No game this Saturday means I can catch up on some of the sleep I misplaced during the week. That drifty morning sleep brings odd dreams though. I had a big fight with Pamela Anderson’s boyfriend because he punched me in the face and was trying to steal my life. So I knelt on his back and broke his arms. Then my Dad came along and said ‘What are you are you doing there?’. ‘I’m breaking his arms’, I replied.
‘Why would you do something like that?’, he said. ‘I didn’t bring you up to be a violent man’.
‘He was trying to steal my life’.
‘Oh, carry on then’.
There was loads of other stuff including trying to poison someone using cyanide tips in a water Sheringham stew. It was all a bit mental. Lie-ins are awesome.
Anyway, looking around at the football stuff there’s an interesting piece from Gael Clichy where he suggests English teams could do with a winter break. He says in light of our Champions League exit, along with those of Chelsea and United:
We are the only championship in Europe who are not having a rest during Christmas. I don’t want to hide behind anything but when you are having two weeks off during Christmas you have time to recover. English football suffers a little bit because we played so many games.
And I think he’s got a great point. We saw earlier in the week Colin Lewin talking about how fatigue was the cause of many of our injuries and a break would certainly allow players to recover, keep them fitter and last longer in the season. Whether it really gives the European teams a competitive advantage in Europe is debatable. The games have to be played at some time but traditionally their seasons go on towards the end of May, our last league fixture in May 9th. That said their seasons start later too so there’s usually some measure of fixture congestion along the way.
It would also mean the end of tradtional football over the Christmas period and that’s probably the biggest obstacle. Fans love it, TV companies love it, but I bet if you asked players and managers they’d almost all be in favour of the time off. I imagine it’ll come down to challenging the perception that this would only be a good move for clubs in Europe when in reality all the clubs would benefit from it, players would be fitter, the games more competitive and so on. I love festive football, I’ve been brought up on it like so many of you, but stepping back from that it’s hard not to see how a winter break would be a good idea.
On the other side of the pitch Bacary Sagna reckons we play ‘too much football’ sometimes. He says:
Sometimes I think we play too much. We just want to do that and do not think about what is good for us. Sometimes we just need to cut out the football, stop playing for a bit and just consider what will help us achieve what we want.
I’m not really sure what he’s suggesting here. Is it that we be a bit more direct, a bit long ball from time to time? Perhaps he means we’re a bit reluctant to shoot at times and look to walk the ball into the net, which seems to be a commonly held belief about Arsenal. It doesn’t really stack up when you consider that we’ve scored more goals from outside the box than any other team in the league this season
For me, it’s that those who come into the team beyond our ‘first XI’ don’t play enough, not too much. We find it hard to maintain possession when playing decent opposition. Tomas Rosicky for example – he’s an experienced international with undoubted quality. He just didn’t perform against Barcelona, he lost the ball on the few occasions he got it. I expected more from him, I have to say. I’m not blaming him by any means, I’m well aware of what we had missing on Tuesday night, so maybe this goes back to increasing the overall quality of the squad so we’re not as impacted by injuries.
I can’t see how we can be accused of ‘playing too much’ against Barcelona, which is where these comments have come from (Update: Turns out the comments were from the programme for the first Barcelona game and were in relation to the Birmingham game. I stand by my comments about playing more football though!).
We need to play more cleverly and I’m convinced that with better distribution from the goalkeeper on Tuesday we wouldn’t have found it as difficult. I lost count of the times a short pass to a full back or one of the centre-halves was on, yet Almunia booted it long time and time again. If Sagna’s complaint is that we didn’t compete well enough to win the ball from those aimless kicks then I’m with him 100%. Two of their goals stemmed from Almunia kicking the ball away poorly. So for me, we need players who can play more football more intelligently, from front to back.
Newly crowned player of the month Nicklas Bendtner says we need to respond to the European exit on Weds night against Spurs:
Beating them at their ground and maybe going second in the League, depending on other results, would be a massive thing for us.
They play this weekend in the FA Cup, although I don’t see Portsmouth giving them much of a game. Still, the extra few days we’ve got to recover and refocus might just be crucial. A north London derby is a huge game at the best of times but with us still in with a title shout and that lot aiming for a Champions League place it is going to be intense.
Zonal Marking have an interesting analysis of Thomas Vermaelen’s defending. It’s certainly true he has a tendency to get very close to his man and we’ve seen in recent games how that has caused problems. What we don’t know is if he’s under instruction to do just that, allowing the older/slower/more experienced centre-half to mop up behind him. I think, at 23, he’s still learning how to read the game, his decision making will improve and we’ll see him develop into a really good player. ZM is a very interesting site though, nice to see someone’s brought something a bit different to football blogging.
It’s a fairly slow day so that’s why you’ve probably come across headlines from Stoke’s manager having another go at Arsene. All I can say is ZZzzzzzz. Each time he has a pop his insignificant, spiteful little profile increases and we’re best off ignoring a man who is, at this point of the season, utterly irrelevant to us. We’ll have him next time.
And that’s really about that. The sun is shining in Dublin, it looks as if spring has arrived and I might go sit outside after I eat my delicious pork based breakfast (cheers, Mrs Blogs).
Till tomorrow.
