Happy hallowe’en to you all. A day for spooky things like spirits, trolls, monsters and the thoughts of our defence trying to cope with Rory Delap’s long throws.
This morning’s Sun quotes an ‘Arsenal source’ who spoke of dressing room discontent after the game against Sp*rs the other night. Sourcey, as I call him, says:
Everyone was going crazy in the dressing room after the game. There were a lot of raised voices and fingers being pointed. Everyone was blaming each other for Spurs’ two late goals and the manager was as angry as anyone has seen him for a long time.
Hardly a surprise, is it? I’d be more worried if there weren’t some raised voices after a final 4 minutes like that. They say that the crux of the argument was the lack of leadership shown by William Gallas and Mikael Silvestre. That, of course, remains speculative. I suspect the arguing was mostly about throwing away two goals against those cunts.
Nevertheless, Emmanuel Adebayor spoke to Arsenal TV and confirmed tempers were raised. He said:
It’s better to wait. There would be a lot of words that we don’t have to use and we aren’t supposed to use to each other. Then we will get together and tell the truth. The nerves will calm down and everyone will have to accept their critics.
I wonder what words they’re not supposed to use to each other. If I was Arsenal manager I would ban entirely use of the word ‘ramekin’. It’s a silly word despite the object itself being particularly handy. Still, there’s obviously a bit of pointing and blaming and stuff going on within the squad and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it takes the criticism of your peers for you to do something about your attitude or performance. Then again, maybe there are those that don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of their performances.
The Sun goes on to say that Gallas’s hamstring injury is ‘convenient’ for Arsene Wenger. If we take it at face value the injury provides the manager with the chance to bring back Kolo Toure in defence alongside Sylvester without having to drop the club captain. The other implication is that this isn’t really an injury at all and Gallas is being dropped.
The Mirror reports that Gallas has ruled himself out of the game after harsh words with the manager. Surely that can’t be true. Ok, given the fact it’s Gallas it wouldn’t surprise me. He’s obviously an emotional person, we’ve seen it before, but for the captain of the club to declare himself ‘injured’ because he was criticised by the manager? Madness. If it is true then serious questions have to be asked about his position as captain. More serious questions than the ones that exist at the moment, I mean. And I’m being tremendously diplomatic there. I haven’t suggested that he should be fired out of a cannon into the sun, or anything.
The article goes to say that Gallas, Sylvester and Adebayor were the main targets of the manager’s ire with all three set to be ‘dropped’ for tomorrow. We might then see a central defensive partnership of Kolo + Djourou and, perhaps, Bendtner in up front alongside van Persie. Diaby and Alex Song might also come in to add some strength as we face a Stoke side that is physically quite big and strong.
So, it’s going to be interesting to hear what Arsene has to say today in his press conference. Of course he won’t mention any fights or anything like that. As always he will publicly defend his players but obviously there’s been quite a bit of fall-out since Wednesday night. Perhaps the team selections over the coming weeks will give us more of an idea how it all went.
Right, on to this week’s Arsecast and joining me for a blogchat about Sp*rs and stuff is GilbertoSilver from Gunnerblog. Sylvester celebrate his first Arsenal goal, Amaury Bischoff PI is there, the Man in the Bar responds to a recent cover version of his cover version of Barry Manilow’s Mandy, and the usual waffle, guff and flapdoodle.
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Ok, have fun. More tomorrow.
