Morning all.
The games are coming thick and fast and we’re struggling to cope – particularly at the back. The team news that emerged yesterday is that Kieran Gibbs is struggling to be fit for the Chelsea game after picking up a groin injury against Villarreal. Bacary Sagna is also struggling to be fit after his illness.
Should they both miss out our defensive options are somewhat limited. The only way I can see us line up is for Alex Song to move back into the defence and play alongside Kolo Toure with Sylvester moving to left back.
It would be a shame to move Song from the midfield just when he’s found his feet but I can’t see any other way around it. If Sagna is fit then he could play left back, leaving Eboue on the right hand side and Song in midfield. So we’ll have to wait and see what the boss says later today.
Regarding other defenders he estimated Johan Djourou could be back in two weeks, which is great news if true, but I’m somewhat troubled by the news about Gael Clichy. The official site says:
Clichy is in the middle of a two-and-a-half week period of rest. Only then will the Frenchman start his rehab in earnest.
So does that mean he’s got another week or so of rest, then some rehab? And how long will the rehab be? We need all hands on deck at the moment so to lose anyone for longer than expected would be a blow.
Blog update: According to AW, who spoke to France Football, Clichy has a stress fracture of a vertebra, hence the need for complete rest. How quickly he recovers is anyone’s guess really.
Cesc has been speaking about the upcoming games, which sees us play United at least three times, Chelsea twice, Liverpool once as well as league games against Portsmouth, Boro and Stoke. He says:
Arsenal, we are not scared of anyone and the way we play shows that. We might not have the same experience as United or Chelsea but I am not concerned about that. I don’t mind at all.
And that’s the mindset the whole team has to have. Of course United have more experience, they’re a great team as they’ve proved down the years, but we’ve beaten them once this season, no reason why we can’t do it again. The same goes for Chelsea, they’re hugely experienced and have a squad full of top class players (and, let it not go unsaid, top class cunts too). But we’ve beaten them, and at a time in the season when we had little going right for us, so there’s every reason to be confident ahead of tomorrow’s semi-final.
On lifting silverware, Cesc says:
It would be the best thing that ever happened to me to lift a trophy in an Arsenal shirt. It’s a dream for me but we still need to work really hard to finally get there. For sure it would be a disappointment if we do not get to the Final or win. What we have achieved is good but the Semi-Final is not good enough; we want to be in the Final.
Theo Walcott says teams will be scared to play us now. They’ll certainly be a lot more cautious than they might have been a few months back but if we’re not scared of them then I don’t think they’ll be scared of us.
Still, we’re in a much better position than we were, a position Cesc said we’d be ‘praying’ to be in just three months ago, another indication of how quickly things change in football. But let’s not go OTT just yet. We haven’t won anything, we’ve done brilliantly to get where we are, it’s fantastic to see how the team and certain players have improved, but ultimately it comes down to who’s lifting a trophy at the end of the season.
Last time around we played fantastically well for 4/5ths of the season, fell apart near the end, won nothing and disappointment was crushing. Similarly we might play well for the last 1/3rd of the season and if we don’t win anything again it will be just as hard to take, I think. Sorry for all the fractions this early in the morning but you know what I mean.
Anyway, all the focus has to be on Chelsea tomorrow. How typical that this morning stories have emerged that Emmanuel Adebayor is a target for Carlo Ancelotti, the man linked with the Chelsea manager’s job next season. How utterly see-through and pathetic. There should be a word for this kind of tactic and the word should be Kenyonesque.
“Oh, what a Kenyonesque story that is the paper today” or “His attempts to unsettle the player before a big game were positively Kenyonesque”.
You know, as much as we can look at the Chelsea squad and point to various players and think ‘Cunt’, ‘Horrible patchy-haired cunt’, ‘Diving cunt’, ‘Lying little swerving off the road, money-grabbing duplicitous, mendacious, classless, stupid, cheat on his foxy wife with a minger, utter, utter, utter cunt’, there’s something about Peter Kenyon that makes you want to beat Chelsea even more.
A truly reprehensible man and one of the best moments of my life was seeing him at the Champions League final in Paris, him swanning about with a delegation of officials, and me calling him a ‘cunt’ as loudly as I could. He pretended not to hear me, but he heard me. Oh, he heard me.
So more team news and squad news and possible formation news tomorrow. Now though, it’s time for the Arsecast. On this week’s show I chat to the man from East Lower about Villarreal, the upcoming games, the improvement of Alex Song and more. As well as that there’s some funk with Sylvester, poetry from Tony Adams, Talkshite Radio and more.
You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too. To download this week’s arsecast directly – click here (22mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.
Right then, that’ll have to do for today. More tomorrow.
