Morning all.
It’s wrong to say that Friday’s before a Monday game are pointless, but they do feel meaningless and empty (like a Chelsea title win). With no football until Monday evening we have to endure an Arsenal-free weekend, looking for entertainment in the failures of others.
Can Tony Pulis take points from Luis van Gaal at Old Trafford? I don’t know about that, or what will happen from a footballing point of view, but I suspect under the right circumstances those two could lay it down big style.
There might be the usual sideline confrontation before it all kicks off when Stoke West Brom are penalised indiscriminately by the referee. The managers push and shove and point fingers, and it can only go one way, Pulis ripping off his baseball cap in furious anger.
‘Come on then’, he’d shout, ‘I’m not afraid of you’.
‘Oh but you should be’, van Gaal will reply, slowly taking off his official Man United blazer, shirt, and tie, revealing a misshapen, pelt-covered bosom with a hideous Kuato-esque growth beneath it. From then on, it’s carnage, with tiny teeth and fur flying everywhere.
That’s on at 17.30 on Saturday evening, so if you have small children you might want to ensure they’re watching something more suitable, like The Exorcist or Emmanuelle Eboue II – The Reawakening.
The other two games of real interest for us take place on Sunday. Chelsea can win the title on Sunday when they face Crystal Palace at home. You might remember last year Palace beat them as Chelsea bottled the league, but I don’t see any repeat of that this time around when not even the combined power of Pard-Bantz and Yaya Sanogo will be able to stop them.
Then it’s Sp*rs v Man City. The visitors have been utter rubbish for months now, and it would suit us if that lot could take a couple of points off them … which is exactly why they’ll lose about 4-0 and City will regain all their confidence going into the final games of the season. So, all in all, a fun weekend of football for everyone else but not for us.
The early team news ahead of this game is that Mathieu Debuchy is likely to miss out with a hamstring strain he picked up in training. It’s not altogether unexpected that a player suffers a muscle strain after so long out, but I wonder how much part coming back and playing 120 minutes against Reading had to play in this.
Nevertheless, we have a very able replacement in Hector Bellerin who will continue what has been a sparkling season for him. Other than that everyone else appears to be in good shape bar Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain who the manager said was a couple of weeks away just last week. Unless he’s had some kind of miraculous intervention over the last seven days, I’m assuming he’s not going to be involved.
You might also wonder if the manager might be tempted to use his squad a little bit. It’s trying to find the balance between keeping things competitive, and not messing around with a line-up that’s functioning very well and getting the right results pretty much every week. I suspect we might see a couple of changes for this one, but quite where yet I’m not sure.
Anyway, no doubt the manager will expand a bit on this during his press conference today after he’s asked about 53 questions about Chelsea being boring despite the fact he never said Chelsea were boring and was actually very complimentary about the way they’ve performed this season. We’ll have all the news from that over on Arseblog News throughout the day, so keep an eye out there.
Some bonus reading for you: Tim Stillman’s column this week touches on whether or not teams have a duty to entertain, as well as achieve good results. Check it out here.
Right then, it’s time for this week’s Arsecast, and this is number 350. As the saying goes, ‘Time flies when you’ve been doing something for almost 9 years’! This week I’m joined by @JeorgeBird to talk Arsenal youth and to discuss what’s going on at U21 and U18 level after disappointing seasons at both levels. Then it’s time for some @Paolo_Bandini to talk Chelsea, the top four, Thierry Henry’s punditry and why Italy might be a good bet for Theo Walcott if he decided his future lay elsewhere this summer – and there’s all the usual waffle too.
You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes).
To download this week’s Arsecast directly click here – 33mb MP3. The Arsecast is also available on our SoundCloud channel, as well as via the SoundCloud app for iPhone and Android. You can now also find it on the Stitcher podcasting app for iOS and Android. Or, you can listen without leaving this page by using the player below.
You can leave comments on the SoundCloud page and reviews/comments on iTunes and Stitcher are very welcome too.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS
If you are a regular listener via iTunes, if you would be so kind as to leave a review/rating that would be greatly appreciated.
So that’s your lot for this morning. The Arsenal Gent will be here with his weekly review later on, more from me tomorrow.
