This morning is the first morning with a real whiff of winter off it. As someone who suffers greatly with SAD (Sun Am Deadly) this is not good news. Let’s hope the football is warm and glowing enough to get me through.
Champions League tonight and we travel to Holland to play AZ Alkmaar. The team news is that Theo Walcott is out and will miss three to four weeks after suffering ligament damage against Birmingham. It’s a blow to him and to us although given the headlines in most of the papers you’d think it was the end of the world for England. So what if he’s going to miss an England friendly? It’s the 5 or 6 Arsenal games that count. Anyway, we wish him a speedy recovery.
From Saturday Tomas Rosicky also misses out with a little bit of a knee problem but the boss reckons it’ll just be a couple of days. Although with Tomas you might just keep your fingers crossed over that. There’s still no Bendtner or Eduardo but Gael Clichy comes back into the squad after his knock and Carlos Vela returns having recovered from a transatlantic flight.
The squad does look a bit light up front and I suspect the manager will use Eboue in a forward position, leaving Vela and Wilshere as options from the bench. Perhaps the most positive thing about this season is that we can go into a game without Eduardo, without Bendtner, without Rosicky, and still be confident of scoring goals. We’re not reliant on just a couple of players to get them, they’ve been spread out across the team and the boss is mindful of that, saying:
We have a good team ethic, a good working attitude together. We all play on the same wavelength, which is why everybody scores.
That said the strikers are beginning to find the net on a more regular basis now. Maybe they, more than anyone else, needed to get used to the new formation. It was certainly a big change to ask Robin van Persie to play as a centre-forward but after a slow start the manager’s patience has been rewarded and he’s on a bit of a streak at the moment. And when your manager is comparing you to Marco van Basten you know you’re doing something right.
It’ll be interesting as well to see who starts in goal. With Almunia recovered from his chest infection you would expect a player who was the unquestioned number 1 at the start of the season to go straight back into the team. Wenger has never had any problem dropping a young player for the established one no matter how well the former has been playing so the continuation of Mannone, should that be the case, would be quite telling. And that his faith is kept in a young man who, at the start of the season, realistically had no chance of first team football might suggest the goalkeeping situation at the club is one that might require some surgery in the longer term.
Ronald Koeman, AZ manager, has declared Arsenal have ‘defects’, which I’m sure will come as a shock to all of us who thought we were the perfectly oiled football machine that could do no wrong. As a manager he has frustrated us a couple of times. Didn’t we have two painful 0-0 draws with Ajax when he was in charge there? If I remember correctly they played a 10-0-0 formation designed to prevent us from playing football. If he sees our defects as defensive then his team is going to have to attack to exploit those, which is no bad thing.
If they come out and play a bit it should suit us down to the ground. I know there’s a big expectation of three points tonight, and rightly so I suppose, but we shouldn’t forget our last away trip in the Champions League. A really sloppy start made the game against Standard Liege much more difficult than it should have been so fingers crossed we’re switched on right from the start tonight.
Not much else happening really. There’s a bit more from Arsene’s pre-match press conference in which he talks about his upcoming 60th birthday and his future at Arsenal, so we’ll leave it there for today.
Here’s to a good performance and three points tonight. Till tomorrow.
