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Arseblog, the arsenal blog
May 19, 2013 posted by arseblog

Newcastle preview: One last push

Newcastle preview: One last push

So here we are, the final day of the season.

After a long and, at times, difficult campaign, it all comes down to what we do today. It’s in our hands and we all know what’s required. Win and we have at least a qualification game for the Champions League; draw and as long as Sp*rs don’t win we’ve got the same; win, and Chelsea lose, and we finish third.

The temptation will be to look at today as the decisive day but the reality is we are where we are because of the entirety of the season. Mistakes today will only compound the ones that came before, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t feel confident. We’ve got plenty of experience of this situation, our form is good, we’ve got good players and enough quality to win this game.

Talk of bonuses for Newcastle staff if they win today is irrelevant, it’s all down to what we do and how we play. Tuesday’s win over Wigan has, hopefully, opened the floodgates a bit in terms of goals. Podolski got his first Premier League goals in a month, Theo Walcott has scored in his last three games, Aaron Ramsey finally got a league goal, and Santi Cazorla hasn’t scored since March so he’s due one.

In terms of the team, if Arteta doesn’t make it (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they patched him up, stuck the old cortisone plunger in there and sent him out) then Jack Wilshere is the only real choice. The fact that neither player could be considered 100% fit if they do play puts an onus on the others, particularly Ramsey and Rosicky, to make up for that. Thankfully they’re both players whose energy levels make them suitable candidates for that job.

Up front, I think I’d stick with Lukas Podolski. Arsene Wenger spoke about giving him some time in the central striker position and after two games in which he found the role a bit of a struggle, he scored twice against Wigan. It would be a harsh reward to find himself benched after that, and should we need a bit more up front later on in the game then having a fresh, rested Giroud, after his ban, seems like a good option to me.

I don’t see anything changing at the back, the back four were good on Tuesday, although Nacho Monreal has usually been selected for the away games and perhaps the manager might look to his greater experience. You’ll remember Gibbs was a late sub last season, pulling off a fantastic late block to keep West Brom out, so if there’s any superstition involved that won’t be far from the manager’s mind.

Arsene Wenger says :

What is at stake is a desire to stay at the top and to play top-level European football. There is a difference between the Champions League and Europa League. Why? The Champions League plays with the best teams in Europe and that is what we want to do. Yes the financial consequences are big but that is not the most important thing for me.

We just need one more push, one more performance, one more result. As has been the mantra in recent weeks it makes no difference how we do it, once we do it. It would be nice if we could cruise through a game for once, take control and not let it go, scoring early and often, but as I said yesterday the chances of that seem slim. Not just because recent results suggest this will be a close game, but because we’re Arsenal and we just don’t do things that way.

If we can find a wringer to put ourselves through, we’ll do just that. However, I think we’ve got what it takes to win this game today. If we do that we can ignore everything else. The players know that the level of competition for next season is down to them and what they do. They’ll want Champions League football and they have to show that today. Even if the performance isn’t brilliant, there can be no excuse for lack of effort or endeavour today, and I think if we work hard enough we’ll take three points.

I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to it, we’re playing to avoid losing something rather than winning anything, but a solid 90 minutes (plus stoppage time, of course), and we’ll have done it.

Come on you reds!

—

If, for some reason, you can’t see the game later, you can follow it on the live blog, where every nail-biting kick will be brought to you in real time. Check back later for a post with all the info, or you can bookmark the default live blog page and updates will begin automatically closer to kick off.

Right, time for some breakfast, then an interminable wait for 4pm. Is it too early for a drink?

Until later.

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
May 18, 2013 posted by arseblog

Thoughts on tomorrow and Yaya Sanogo

Thoughts on tomorrow and Yaya Sanogo

Morning chums.

A quick Saturday round-up for you. Firstly, some quotes from some mad people who are genuinely looking forward to tomorrow’s game against Newcastle.

Arsene Wenger: Sometimes you think it would be nice to have a game with no pressure, but when you have one you think, ‘let’s get it back, it’s so boring’. What would be terrible would be to go to Newcastle and have nothing at stake for us. We have what we wanted so let’s just finish the job.

Jack Wilshere: I think excitement first of all. When we get into the game, we’ll see what happens. Maybe a bit of nerves will come into it.

Olivier Giroud has spoken about how Montpellier won the title in France on the final day of last season, and look, I get why the players and the manager have to make confident noises ahead of this game. They should feel upbeat, it’s in their hands, results have been good lately, and we’ve got the experience of having done this before. More than once.

Personally though, I don’t find anything enjoyable about it at all. If the result goes our way I’m sure I’ll be delighted and happy, but it’ll be relief more than anything else. Like finally getting off a train with no toilet and finding somewhere to have a wee after sitting cross-legged for an hour. It’s a lovely feeling but one precipitated by a period of increasing discomfort and pain.

I can’t get the final day of last season out of my head and that excruciating game against West Brom knowing that one goal would leave us in 4th. As bad as watching Mr Shinpads lift the Champions League for that pack of knobbers, knowing it would have deprived us of our spot in that tournament this season would have been unbearable.

Only a win will do for us tomorrow. Sunderland might try hard but they’ve little to play for and they’ll want to get away from their angry manager as quickly as possible. Spurs know they’ve got to win to have any chance of finishing top four and I fully expect them to do it. Although we beat Wigan quite comfortably on Tuesday night, you need only look at the sequence of our recent results to think it’s probably going to be a tight game tomorrow.

Before Wigan it’s been: 1-0, 1-1, 1-0, 0-0, 3-1, 2-1. The late, late rally against Norwich made that scoreline look more respectable than the game felt. But hey, I don’t want to come across as overly negative. I think we’ve got the form, experience and the quality to win tomorrow, but in all honesty I’m looking forward to it about as much as a trip to the dentist. And the dentist is drunk. And uses a Black and Decker drill. And instead of Novocaine he injects you with Painacaine, a new invention which makes you feel all the soreness multiplied by 75. And his hands are covered in warts and he’s not wearing gloves and at one point, as he’s leaning over you, he dribbles some of the spittle from the tobacco he’s chewing into your mouth.

So there.

In other news, away from the final day stuff, comes a story from France that we’ve agreed to sign 20 year old Auxerre striker Yaya Sanogo on a free transfer. I don’t know anything about him, really, other than he ticks a lot of the ‘haha typical Arsenal signing’ boxes in that he’s young, French and has had a lot of injury problems.

So he’s apparently very talented but somewhat brittle. Therefore, getting him on a free doesn’t seem like an unreasonable gamble to take. I don’t fall into the group of people who know with absolute certainty that this is the only transfer we’ll make this summer, eschewing more experienced and better quality options simply because he’s young, French and injury prone, just how we like ‘em, har har!

Shoot me.

I suspect this is about adding some depth to the striking position for next season. We’ve bemoaned it all season long, how we didn’t have anyone to fill in when Giroud was out, not even a promising youngster. Well, if he signs now we have that option. It doesn’t mean we won’t sign anyone else because as our defensive record show this season, it’s lack of goals that have hindered us, and I think that will be a major factor in what we do in the transfer market this summer.

It’s the age old ‘You can’t please some of the people any of the time’ thing when it comes to transfers. They complain when we don’t make them, they complain when we do. They are seeking Goldilocks’ porridge in every single deal but sometimes the porridge is a bit lumpy and sometimes the porridge is a bit cold. And hey, not all the porridge is good porridge but at least give it a try before you throw your toys out of the pram.

And on that horrendously mixed metaphorical note, I’m off to try and forget about tomorrow until it happens. Have a good Saturday.

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
May 16, 2013 posted by arseblog

Rockets, centre-halves and The Unwanted

Rockets, centre-halves and The Unwanted

Morning all,

we’re heading towards the final day of this Premier League season, and it really seems to have flown by. There’s no reason it should have, in fairness. Some of it has been excruciatingly awful and there were Interlulls galore, but here we are. Times flies when you’re having … erm … maybe time just flies.

There’s been a lot of talk about a potential play-off game for third place if results play out a certain way on Sunday, but I think the likelihood of that is pretty slim. And even if it was required it’d be a grand old thing, knowing that we can play with little pressure because we’d have a qualifying round, at least, and if we won we’d avoid that and make Chelsea play another game. I think we just need to concentrate on getting the result we need at the Wonga Manboobs Arena and worry about what the others do after the fact.

Harking back to Tuesday night, and Theo Walcott has revealed that Arsene Wenger gave the team a bit of a going over at the half-time break:

We got a rocket. We’ll keep that in the dressing room,. But it’s great that the manager has that passion and it got a bit more out of the players. We all knew how big it is, not just for the manager but the fans, the players and the club itself. It’s massive to be in the Champions League. The manager gave us a kick up the backside. I felt we did show some good play in the first half but we didn’t manage to take our chances. Thankfully we did in the second.

Certainly Arsenal were more clinical in the second half, taking their chances while Wigan spurned a great opportunity to go ahead. I had visions of the Koscielny miss coming back to haunt us in a big way, but thankfully those further up the pitch spared his blushes and his overall performance wasn’t coloured by that one incident.

He and Per Mertesacker have forged a tremendously consistent partnership over the last few months and, I could be wrong here, but I think we’ve only lost a single game all season in which they’ve both started together at the heart of the defence (Bayern Munich at home). Since the manager dropped Thomas Vermaelen we have improved defensively and I think Koscielny and Mertesacker complement each other extremely well.

It’s funny, if you look at the league table you’ll see that Manchester City (31) are the only club to have conceded fewer goals than Arsenal (37) with United and Chelsea on 38. It suggests that for all the criticisms of our defence – and make no mistake they’ve been valid, for the most part – our biggest problem this season has been up the other end of the pitch.

We had periods in this campaign where we were utterly toothless in the final third. I remember a few consecutive games (I think around the time of the Norwich match) where our first attempts on goal came as the games headed into injury time, and those performances have been costly when it comes down it. When you combine that lack of firepower with silly, individual defensive mistakes it doesn’t do much for your points tally.

It took that thumping by Munich for us to finally come to the conclusion that if scoring was something of a problem, we were exacerbating it with how reliably we were conceding. It’s better late than never, and while it hasn’t made for completely comfortable viewing in the last few weeks, there’s little arguing with the results it’s brought about. We need one more push, one more solid defensively display, and I think we’ve got the goals now to get us where we need to go. All going well, we can find better balance in the transfer market this summer.

Elsewhere, we expect Arsenal to clear the decks once this season is over, and Marouane Chamakh proves himself the master of understatement. Talking about his future, he says of a move this summer:

Yes, this is possible because there is a good chance that I will not stay at Arsenal. If I come back to France, it will be in Bordeaux.

I’d say there’s a very good chance indeed he won’t stay at Arsenal. Having moved to West Ham on loan in January he hasn’t made an appearance since the 30th of that month in 3-1 defeat to Fulham. Those who watched him at Bordeaux, and noted his Champions League scoring record – not to mention his early months at Arsenal – will tell you there was a decent, but limited, player in there somewhere.

People point to the return of van Persie from injury as the killer to his Arsenal career, but this is a bloke who has self-destructed in quite spectacular fashion. I doubt there’s a club in Europe who would pay an actual transfer fee for him at this stage. Maybe, just maybe, we could get something nominal for a guy who has made just a handful of starts in 2 seasons and scored just 1 league goal, but I think it might to be a tough job to even give him away.

While the likes of Arshavin and Squillaci are out of contract and will move on regardless, the transfer fixers still have to work to sort out the situations of Chamakh, Park, Denilson, Santos and Bendtner, none of whom have any future at the club. Maybe we could have sale ‘Buy one Get one free, get one free. Actually, make that two free! Did I say two? I meant ALL.’

Even the great Dick Law and Order might struggle with this one.

Till tomorrow.

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
May 15, 2013 posted by arseblog

Arsenal 4-1 Wigan: We’re halfway there …

Arsenal 4-1 Wigan: We’re halfway there …

Match report – By the numbers – Player ratings – Video

In typical Arsenal style we made it a bit difficult for ourselves, but in the end that was a game won on merit and off the back of some excellent performances.

If the opening goal wasn’t quite as early as in previous weeks, it was sufficiently timely to settle us down and give us the platform we needed. The corner routine, looking for a Mertesacker flick-on, didn’t quite work, but it confused Wigan enough that they let the ball bounce to Lukas Podolski who nodded home from just a couple of yards out.

We were full of purpose and running, putting Wigan on the back foot, and really should have been further ahead towards the end of the half when Laurent Koscielny contrived to miss from a couple of yards out after another Cazorla corner. Unfortunately for us, that miss came at a time when we went through our most careless phase of the game. Our passing was off, Wigan grew in confidence and equalised shortly afterwards.

Mike Dean had ignored a couple of Cazorla tumbles which you may or may not see given – and I’m fine with the ref playing on as long as the same standards apply to both sides. When Maloney went down under pressure from Arteta, it was frustrating to see the referee award Wigan a free kick in a dangerous position. He’s good with the dead ball, his free kick skimmed the top of the wall, just inside the post, and although Szczesny got a hand to it he couldn’t keep it out.

Some might apportion blame to Podolski for not jumping or the keeper for not saving it, but for me it was just a fantastic free kick (made more annoying by the fact it should never have been given). So, level at half-time and the visitors came out flying at the start of the second. But for a massive Szczesny save from Koné we could easily have been behind and with the momentum changed and the pressure on who knows what might have happened? The importance of that stop cannot be underestimated.

They seemed to lose some rhythm when they lost McManaman to injury and shortly afterwards we blew them away with three goals in 9 minutes. Firstly Cazorla’s wonderfully weighted ball found a perfectly timed Walcott run in the middle and the England man poked it home under the keeper. Then the Spaniard nodded a headed clearance back into the middle for Podolski to lob home the third, and when Aaron Ramsey was set free down the left (again by Cazorla), he had two players in the middle waiting for a tap-in but gave the keeper the eyes and lashed it home high into the net.

At that point it was done and dusted. Although Wigan had a couple of decent efforts subsequently, they knew it was all over, that relegation was inevitable, and the three points were going our way. The game played out to its inevitable conclusion, we went back up into fourth place and our Champions League destiny remains very much in our own hands.

Afterwards, Arsene said:

We became a bit edgy and nervous at the start of the second half. But in these types of games you need to keep your nerve and continue to play like there is nothing at stake basically. When we scored the second one it was a massive blow for Wigan and they never recovered from that. It then became a comfortable win with goals three and four. It was a tight game.

And the scoreline certainly does add a bit of gloss to what was an edgy evening. I think the Szczesny save was one of those huge moments that tends to get forgotten when the final score is so emphatic, and that was coupled with desire to win that hasn’t always been present this season. Theo Walcott, for example, had the kind of game that if he could replicate on a much more regular basis would make him a far better player and us a better team. Not only was his delivery and decisiveness in the final third excellent, he coupled that with genuine hard work and commitment when we didn’t have the ball.

His goal tally this season is excellent, no question, but to see him get back, make tackles, and even shoulder people out of the way was great to see. Please do that every week. At the back Mertesacker and Koscielny continue their excellent partnership; Rosicky wasn’t necessarily eye-catching but played a big role in how we won that game, while Santi Cazorla added the creativity we needed to take the points.

I know he was credited with four assists but I’m not 100% sure you can give him the one for the Ramsey goal. It wasn’t as if he set him up with a scoring chance, and the Welshman had a lot to do after receiving the pass. I was delighted to see him get a goal, and at home, because his recent performances have deserved that. He’d had a good first half, struggled a bit in the second, but you’d have to have a cold, cold heart to begrudge him that goal based on his contribution and renaissance over the last few months.

The only downside is that we’ve probably lost Mikel Arteta for Sunday’s trip to Newcastle. A calf strain means he’s likely to miss out, but it couldn’t take the shine off what was a hugely important win. The final home game of the season ended positively, a win on the final day of the season guarantees us at least a qualification game for the next season’s Champions League and the chance to build on what has been an excellent final third to this current season.

It might not be where we want to be, but winning on Sunday gives us a much better chance of getting there than the alternative. Now it’s time to rest, recover and get focused for what’s going to be another nail-biter this weekend.

Till tomorrow.