So it’s Splendiferous Sagna, Gleeful Giroud and Laughing Laurent as France made it through to the World Cup finals in Brazil next summer.
They overturned the 2-0 defect from the first leg, beating Ukraine 3-0 and will thus be at next summer’s tournament. As I said yesterday, this is probably a good thing for us this season. As well as being focused on what they want to achieve with Arsenal, that World Cup carrot is a good thing to keep players focused and on form.
As it happened, Sagna and Giroud didn’t play much last night. Bac came on in the 78th minute, Giroud in the 82nd, so with Koscielny having missed the game due to suspension, the potential for fatigue when they return to Arsenal is far less than it might have been.
In the other European qualifiers it’s Ronaldo ahead of Zlatan as Portugal beat Sweden, Iceland couldn’t do it in the end and went down 2-0 to Croatia, while Greece beat Romania to qualify.
Elsewhere, Spain lost 1-0 to South Africa with Nacho Monreal playing the full game and Santi Cazorla coming on as a second half sub. Per Mertesacker’s goal will probably get Roy Hodgson Photoshopped as some kind of root vegetable on the back of The Sun as Germany beat England at Wembley. Thomas Vermaelen did 90 minutes for Belgium as they lost 3-2 to Japan, Wojciech Szczesny played as Poland and Ireland drew 0-0 while Carl Jenkinson scored for the England U21s as they somehow managed to beat San Marino.
And I think that’s about that. Hopefully all involved come back fit and well and ready to go and we can concentrate fully on the Arsenal for the next few months. I think the next Interlull is some time in March so between now and then it’s red and white and yellow and blue all the way. Which is how it should be, of course.
Looking at our schedule we’re going to have to get ourselves back on track and quickly, there’s no time for finding our feet. It’s unfortunate that you don’t have a chance to put right the United result straight away with another fixture but I’m sure the focus and determination will be there when the players regroup.
So, to come between now and Christmas (just a few short weeks away in case the incessant, cloying, super-twee, mega-saccharine, mawkish advertising hasn’t given it away yet), we’ve got:
Fixtures
| Southampton | 23.11.2013 (H) |
|---|---|
| Marseille | 26.11.2013 (H) |
| Cardiff | 30.11.2013 (A) |
| Hull City Lions | 04.12.2013 (H) |
| Everton | 08.12.2013 (H) |
| Napoli | 11.12.2013 (A) |
| Man City | 14.12.2013 (A) |
| Chelsea | 23.12.2013 (H) |
And that’s not to mention that we’ve got West Ham on Dec 26th and a trip to the Laura Ashley Bowl to play Newcastle a few days later.
So it’s not until after the Man City game in just under a month that we have any break from the relentlessness of the fixtures. We’re playing every 3-4 days for a month and this is why it’s going to be important that we keep players fit and available. Some of them just aren’t going to be able to play in every game during this period so some measure of rotation will be required.
There are obvious ways we can do that in certain positions, but others we’re short of options. It looks as if Theo Walcott will be back for the Southampton game which does give us another option in the front three, and we have plenty with which to fill the wide positions and the midfield, but there will be a heavy burden on Olivier Giroud as the lone front-man.
To be fair, he’s spoken about how he’s happy to carry that and how fit he feels, but he’s become so integral to the way we play, you worry about what will happen if we have to cope without him. Maybe that’s looking for a problem where there isn’t one and he could well stay fit all the way through, but we do ask him to do a lot of work up there, and having to do it alone, game after game, could take its toll. Like it or not we might have to look at certain fixtures as ones in which we can rest him a bit.
The fact that Nicklas Bendtner is our only real option there now isn’t ideal, but we genuinely don’t have much choice. Last season Wenger deployed Gervinho as a kind of ‘false 9’ (insert your own jokes here please) for a few games, and it worked ok, but I’m not sure we’ve got anyone in the squad who could really fill that role. Maybe Walcott, but it would mean a change in how we play because we can’t expect him to hold it up and bring others into play – that’s just not his game.
Anyway, it all promises to be an exciting period, one which will have a big impact on how successful our season is going to be. We can’t complain about a lack of football during the Interlull and then of too much when things get going again. The key is to rebuild our momentum, there’s nothing like winning games to make you forget about tired legs and those aches and strains.
Let’s see where it takes us. Till tomorrow.
