May I *boilk*? I may? Thank you.

Some interesting comments re: Cesc and the captaincy to kick us off today. Arsene feels it has been a ‘burden’ for him this season, saying:

It is too much for him at his age. I believe so. Every difficulty in life will make you stronger, especially when you have a strong character, and Cesc is a strong character. I believe it will make him stronger, but maybe this season it is a bit of a heavy burden.

I think in one way any post-Adams captain suffers from comparisons to him. He was the archetypal leader, the shouter, organiser, a quintessentially English captain. Paddy came after and had the benefit of a great team. Thierry was never really a captain but who else was there? And it was the same thing when Cesc became captain. Gallas, a big mistake in the first place in my opinion, shot his mouth off again and again, and the universal choice was Cesc.

I had no problem with it then and I have no problem with it now. I don’t think he’s a bad captain by any means but perhaps there’s some truth to what the manager is saying. The pressure on Arsenal to win something is now immense. And getting immenser. It is a lot to deal with at 23 even if you are a vastly experienced 23 year old. To suggest our problems could be solved by somebody a bit more shouty rather misses the point, I think.

That’s not to say the team doesn’t lack a bit of direction at times but it doesn’t mean the finger should be pointed in the direction of the man with the armband. It goes, perhaps, to something I’ve gone over on the blog plenty of times before, a callowness to our team. On the one hand the manager says:

I believe that this team has been educated, grown together. The biggest achievement for them will be to win together. They will have learnt their job the hard way.

And much of what’s happened this season has been the hard way. How do you fix it? Arsene gets it bang on here:

We’ll try to certainly bring in some more experience. One of the reasons I took Lehmann back was because he has done it.

He might be spoofing there a bit because the reason he took Jens back was because SZCZ dislocated his finger, Fabianski was out, and the only back-up to Almunia was a youngster. That doesn’t mean the point isn’t valid and it’s the first time we’ve heard him admit, publicly at least, that the talent needs to be augmented with experience. It’s not as if he’s never bought experienced players but he needs to get away from the bargain basement. No more Sylvesters. Experience + quality is required. Experience alone won’t do it.

As for those who state, quite categorically, that Cesc’s head hasn’t been right this season, well, it must be quite amazing to have the power to see inside somebody’s mind. As I’ve said before, it’s worth considering that it was summer 2007 the last time he had a full and proper rest away from football. Season 07-08 > Euros > Season 08-09 > Confederations Cup > Season 09-10 > broken leg > World Cup > Season 10-11. I’m positive this has been a major factor in the injuries he’s struggled with this season and those injuries have certainly had an impact on his form.

All of us need a break from work at some stage, regardless of how well we’re paid or how great our job is. From a purely physical point of view there’s no doubt a summer without a tournament and travel and training will do him the world of good. And while there’s a genuine fear that for some players the reaction to letting another title slip might scar them, Cesc is the kind of player who will, as the manager says, become a stronger character out of adversity.

Meanwhile, Thomas Vermaelen says he’s ready:

I’m fit at the moment, I feel great and, in training, I don’t feel any problems. So physically I feel good. It’s up to the boss, he makes the decisions. I’m available at the moment so I hope I will be back in the squad soon and that is my target.

It’s a bit like turning up at a dinner party, dying for the Beef Wellington, to find they’re already serving the coffee and armagnac. Or Gold Blend and After Eights. I think he’s been a big miss this season, not just from a defensive point of view but he’s one of the leaders, one of the big characters and you just feel with him in the side we might not have capitulated as often as we did. Oh well, let’s hope he’s fit and well throughout next season.

The Mail rather tentatively links us to Newcastle’s Jose Enrique. Has always seemed a decent enough player and there’s definitely a left back on the agenda, I’m told. Of course it remains to be seen how much truth there is in this one. Plus, he’s got the exact same mouth as Manuel Almunia. Seriously, check it out next time you see him interviewed.

Further reading: Johan Djourou talks to the Guardian about football and his rather unusual upbringing. Lee Dixon touches on the experience thing in the Independent.

And that’s about that for this bank holiday Saturday. Time to consider breakfast. Till tomorrow and a full preview of the United game.

After a week of nothing we’ve got a whole pile of something this morning. Arsene’s pre-United press conference took place yesterday but was only available for viewing late last night so I haven’t had time to watch it yet.

Obviously the agenda revolved around the end of season slump which has put paid to our title chances for another year. The manager has pointed to the Carling Cup as the turning point in our season:

I just feel that after the Carling Cup we continued to be absolutely spot on with our attitude, but we missed a little bit of that subconscious belief which makes you win – that frustrates you because you know that it is there and you want to fight against it.

I’m not quite sure what to make of that, to be honest. I think it’s a way of saying the fear got under their skin, that they knew the fear was there and because we’ve been down this road before, in ends-of-seasons past, it affected us so badly that we’ve won just one league game in our last seven. I totally agree that the Carling Cup defeat had a major impact on the season and the confidence of the team but it’s worrying that we couldn’t find a way to cope with that.

Our ability to make crap teams look good came to the fore. Birmingham in the final. With no due respect they are a very average side. Bolton, spanked either side of their win against us. There’s a psychological barrier that would probably have been smashed to pieces with a Carling Cup win. Losing it in the way we did only reinforced it and I think we’ve seen the evidence of that in the last couple of months.

Even then it was in our hands, and that’s another frustration:

If you look at all the numbers, it is the closest we have been. Just look at the last week – we could have had nine points quite easily against Liverpool, Tottenham and Bolton, in the end we finished with two. We feel more frustrated than ever because we are closer than ever to win this league.

Of the two trophies, the most important above all for me is the league – and this year we had the quality to win it.

I’m sorry, but I have to disagree. A team’s quality is not measured only on how well it plays on the days when everything goes right. It’s how you cope with the bad days, adversity, poor form and when it comes right down to it, pressure. When it was on, we choked. Bizarrely and spectacularly against Liverpool, even more so against Newcastle away, and we crumbled against Bolton. Chances to win were squandered before our brittleness handed them the game.

Even if you want to argue Arsenal possess the pure football quality to win the league – and I don’t think I’d agree with that either – you can’t escape the fact that we lack something in terms of the quality of our character. And it plays such a massive part in any successful team that it’s impossible to ignore when making any real assessment of our season.

Still, we have the visit of United on Sunday to show some mettle. After everything that’s gone on we need to see a response from these players. Maybe now the pressure’s off we’ll see a bit more freedom in their play. It wouldn’t be untypical for us to go through a week like last week and then beat them on Sunday. Don’t get me wrong, I want that to happen, I want that to happen a lot, and while it will certainly help lift spirits from the doldrums it might just compound the frustration for some, which is understandable too. More on that game in the days ahead.

In other news the AST have written to Ivan Gazidis re: ticket prices. A 6.5% increase across the board was always going to be a tough sell, particularly in light of what’s happened in the last little while (not that the two are related, really), and there’s some suggestion that there might well have been a re-think on the club’s part about the rises. We’ll wait and see what happens in the next week or so.

Thomas Vermaelen appears to have come through last night’s reserve game unscathed. Sunday is too soon for him to make a first team comeback but it would be nice to see him make a return to scathe opposition players before the season’s out. I know some might suggest we’d be better to rest him and get him ready for next season but he’s spent 7 months resting. If he’s ready he’s ready and I’d very much like to see him back.

The line-up for the Emirates Cup was announced. The visiting teams are PSG, Boca Juniors and the New York Red Bulls. That means a return home for Thierry Henry (more of whom below). Interesting teams. I’ve got no interest whatsoever in PSG, and assuming a match with TH’s lot is a shoe-in, it’d be interesting to see us against the South Americans, even if it is just in pre-season.

Jack Wilshere is set to be named in the England U21 squad on Tuesday. Boooo but not at all unexpected. It’s something we’re going to have to cope with at the start of next season though. I’m sure I won’t be alone in hoping for a group stage exit for England.

Right then, time for this week’s Arsecast and joining me to discuss the fun-filled events of the last 7 days is former Arsenal player, now journalist and podcaster, Adrian Clarke. As well as that you’ll hear from Internet Joe, Arshavin and there’s a competition to win anything you like from Arseblog Online Store.

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too. To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here (21mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

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You can find Adrian Clarke as one part of the Red White and Blue podcast – and here on Twitter.

And that’s about that – only to point you in the direction of a brand new print in the store. As mentioned above it features that quite good player Thierry Henry (scored a couple of goals for us, I think). As well as that check out some of the new combo items which will save you money. And that’s always a good thing.

Bank holiday weekend awaits. Let’s hope the sun keeps shining. I smell BBQ and mint based cocktails. Till tomorrow.

Morning all, beautiful day here.

See any of that old Champions League stuff last night? Pfff. Who’d want to be in a competition like that? If that’s two of the best teams in the world give me Bushy Park Rangers v Leicester Celtic any day of the week. Well, apart from that Messi bloke. He’s a bit good, isn’t he?

Would it be a timely time to remind people that when Arsenal brought Cesc to the club they were seriously interested in Messi too? And that work permit problems meant it couldn’t happen. Not that it was 100% or anything but you know us – we’re pretty good at nabbing youngsters from Spain. Imagine, he’d have been the finest attacking left back in Arsenal’s history. Just beating out Juan in the rankings.

On the other hand, and while I have no sympathy whatsoever for any team managed by Mourinho, the sending off played a big part. If there’s a divier diver than Davi Alves I just don’t who it is. He has the temerity to do the ‘divey-divey’ motion when people play him at his own game but then shows why he’s the Dive King at the first opportunity. Real Madrid know the pain we felt – a red card against Barcelona that wasn’t deserved and it had a big impact on the game.

Anyway, Mourinho is the Phil Collins of football, lots of number 1s, lots of Grammies, but you wouldn’t pay tuppence to watch the cunt. Unless it was in a colosseum. And he was facing extremely hungry tigers and panthers and rabid koalas crossed with gorillas. I call them Goroallas.

As you might have gathered there’s little or nothing going on from an Arsenal point of view. The silence continues as we lick our wounds, take stock and wish we had Messi at left back. Young Guns reports that Thomas Vermaelen will be back against United but not the real United, the reserve United. Good news, I guess, although it’s very much too little, too late in terms of the title. It’ll be Djourscielny on Sunday no doubt.

Which reminds me of something the Mugsmasher pointed out a couple of weeks back. He saw it suggested somewhere that Koscielny looks like an early Bart Simpson. I think he could be onto something there, you know.

Meanwhile, our recent form clearly has United worried. Rattled even. Patrice Evra, a man whose talking is generally the equivalent of Alves’ diving, is cautious, saying:

You have to fear the wounded animal. It is all or nothing for Arsenal so that is a danger. They will want to show they can still win the title.

Cunning stuff indeed by Arsene. Deliberately lulling United into a false sense of security, throwing the Bolton game on purpose, and banking on beating them this weekend which will send them into a spiral of doom and negativity, culminating in a Vidic OG hat-trick on the final day of the season to hand us the league. Those of you who doubt the manager will have to eat some portion of humble pie then, let me tell you.

Elsewhere, the Mail reports ‘EXCLUSIVELY‘ that Pat Rice may not continue as the number 2 (pfff) next season. Wow. I didn’t see that coming. Not for one second. I’m taken aback this morning at this most exclusive of all exclusives. Who knew? Certainly none of us and not for ages at all.

It does raise an interesting question though – who will fill his legendary boots? For me Steve Bould is the obvious candidate. He’s been at the club in a coaching capacity for years now, he’s done his time with the under age and youth teams, and if he has ambitions to go further then this would certainly be the moment for him to step up. A much more unassuming character than Tony Adams or Martin Keown, for sure, but fuck me if he wasn’t a great defender and one who could certainly bring a tint of George to our coaching.

There are other options, former players of great stature with fantastic songs who may or may not be retiring at the end of the season, but for me Bouldy is the favourite. As much as we talk about changes of personnel on the field there’s long been the sense that other areas need a bit of a shake-up too, the coaching staff in particular. I have a lot of time for Pat Rice, a man who has given so many years to this club, and I find some of the stuff directed at him a bit disrespectful if I’m honest, but sometimes a change is necessary and this is one I think I’d like to see now.

More transfer speculation this morning involving Carl Jenkinson (deal done and dusted, apparently) and Alex Oxencart-Chamberpot. The former is expected to challenge for a first team place straight away, perhaps at left back, while it would be a lot to expect of the latter to make an immediate impact. He’s still very, very young and in a team that is lacking experience you’d have to think his signing is one for the future.

Unless Wenger’s thinking “Experience, eh? That’s exactly what they’d expect. I’d fool them all by fielding players even younger than the ones I do now. Mwa ha ha ha ha” … *weeps*

If you haven’t already seen it, Tim Stillman’s latest column is here – Party politics and religion – Arsenal style

Right, I’ve spun this out long enough. Back tomorrow with a dirty great Arsecast and hopefully a bit more news from inside the walls of silence.

As footballing weeks go, this one has been a bit like finding out John Terry is your biological father and that your conception was captured on Ashley Cole’s camera phone and the footage sold to the News of the World. In fact, the last two months has been like some kind of maudlin Clockwork Orange style scenario where we’ve all been strapped to our chairs, our eyelids held open by rusty hooks as we’re played repetitive footage of Rory Delap’s long throws, Harry Redknapp’s twitching nutsack of a face and Phil Brown singing Perry Como covers to your Nan. All this whilst getting a lap dance from Sam Allardyce. Last week I wrote about the seemingly attractive figure of hope having sashayed into view on the dance floor. Turns out it was Richard Keys in drag. The hands should have been a dead giveaway. The simian twat.

As such the red and white corners of the interweb have been in meltdown with the latest stream of foam mouthed bile. Indeed, as the final whistle sounded at a sun-kissed Reebok Stadium, I headed for the exit with the speed of Kevin Davies chasing a hotdog van. (The locals did raise a smile with their rendition of “Bolton’s a shithole, you should’ve stayed home” as I made my frantic search for stage left). The air turned very poisonous, though there was no orchestrated chanting to the effect, there were plenty of anguished screams for the manager’s head. Frankly, I didn’t really want to stay and have my ears erode clean off the side of my face due to stray acid laced spittle.

I won’t go too much into the minutiae of the last two games – save to confirm that since you’re reading this, I obviously escaped from White Hart Lane alive! No thanks to some shoddy policing. The police thought it would be a good idea to momentarily prevent the away fans from blending seamlessly with the home support on the Tottenham High Road and instead left us like sitting ducks for a few nervy seconds; affording the knuckle dragging factions of the home support ample time to identify us, before we were released into the lip of the lion’s cage. If anyone from Haringey Police happens to be reading, please police all future North London derbies in exactly the opposite manner that you policed this one. Cheers.

Having dropped, or rather given away, points in each of our last three games, internet forums have become a cauldron of ideas and half solutions. Unquantifiable and therefore completely disprovable buzz words are rolled out en masse. “Leadership”, “winning mentality”, “commanding centre half.” Even the word “capitulation” now seems to be firmly entrenched in the Gooner lexicon. In truth, I think a lot of the solutions offered are rather half baked. Since none of us know exactly what happens on the training ground, it’s difficult to come to the sort of concrete conclusions that so many appear convinced of.

For instance, I’ve seen many a call for a specialist defensive coach to come in and help aid the team’s obvious vulnerability to set pieces. Yet Arsene Wenger, Pat Rice, Boro Primorac, Neil Banfield and Steve Bould all earned their corn as defenders and all are on the training ground every day. Would another defender really make a difference? Perhaps it’s the opposite? George Graham was a centre forward that sculpted one of the meanest defensive units the English game has ever seen. Who knows, perhaps that’s what we are missing in those situations? A centre forward’s perspective. Let’s get Duncan Ferguson on the payroll, get him to knock our centre halves around a bit when they practice corners!

We have now conceded 3 goals from the last 25 corners we’ve faced and scored none of our last 47 won. In that respect, it’s probably not difficult to guess why the team is so poorly drilled at defending corners. They probably look like expert set piece repellers at London Colney, as van Persie sends another delivery dribbling across the daisies to be hacked away at the front post by Laurent Koscielny. There are plenty of calls to freshen the coaching staff up – with Pat Rice’s likely retirement at the season’s end that might be an enforced eventuality anyway – but the truth is none of us are privy to what goes on at the training ground, so it’s hard to see how people can say with such conviction that that is the solution. Don’t get me wrong, it might well be, but ultimately we’re all of us pissing in the wind a bit here and it wouldn’t hurt some of us to admit it.

My own guess (and it is a guess) from the evidence I see on the pitch is that there maybe the need for a slight reconnection with some basics. The team that lost to Bolton and drew with Spurs was largely the team that was shoeing all comers back in January and February and keeping clean sheets galore along the way. But simple things appear to have deserted us and perhaps we need to reassert those faculties. Delivery of crossing, defending and taking of set pieces (whatever happened to van Persie’s free kicks?), shots on goal, marking opponents. We know we can pass triangles all day long, that quality hasn’t deserted us. Neither has effort been lacking. But our profligacy and tendency to over elaborate has been just as much a devil in the detail of the last two months as the shoddy defending of set pieces.

I don’t believe that achieving that requires wholesale changes to either the playing staff or the coaching staff; though I could be wrong. For all the talk of beastly defenders and new goalkeepers, I do rather worry that our creative options are not as well stocked as they might be. Cesc Fabregas has an assist for every 171.6 minutes played this season (thanks to @Orbinho for that one) and Robin van Persie has 20 goals in his last 21 club and international matches since January 1st. Beyond those two, it’s difficult to see where an Arsenal goal will emanate from at the moment.

Nasri and Arshavin can create for themselves in isolated moments of inspiration, but we regularly face ten man defences and nobody but Fabregas has the guile to split them in twain. It’s an incredible burden Cesc takes at the moment and one I think he takes manfully, but I don’t think it would hurt to augment our options in that department. Particularly now that Tomas Rosicky has burned all of his earthly possessions and trotted off to live with the jackals.

There are palpable divisions in the fan base at the moment, which baffle and infuriate me. It’s like that Life of Brian sketch, The People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front. I guess it’s a symptom of party politics and religion, but everybody seems to want to conceal themselves in little boxes. That way, all intelligent debate is eliminated. You’re either an AKB or you think Arsene’s a stubborn old cunty chops that should be marched off and shot and don’t you dare try and assert an opinion anywhere in between lest you be cast asunder! It always brings me back to this Chris Rock sketch.

That brings me finally onto the notions of a supporter protest prior to the Villa match. I really struggle to see what it’s trying to achieve. Yes, yes, I’ve seen the manifesto, but aren’t these issues that existing organisations such as the AST or AISA could take up with the club? Who goes on a march about retweaking commercial strategies? It reminds me of a quip Armando Iannuci made on Have I Got News For You a few weeks back about organising a march for those that don’t necessarily believe in stringent Government cuts, but do concur that the Government’s administrative budget could do with a rethink. The transfer window does not open until July 1st, the club ownership has changed so recently that the documentation is still in transit. And would this march, walk, whatever be going ahead if we were top of the league, or even if we were still 3rd but had won the Carling Cup?

Again, I can only speculate, which is all any of us can do. Let’s hope a win over Manchester United makes the world a brighter place when I speak to you again this time next week. Until then, whatever your opinions, Up the Arse!
LD.

Follow me on Twitter @LittleDutchVA