december 9th
Ahh, Friday, how I love thee. It seems against Ajax we played a 4-3-3 formation and Arsene Wenger is mulling over whether or not to persist with it against Newcastle. He says he hasn’t made up his mind but one of the reasons for using it was to see Alexander Hleb in a more central role. Having just come back from a serious injury we’re no wiser as to whether or not he can do it. What is interesting though is the variation in formation from AW who is normally quite rigid with his 4-4-2 and maybe it shows a willingness to change things which we haven’t really seen before, mostly because he hasn’t needed to. If it ain’t broke and all that. It might be a bit broke at the moment though.
At left back tomorrow will be Lauren as Pascal Cygan has an injury which has nothing to do with me or two big blokes with iron bars, honest.
There’s no time frame on his injury either so it might well be a case that Lauren stays there for the Chelsea game too. It will be interesting to see who he uses at right back. Eboue has bags of energy but seems careless on the ball at times so maybe we’ll see Kolo out right and Senderos deservedly coming back into the centre. José Antonio Reyes is definitely out but his knock is very short term.
Thierry is concerned about our form and doesn’t know why we’re good in the Champions League but struggle away from home. He reckons we need to be more teamariffic, saying “Football is a team effort and sometimes when you’re not playing well you need to go back to basics and play as a team.”
Newcastle is not really a great plce to going either. Souness will have them fired up because a defeat will probably see the end of his time there. That could work two ways. If the players want him to stay they’ll be giving it socks, if they’re not bothered too much it might work to our advantage. Whatever their motivation though we have to be a lot better than we were against Bolton.
T-shirt winner: All week we’ve been running the competition to win the shirt from our chums at harderthansatan.com. The answer to the very difficult question was of course B – The king is dead, long live the king (although many of you expressed a firm interest in buying a t-shirt with C on it!). The RNG did its thing and the winner is Thomas Fornash. I’ll be in touch with you to get address and size details. The rest of you, I’m afraid, will have to buy one or get someone else to buy you for Crimbo.
Ok, after a relaxing day yesterday it’s back to the grind. Till tomorrow.
