Morning all, I hope your new year celebrations have left you in good shape and in the form to carry out your resolutions. My new year’s resolution is to eat less panther meat. It’ll be a struggle but I’ll give it a go.
We play Charlton tonight and we could see the return of Thierry Henry. We have a bit of a striker crisis, you see. Adebayor is out, Julio Baptista is out with an ankle knock and Robin van Persie is a serious doubt. Henry’s last game was the 2-1 away defeat to Fulham and if he doesn’t make it it’ll probably be Aliadiere on his own up front which doesn’t really bear thinking about. Maybe we’ll play Anthony Stokes!
We could have Hleb back though and there’s no word on whether or not Theo Walcott will be available. Despite the injuries though the manager is insisting that he won’t be pushed into the January sales, saying:
We will not buy anybody. We already have too many players. Three years ago I said the same thing and then I bought Jose Reyes. But those were totally different circumstances. This time I am not even after anybody.
There’s still a lot of talent, and experienced talent at that, to come back into the squad so I can see where he’s coming from, I suppose. Of course tonight sees the boss go head to head with his old chum Alan Pardew again. So far Pardew has escaped punishment for his part in the Upton Park incident and the technical areas at the Grove are too far apart for him to get anywhere near Arsene Wenger but hopefully he won’t have any reason to show us his poxy dancing or kiss disabled people on the head, the twat.
Meanwhile Gilberto has reminded the team that there’s a big fight on for the Champions League places. While the boss refuses to rule us out of the title race the more realistic goal for this season is third or fourth place. Gilberto says:
It is difficult because we are very close with Bolton, Liverpool and Portsmouth. It will be a fight – but we need to do the best we can. We cannot afford to drop points.
There’s no question anything less than the three points tonight would be a bit of a disaster but we’ve shown we can respond, especially at home, after a bad result this season and I think we should have enough quality, depending on who’s up front, to win the game. Kick off is 7.45, not sure it’s on the TV though.
All going well there should be an Arsecast this week so please feel free to email comments, questions or suggestions to arsecast@[remove]arseblog.com or you can leave your own audio contribution, an Arsebite if you will, by going to this page and doing the do. Perhaps you have an opinion on our squad or the lack of transfer activity in January, perhaps you’re an ex-Russian convict called Igor with something to say about having sex with Ashley Cole, who knows? It’s the variation that I love.
And that is about that. So, what’s your new year resolution then?
