Good day to all of you, another week begins and it’s mostly still fallout and reaction to Saturday’s game against United.
Cesc talks about the great spirit in the team, Owen Hargreaves claims it was United he played the beautiful football while the Telegraph’s Patrick Barclay says the FA should throw the book at Demento for his comments about the referee being biased towards Arsenal. If they’re going to throw any book at him they should throw the Arsenal Opus at him. 3,000 pages of Arsenal right in the mush. Beautiful.
Also interesting was Arsene’s admission about his tactics. With RVP injured he played it a bit safe with Hleb floating behind Adebayor, but as he says himself:
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Sometimes Adebayor was a bit too isolated up there. Maybe I could have played Theo Walcott up front, or Eduardo or Nicklas Bendnter. But I went for a different approach. Without Robin van Persie the balance in the final third was not completely right. That’s my fault. I’d look at that again.
It easy to look at it with hindsight but it is a formation that has worked before. Not my favourite, I’d always prefer to play with two proper strikers, but I can understand why he did it. However, I think this team has proved they can beat anyone on their day and that job is made easier by using the formation most familiar to them.
The goalkeeping situation is coming under scrutiny again though. The boss has backed Manuel Almunia despite the Spaniard being a little all over the place for United’s second. I don’t think it was as bad as it looks, to be honest. Had he managed to get a touch or block Evra (who would have had a clear shot on goal if Almunia hadn’t come out) he’d have been a hero. He didn’t and that made it easy for United to score. It’s a fine line for keepers.
Looking at the situation overall though it’s a difficult one for the manager. Lehmann’s childish petulance should not be rewarded with a place in the first team and he’s now at an age where he’s going to moving on sooner rather than later anyway. Almunia seems like a lovely bloke and is a capable keeper but most fans, even those with a soft spot for him, would probably recognise he’s not the long term solution. That leaves us with Fabianski who I quite liked the look of when I saw him in the Carling Cup the other night.
We saw Arsene move to improve the right back position this summer by bringing in Bacary Sagna when we already had two right full backs who most observers would have felt were of sufficient quality. Hoyte now hardly plays while Eboue gets his games on the right hand side of midfield. We’re now much stronger defensively at right back. It strikes me the manager needs to do the same with the goalkeepers. Lehmann should go in January, let’s either give Fabianski a run in the team or bite the bullet and bring in a keeper of the quality and stature a club like Arsenal should have.
I do quite like Almunia though. Hopefully his performances on Saturday was a flaw in what has been otherwise a very solid run in the team. The defence seem to like playing with him, his distribution is generally good, there are no antics, fights with his own teammates, histrionics at corners or anything like that. I think at the moment he deserves to keep his place but in the longer term it’s got to be something AW needs to give some serious thought to.
Meanwhile Gilberto has denied having any kind of fight with Arsene, saying:
We’ve a mutual respect for each other and although I’m not happy to be on the bench I always respect his decision about what he thinks is best for the team. I’m being very professional, so I don’t understand how these things come out when we don’t have any problem. I’m not a the kind of person who’d refuse to play.
It’s good to hear that from him but it’s quite obvious he’s very, very unhappy with his lot at the moment. He seemed disinterested in the post-match huddle on Saturday and it’s sad to see. It’s almost sadder that his unhappiness is coming solely from his playing situation at the moment and not from a big bust-up, if that makes sense. Arsene looks at the job Flamini does, the ground he covers, how quickly he moves the ball and sees a player who does what Gilberto does but does it better at this moment. You have to credit the Brazilian though, he’s just getting on with it, no matter how much it hurts.
And that’s about it for today. Don’t forget if you want to win a copy of the aforementioned Arsenal Opus, even if it is just so you can hurl it at Alex Ferguson, click the banner below this post to get details of the competition run in association with O2. It’s all about taking Arsenal related photos so anyone can enter. Get clicking folks.
More tomorrow.
