Good Monday to you all.
Barely a day of recovery for the lads before they fly out to Turkey for tomorrow’s game against Fenerbache. As yet there’s little or no news about who’s going to be fit but it looks like we’ll be without Kolo Toure following his shoulder injury on Saturday. We await news of Samir Nasri and I do hope he’ll be fit. He’s had a niggly start to his Arsenal career. Almost every good thing has been balanced out by a little injury and you suspect that if we are to win anything this season we need him fitter more often.
The travelling squad is usually announced the day before the game and it’ll be interesting to see who makes the trip. The players are under no illusions about how tough it’s going to be with Robin van Persie saying:
It will be really tough out there. I experienced it a few years ago and the fans are amazing. It was really aggressive. You have to deal with the atmosphere. It’s not nice but if you play for Arsenal, you have to adapt and just play your game.
More on that game tomorrow. Robin has also been talking about the comeback against Everton and he reckons the side is 30-40% mental. Or something. He says:
The way we came back was fantastic. Once we scored, you could see the heads of the Everton players go down. In football, the mental aspect is really important, maybe more than 30 or 40 per cent. Sometimes it is more important than the way you play.
I’m not sure where he gets his figures from but he does have a good point. An unwillingness to be beaten is what separates good teams from great teams. Having the mental strength to dig out a result when you’re playing poorly is a brilliant thing. So while the result against Everton was great you do wonder where that mental strength was against Fulham and Hull. It’s too early to say we’ve turned any kind of corner yet. The proof will come with the results in the next few weeks. We’ve often been a team that thrives on momentum but so far this season we have failed to get that going. Fingers crossed we can do that as there are some big games on the horizon.
Perhaps the incessant Interlulls haven’t helped us and, in today’s blog brought to you by the letters R, V and P, Robin says:
We were fantastic for three-quarters of last season and then suddenly everything fell down. We have learned a lot from that. I prefer it when you can have a good long run with your club team, get together and get results.
Obviously what they’ve learned is that in order to not make the same mistake as last season they’ve decided not to have a good run until a quarter of the season is over. Revolutionary thinking, I like it. That said the disappointing results this season have come pre-Interlull when the squad has been together and not post, as you might expect. Maybe they’ve all been thinking about how many pairs of underpants they have to pack before they go away. They need to be more focussed on football and less on underpants.
You can read more Robin, and Arsene saying he doesn’t know what kind of car Theo Walcott is, here. There’s a thing – what kind of cars are our players? I don’t know enough about cars to even try although Eboue could definitely be a clown car.
Right, nothing else to report. Have a good Monday. More tomorrow.
