Good morning all,
there’s so much going on these day there’s barely time to think. Following Sunday’s game against Chelsea we have another one tonight. This time it’s Carling Cup action against Burnley, the team who knocked Chelsea out in the last round.
It’s another chance for some of the young players to show what they’re made of. Arsene Wenger says we’ll see Silvestre, Vela, Bendtner and Fabianski while the likes of Wilshere, Ramsey (who talks here about how much he’s improved since joining the club), Gibbs and Merida will all probably be involved. It’s another decent test for the lads on what’s sure to be a freezing cold night at Turf Moor.
We have played them recently, a 2-0 win in the FA Cup last season, but after beating Chelsea at Stamford Bridge they won’t be afraid. The full squad should be released later this morning. Martin Keown and Bob Wilson look over some of our young English talent on the BBC.
Update: Here’s the full squad. Looks like it might Sylvester + Rodgers at centre-half.
After the win against Chelsea Cesc has reiterated the manager’s words about how the team needs to focus for every game. He says:
We showed a different attitude and that is what we want to do from now on. We have shown we can do it, to beat the big teams, so we can have no excuse with not doing it against the rest of the teams.
No arguments here with regard to that. Emmanuel Adebayor believes Sunday’s result sends a message to the rest of the teams in the league:
People wrote us off in the Premier League and now, we’ve sent out a message to every team that we believe in ourselves and we can do something. We forget about all that happened. We are always together.
The proof of whether the lessons have been learned or not will come on Saturday when we play Wigan at home. For every high this season there seems to have been a low and in December the only thing you want lowing are cattle, although not if you have a baby because they’ll wake him up.
Meanwhile Robin van Persie has played down any talk of him being the one William Gallas’s barbed comments were aimed at last week. When asked if it was him, he said:
Are you suggesting that William was talking about me? I don’t know that, because he never told me anything and I didn’t see my name in the papers, so I never felt that he was speaking about me. For me, there isn’t a problem.
Which is fair enough. And at this point does it really matter who it was? It’s all water under the bridge now anyway. And it was Eboue, according to a phone call left on the Arsecast hotline yesterday. So there you go.
I wonder in the entire existence of Arseblog how many times we’ve been linked with a transfer move for Yaya Toure. It must be close to a hundred at this stage. The Sun doesn’t let us down with talk of a €6m deal in January. He’s not getting his game at Barcelona though so maybe he’d fit the bill for a January transfer.
Away from Arsenal, Arseblog has been nominated for ‘best podcast‘ and ‘best community‘ over at the Soccerlens awards. So feel free to go and vote. For Arseblog. I should make that clear as this site is populated by smart arses.
And if you’re a Twitter user, Arseblog, with almost some Arsenal content (mostly during games), can be found here.
So that’s about it. I’m looking forward to tonight’s game, even though I’ll have to record it and watch it later. After the stress and pressure of Chelsea it’s nice to be able to just sit back and enjoy the football. Come on the kids. Erm … I mean … COME ON ARSENAL!
Till tomorrow.
