march 17th
09.14 – Happy Saint Patrick’s day to you all. May your flask be always full of porter and your potatos free of blight.
Arsenal travel to Spain today with their Champions League hopes firmly in their own hands. Spookily, it will be almost exactly a year to the day since Arsenal went out in the 2nd group stage following defeat in Turin against Juventus, and Deportivo’s capitulation against Leverkeusen.
This time though, it’s up to the lads to get themselves through without having to rely on the results of others. The permutations are many and varied and I’m not going to go through them all again. See here or here for full details.
Arsenal do have some injury worries though. Patrick Vieira should return, but Martin Keown is definitely out. Sol Campbell and David Seaman are rated at 20%. Not good news, and although Valencia’s form has been patchy at best this season, the Mestalla last place you’d want to go with Igors and Pascal Cygan in central defence.
I suspect that Sol Campbell will definitely play. If that means injecting him with cortizone or horse spunk or whatever it takes, he’ll play. We look very suspect defensively at the moment, and Big Fat Ron attributes some of Pascal Cygan’s poor play to the fact that Gio is not a partcularly good full back. If Sol doesn’t play, we may well see Gilberto in central defence – especially if David Seaman isn’t fit. Stuart Taylor will then play in goal, and while he’s a very promising young keeper, I don’t think AW would play Cygan and Stepanovs in front of him for such an important game.
Tony Gale echoes my sentiments about Cygan, Upson and hopes the fact that Arsenal are forced to play central midfielders in defence won’t cost the Gunners too dearly. Everyone keeps talking about Gilberto having played cetral defence when he was in Brazil, but does anybody really know how long he played there? 1 game, 1 month, 1 season? It might well be a case that it was somewhere he played when he was young, but Ashley Cole used to play up front when he was young, and you wouldn’t consider him as a striker in any way. For a club the size of Arsenal to be struggling for a central defender at this stage of the season is frankly not good enough.
Right, let the ale flow freely, the snakes remain banished, and Riverdance be dropped en masse off the top of the Empire State Building. The tap dancing cunts.
Sláinte.
