 4-2 against Mark Robins and Norwich City, before an admittedly poor league season saw us end by winning both domestic cups.
I’ve seen the fattest man to ever score a hat trick, Micky Quinn, help Coventry City destroy the latter crowned European Cup Winners’ Cup winners 3-0. Those were opening day crises, and magic was savoured from both seasons.
The flip side to such results can be found at Plough Lane, where a Champions elect Arsenal stormed to their first three points of the 1988/89 season. A romping win on the opening game of the season might well point to a successful campaign. As might the defeat United suffered at Villa Park before they went on to win the treble.
Let’s finish with the Sun (preferably forever). “One thing is clear – Arsenal will NOT win the league”.
Thanks for the capitalised letters, without them your point would be misunderstood.
Here’s my point.
With Manchester City defending their crown against a United side willing to invest a total of £70m on an injury prone world class striker, Arsenal probably WON’T win the league.
Yet there will be no crisis, no matter how hard the dinosaurs try to manufacture one
Alex (@WindAFC6)
278 days ago
- Why is there always bodily congestion in Tesco Metro/Express?
- Why do the media hate Arsenal so?
- Why do people try to go the same way when walking head-on towards someone a minimum of 3 times before making the correct opposite decision?