Morning all. Stupid *boilk*.
I’ll start with a small piece of advice. Don’t go see the new James Bond film. Quantum of Solace? Quantum of Bollocks, more like.
Right, well we’ve got Stoke later and they’ll be looking to take advantage of our defensive weakness with their players talking about bullying us to get a result. Hasn’t anyone told them bullying is mean? So much for all these campaigns to stop it. And what kind of an example are these so-called professionals setting to the kids of today? They’ll go into school on Monday and start bullying people and then some of them will kill themselves and then The Sun and the Daily Mail will find some way to blame Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross and from there on in it’s a downward spiral.
The manager and the captain have been talking about how the squad is united and determined and blah blah blah. It is, of course, just what they should be saying after reports of the dressing room bust-up following the Sp*rs game. Gallas says:
We are a tight- knit unit working together with belief and desire to challenge for trophies. We can do it. That starts tomorrow at Stoke. Unfortunately a scan has revealed that I have pulled my hamstring so sadly I won’t be involved but the boys are determined to come back with three points.
There are still whispers that the lack of Gallas involvement today is not down to an injury at all but until those whispers becomes stone-cold fact then there’s not much point speculating. Unless all the speculation leads to Gallas being shot out of a cannon into the sun. But I don’t think it will so let’s not waste our time. Goodplaya notices a seismic shift in the quality of the captain’s vocabulary too.
The boss says he will rotate his squad but it’s not because he’s upset at some of the performances. It’s simply because we have so many games coming up. And we do. November is a busy month with eight games so there is obviously some truth to what he’s saying. I like to believe though that he’s not so much rotating as ‘dropping’ certain players. It makes me feel better inside.
For today I think we’ll see Bendtner up top with Adebayor on the bench. Kolo should come back into the side and in the absence of Gallas will wear the captain’s armband and we’ll probably see Diaby slotted in somewhere – maybe today is the chance to see him in his favoured position in central midfield. On the other hand the manager could stick his head back in his shell a bit and go 4-5-1 with Diaby in the hole like against Fenerbache. We’ll see.
I’d love to say I was confident today. In season’ past this would be the kind of game you look upon as a three point banker but with this Arsenal team you just don’t know. We’re could win it at a canter or we could find ourselves pissing in the wind all day and going home having lost 1-0. On paper we should win, sadly we don’t play our matches on paper.
Once again we find ourselves looking for a reaction from the team and for three points which would get us back on track. Until the next time we go off track.
Fingers crossed, Arsefans. Till tomorrow.
