Arsenal live blog
3:15 pm May 19, 2013 posted by arseblog - Comments disabled

Newcastle v Arsenal – live blog

Newcastle v Arsenal – live blog

Join us this afternoon for live blogging of Newcastle v Arsenal in the Premier League, kick off 4pm.

Live blog is 100% free to follow on your computer or mobile device and gives you real time text commentary from the match. This season we’ve added a mobile specific theme which should detect your phone making it much easier to follow the updates. You can also switch to the main theme, or back, at the bottom of the page.

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Arseblog, the arsenal blog
9:00 am May 19, 2013 posted by arseblog - 1461 arses

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
8:38 am May 18, 2013 posted by arseblog - 446 arses

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.

Arsecast
7:48 am May 17, 2013 posted by arseblog - 312 arses

Top four, Jack to replace Mik + Arsecast 279

Top four, Jack to replace Mik + Arsecast 279

Hello and welcome to Friday.

The day of reckoning draws ever closer. By 6pm Sunday we’ll know what next season will bring in terms of European football, but it strikes me that what we need to do this summer won’t be too heavily influenced by where we end up.

Accepting that Champions League football is a draw for certain players, it doesn’t mean you can’t sign quality just because you finish outside the top four. Clearly Luis Suarez is a crazy man but he’s also a rather wonderful player. The Mugsmashers managed to sign him despite scoffing from Europe’s lesser plate and have never given him a moment of Champions League football.

The reality is that our summer business should be predicated on the massive points gap between us and the title winners, not the very small one that will exist between us and 4th if things don’t go our way on Sunday. Maybe it’ll make it a bit more difficult to do the business we want but we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves for that. Perhaps better investment last summer, or even a January booster, might have made this Sunday irrelevant, so little changes either way for me.

If we do what we need to, and win the game, it’s not as if you can mark the season down as a success. We’ll have achieved the minimum required, no more, no less. It’s not a laurel to be resting on in any way. We can be encouraged by what we’ve done in the last few weeks, and how we’ve done it, but it doesn’t alter the fact that this squad needs to be more competitive in all competitions.

Obviously the ideal situation is to win our game, see what happens in the others, and then make our plans based around that, but hopefully the word ‘contingency’ has been bandied about a bit because it would be unwise not to think it couldn’t happen to us. Still, three points makes all of those concerns subside, but between now and Sunday it’s hard not to worry.

In terms of the team for the trip to the Laura Ashley Monster Belly Bowl, we’re likely to be without Mikel Arteta with Arsene Wenger looking for a solution elsewhere:

Honestly, his chances of being available are minimal. I have to be realistic and prepare for another solution.

Jack Wilshere?

He is an option, yes. We will monitor him until Sunday and I will make a decision very late over what I will do.

To me Wilshere is the only realistic option provided he’s fit enough. We know he’s scheduled for post-season surgery on his ankle, the risk is whether or not he might cause himself some real damage. I suspect, given that he was about to come on just before Theo Walcott’s goal on Tuesday, that he’ll probably be all right. The boss said he’d only use Jack in an emergency and, well, this comes pretty close.

It’s not run around and wave your arms in the air screaming territory, but missing the experience and calm of Arteta for such an important game is hardly ideal. Ramsey and Wilshere at the base of a midfield with Rosicky at the top is about the best we could put out. There’s no Diaby, as we know. Francis Coquelin is a tidy player but he hasn’t started a game since the FA Cup defeat to Blackburn in February and his last appearance was a brief cameo as we held on against West Brom at the start of last month.

That leaves Jack, and although there are doubts over his fitness, I think we’ll be able to get something close to 90 minutes out of him. I suppose the other option is to deploy Ramsey in the Arteta role, move Rosicky back into the middle, play Santi as the most forward midfielder and play somebody else wide (perhaps Podolski with Giroud coming back as the main striker), but I’d worry that we might be a bit lightweight in there and we’ll have used up all our attacking eggs in one basket.

The Podolski/Giroud decision is another one that isn’t obvious either. After two games where he struggled, the German scored twice on Tuesday and it’d be difficult for the manager to drop him after that. Yet Giroud, for me, is a much more rounded centre-forward who holds the ball up well and will be nice and fresh after his three game ban. No doubt we’ll get more from Arsene in today’s press conference on the various permutations.

Right then, onto this week’s Arsecast and I’m joined all the way from the USA, and from Stan Kroenke’s home town no less, by Paolo Bandini. On the agenda is the Wigan game, how we cope with the absence of Arteta, the looming Newcastle game and all the other bits and pieces that have gone on this week. Also in there, some sports goods advertising while Mick Bendtner and Arshavin do a duet.

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 (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here 22mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

If you fancy a look at the book Paolo mentions, this link is your friend, and remember, the Arsecast can be found on Soundcloud (where you can subscribe/follow) as well as in their apps.

And that’s about that for this morning. We’ll have all the news from the press conference over on Arseblog News, and I’ll be back here tomorrow as usual.

Have a good one.