Morning all.
I have to say when I first saw the schedule for this weekend I was all like ‘Monday night? Boooo’, for a full weekend without the Arsenal is just not right, is it? But now I’m all like ‘Yeah, Monday’s cool. Recuperation and that, isn’t it?’.
With a squad so stretched that a move for Götze should be mandatory, and after two very intense games in relatively quick succession, I suspect there will be some tired legs and some players not so much in the red zone but camping out in it like Occupy Stuff To Make An Obvious Point But Which Does Very Little Really style protestors.
The boss said there were players carrying knocks into the Milan game. Oxlade-Chamberlain had the flu (I suspect he had a bit of a cold really because if he really had flu and he played like that against Milan then he’s essentially super-human. Not that this would surprise me, or bother me, but still) while Tomas Rosicky was touch and go beforehand. Having to go all weekend without the Arsenal is frustrating but this time it’s probably not the worst thing in the world that could happen to us.
With Europe now but a wistful memory, all the focus has to turn back to the Premier League and the challenge that lies ahead there. Many have spoken about the Sp*rs game being a blueprint for how we need to play (assuming we don’t run into diving cheats like Bale every week and can defend from the first whistle), and Bacary Sagna has called the Milan performance ‘a reference game’, saying:
We did well from the front to defence, the goalkeeper too. We have to keep on fighting until the end as a team and show the same performance again.
When you consider the mood after the Sunderland FA Cup game and the mood now it’s an illustration of how quickly things can change in football and, most of all, how the perception of everything is affected and influenced by results. I know it’s obvious but when you lose it seems easy to go into in-depth analysis of how everything at the club is wrong, from top to bottom, with theories about how and why we’re in this mess flying about all over the place.
That’s not to say there isn’t merit in looking at how we’re set up and so on, but three wins later, and three very good wins at that, and it no longer seems quite so critical. Again, it doesn’t mean it’s not important, it just means that the first thing that matters at any football club is what happens on the pitch. Manchester United fans were very vocal about the Glazers and how their takeover put the club in a precarious financial position. I suspect those legitimate protests and concerns would have had a lot more focus and attention if they hadn’t won all those league titles and stuff.
And this isn’t something just for fans to consider, it should be obvious to those charged with running this football club that their lives will be made an awful lot easier if Arsenal have a team which is more competitive and wins more games. The simple way of achieving that is investing in the squad properly, addressing the weaknesses, and making us stronger. Overly simplistic, perhaps, but no less true because of that.
Now, I’m not trying to suggest football fans are fickle, I think we all know that could not be further from the truth, but the reality is that in a world in which we have so much information available to us about almost every aspect of the football clubs we support, it still all comes down to the 90 minutes on a Saturday. Or Sunday. Or Monday evening. Or Tues … well, you get where I’m coming from. Concerns and gripes about how does what, who doesn’t do what, and who owns what pale into insignificance as long as your team is winning games (or at the least giving 100% each time they go out there).
All this information is good, don’t get me wrong. The more we know the better informed we are, but let’s not avoid the fact that much of what goes around is like a digital version of Chinese Whispers. The truth is out there, but there are about twelve different versions of the same truth. There is nearly always a need for clarification, things are taken at face value and twisted slightly to fit certain agendas (whichever side of the fence you happen to be on), and there’s an awful lot of politics. And as everyone should know, politics is for cunts.
Meanwhile, and speaking of politics and cunts, Arsene Wenger has been charged with ‘improper conduct’ by UEFA for comments made about Tuesday’s referee, Damir Skomina. We all know UEFA and Wenger have history, they’d charge him for looking funny at a match delegate, let alone dare to question a referee who was clearly out his depth, so I guess we can expect another touchline ban should we finish top four this season.
My favourite bit though is the info from the Sky Italia reporter (via @Marcotti) reporting the ref running off down the tunnel shrieking “DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T TOUCH ME!’ as the boss tried to speak to him at the end of the game.
“I DON’T LIKE BE TOUCHED!”
There really is nothing like a bit of old-fashioned, camp as Christmas, histrionics to remind you of the manliness and machismo of football, eh?
And finally for today, despite the fact I’m still dubious as to the veracity of reports surrounding Podolski and I’m still not that interested in him until next season, if they are true then it’s encouraging that we seem to have modified the way we do our transfer business in a significant way. The last few years have been ‘Let’s wait until as late as possible then try and find the pieces of meat that aren’t too grey and have that rainbowy sheen on them’, whereas this would suggest a much more proactive and planned approach. Which might well be why I’m so dubious about the whole thing but I’d happily be surprised.
Right then, that’s yer lot for this morning. No, I don’t really have anything to say about Mancini wanting van Persie. Of course he does and he’s got the money to do it and to provide a safety net for his rather transparent attempts to make it public, this is the way football works, like it or not, but van Persie’s future will depend far more on what we do than what Mancini says.
Till tomorrow.
