So plucky little Man City got knocked out of Europe last night, following our lead. Copycats.
Have to feel sorry for them though. A club with such limited resources was always going to struggle. You just have to commend them for being brave enough to even turn up in the first place. Obviously their confidence was shattered having gone out of the FA Cup to that huge spending behemoth, destroyer of the game, and all round bully, Wigan.
I bet they’re just sitting on the back step now, with their little mongrel dog, crying softly to themselves and wondering why it is that everyone picks on them. Soon mummy will be home and she’ll make them toastie cheese and ham sammiches with the crusts cut off because they don’t like the crusts and they make your hair go curly.
From our point of view we’re waiting on definitive news regarding Mesut Ozil. According to Jeremy Wilson in the Telegraph he picked up the injury as early as the 2nd minute – not that being injured is any excuse for not playing like Zidane in the World Cup final, obviously – and that he thought he could run it off.
Some early suggestions are that he could miss 6 weeks but I’m hopeful that’s just the kind of stuff put out in that period where everybody’s fearing the worst, nobody actually knows yet, and gets lots of hits on websites which employ people who accuse injured players whose injury affects their performance in a difficult game against the best team in Europe of ‘nicking a living’.
I am unsure of what exactly to think of people who say ‘Maybe it’s for the best’ that Ozil is out injured, but I’ve seen that a lot and it makes my head hurt like this. What would be ‘the best’ is if a player who has got 6 goals and 13 assists this season, and made more passes than any other Arsenal player in the Premier League, was fully fit for games against Sp*rs, Chelsea and Man City.
The only ‘for the best’ in this situation is for the opposition. It’s for the best, for them, that he’s going to miss those games. We face massive Premier League fixtures without one of our best players and that makes getting points from those games more difficult so if you think it’s ‘for the best’ can I politely suggest that you close a car door repeatedly on your fingers. And by fingers I mean mickey.
There was some hope that Aaron Ramsey might be back for Sunday, but it seems he’s not quite ready yet, and there’s no way we should risk bringing him back early. We may have Kim Kallstrom available. What a story it would be for him to score the winner at White Hart Lane with a free kick late in the game which causes Tim Sherwood to run onto the pitch and start beating Emmanuel Adebayor about the head with the leg of Steffan Freund before a distraught Daniel Levy runs onto the pitch and puts the part-time manager out of his misery with a single shot from a cattle gun.
“It’s for the best,” he cries on the pitch as Geoff Shreeves seeks to exploit his heartbreak in front of the live TV audience by also revealing, with his trademark sensitivity, that his children have been eaten by a bear.
“How do you feel about the fact your kids have been devoured?”, asks the Shreeves, before showing him video footage of the incident in which the crunching of bone and terrified screams create a soundtrack that nobody will ever forget.
“Back to you in the studio,” he LOLs as Levy weeps and Jamie Redknapp criticises the children for the way they were eaten.
“You wanna see kids get eaten more betterer than that,” he says. “I was literally consumed by an ogre when I was a youth team player at Liverpool,” except he pronounces ogre as ‘Oggar’ and loads of people on Twitter laugh at him for his poor English.
I could, however, be getting a little ahead of myself here. Arsene should give us the news on Kallstrom later today or at his press conference tomorrow. Meanwhile, Lukasz Fabianski is hoping the draw in Munich can give the team the same kind of platform as last year’s win did. He said:
Hopefully it will give us the same as it gave us last season where we went on a really good run. We are still competing for the title, we are still competing for the FA Cup so hopefully it will give us a massive boost for the rest of the season.
There’s no reason why we shouldn’t take confidence from the draw. Most teams go there and get turned over like a plucky Man City facing a cash-rich lower league opponent, so there’s something to say for not being beaten. We all know the main damage was done in the first leg. The first leg of the tie, obviously. Not Arjen Robben’s leg which was nearly scythed from his body by Wojciech Szczesny #neverforget.
As for Fabianski, he’s playing like Arsene Wenger always believed he could. The Arsenal manager regularly spoke about his quality, the issue was his inability to show it in games and he went through a period when it looked like his Arsenal career was going to go in a very Richard Wright the direction. Now, although he’s going to leave this summer to play first team football somewhere else, he’s proving a valuable member of the squad. It’s nice to see.
So that’s just about that. We’re going to do a live Arsecast recording tonight via a Google Hangout, probably, which will be available on the site around 8pm. So that should fun. I must wash my face.
Until later.
