Morning all. Clocks have gone forward, summer is on the way … allegedly. I do wish it would warm up.
Yesterday’s results in the Premier League didn’t do us any favours as our next opponents, Everton, won their fifth game in succession. It leaves them 4 points behind us with a game in hand, making Sunday’s fixture a massive one in terms of our top four position.
It goes to highlight our recent poor form in the league. In the same period as they’ve taken 15 points, we’ve added just 5, allowing them to close the gap and even if we’ve straightened things up a bit with that result on Saturday, we’ve given ourselves a bit of a problem. A win on Sunday, halting their momentum in the process, would probably ensure we finish at least fourth, but having been the team that does that kind of charging up the table in seasons past, we know the benefit of finding form at exactly the right time.
At least it’s not boring, I suppose. Liverpool went top as they spanked Sp*rs 4-0 and to me it’s clear they’re benefitting from not having played European football this season. The physical demands of extra games and travel can be seen in the injury lists of the teams around them – something we know well – and although City have games in hand, the Mugsmashers have it in their own hands as they host Pellegrini’s team in a couple of weeks.
As I mentioned we don’t play until Sunday, so after a hectic run of games it’s a chance to get some batteries recharged and players fresh for the trip to Goodison. Meanwhile, Wojciech Szczesny has been talking about the City game, saying:
We owe it to the manager, the fans and everyone at the club. Ourselves as well because you want to do yourselves proud as well. We lost 6-0 and that’s embarrassing for players who represent this club. Hopefully, from now we can start getting wins. We didn’t get a win but it was a half-positive result and now we can kick on from that.
He also touches on a key factor, the injuries:
We’ve been very unlucky with injuries. I think if you look at the players that have been out, it’s probably five or six players who are guaranteed in the starting line-up. We’ve been really unlucky.
Again it raises the question as to how much you can put it down to bad luck. One or two players is unlucky, perhaps, but more than that and you have to wonder. I know we’ve done it to death already, but it’s hard not to feel wistful about the period we’ve gone through when you think how different it might have been with Ramsey, Wilshere, Walcott and Ozil in the side.
Get the True Detectives out to find out what’s happening, I say. Or Special Agent Dale Cooper, who wouldn’t be at all fazed when he rocked up at the training ground to find Ivan Gazidis walking around the place talking to a log, before Per Mertesacker came into his hotel room to tell him the owls were not what they seemed.
Accusations of ‘lack of character’ have been levelled at the team in the last few weeks, but captain Thomas Vermaelen refutes those claims, saying:
I don’t totally agree with that. In every game we’ve tried to work hard and the character and spirit has always been good. Of course the results in the big games haven’t been sometimes what we wanted but we showed today we can work hard and play for a result.
It’s interesting to try and quantify intangibles like that though. At half-time in the game on Saturday I chatted to someone on Twitter who called our performance ‘shameful’, and said it had ‘no passion, no desire’. I thought City played better than us, but couldn’t agree with that verdict. I thought we were trying hard and the second half was genuine display of character under difficult circumstances.
But as long as you’re losing I suppose you’re open to those kind of accusations. It’s just how do you measure them? There’s passion-ometer or a graph which fills up with desire. You can judge a performance on what you see, obviously, but I didn’t think for one second that we lacked those qualities in the first half. The level of our performance was open to question, but not our willingness to ‘get stuck in’, if you like.
Maybe it’s one to think about more in the summer when there’s time off, but all it takes is for a few people to say the same thing a few times and it becomes the accepted wisdom, regardless of its veracity. Or maybe it’s all just subjective and one person’s desire and passion is another man’s insipid display because there isn’t enough charging about the pitch and shouting and roaring. Who knows?
All that aside, I’ll recording the Arsecast Extra this morning with Gunnerblog. If you’ve got any questions, please fire them us on Twitter (@gunnerblog @arseblog) and please use the hashtag #arsecastextra, we’ll try to get to as many of them as possible.
All going well we should have this ready for you by lunchtime. In the meantime, have yourselves a passionate Monday.
Till tomorrow.
