Morning, a very quick Saturday round-up for you. I went to see IT last night, and I really hate clowns. This film did nothing to alleviate that in any way. So much for the tagline of the movie ‘This will make you love clowns, honestly’. Maybe that wasn’t it, in fairness.
The only thing I can think of that’s worse than a clown on its own is a bird clown, or a clown with wings, a winged OWL or something, like this. FFS, why did I even make that?! My dreams will be haunted forever by the idea of this thing coming towards me, all clowny and flappy like a flappy clowny bastard.
Ugh.
Anyway, let’s get away from scary clowns and onto football and our sometimes clowny football team although we’re more hapless, falling over, custard pie in the face clowns than evil, haunting, rip your arm off, feeding on the fear of young people, living in the sewers clowns.
We’ve got a big game tomorrow against Chelsea, and there’s a lot of focus on our poor away record against the big teams. It’s January 2015 since we won a match against one of the leading lights like Man City, Man Utd, Liverpool and Chelsea, and then teams like Sp*rs too. The record currently reads like a Welsh village, LDLDLDDDLLLLL (via @Orbinho) and we really need at least a D or preferably a W at Stamford Bridge.
Arsene Wenger was asked about this, and while admitting things haven’t gone as well as they should have in recent time, insists that there really should be no difference between a game played at home and one away. He says:
I don’t really believe in that. The pitch is 105 metres long and 68 wide, everywhere. And never in my life I could understand that it’s different away from home. It’s just a matter of how much you want it, wherever you play.
That’s about football.
You know what? I agree. There shouldn’t be any real difference, except there is. It’s clear there is. Look at our record against Stoke. Every single time they come to the Emirates we win. We have a better team than they do, we have better players than they do, and that’s reflected in the results. That quality should be enough to win the games at the Ray Winstone Arena, but we all know that’s not the case.
We’ve won once there in the last seven seasons, and the only possible explanation for that is we have an issue when we play there. It can’t be one of quality, because the home games show how we can exploit that differential, so it’s a psychological barrier of some kind. An inability to cope with the environment more than the Stoke team, its players or tactics,
Even now, when they have, for the most part, moved away from the kind of team we found so difficult to deal with – a massive, gigantic one that could throw the ball into the box putting the shits up our oompa-loompa team – we still lose. We lost this season despite dominating the game in terms of possession and chances. You could call it one of those days or an aberration if we hadn’t seen it so often before.
So, to me it’s obvious that same issue exists – at the moment – with the big teams away from home. Not only have we had a poor record against them, we’ve also taken some real poundings. It’s not simply that we’ve lost but we’ve been done 8-2 at Old Trafford, 6-3 at Man City, 6-0 at Chelsea, 5-1 and 4-0 at Liverpool … when you add those to the other results you can see why the players might have something in their minds.
And not just the players, there are very few of them left from that Man Utd game, but it must be something that affects the manager too. He is the constant factor in all of us, and the longer it goes on the more it will become a thing.
And it is a thing, there’s no doubt in my mind. It’s whether we see evidence of being able to address it on Sunday that will be interesting. In our last four meetings with Chelsea we’ve won three (one on penalties in fairness), and lost the other. That game was at Stamford Bridge last season. So, we know we have the quality to beat them, we know we do, but do we have the character to do it at their place? We’ll find out tomorrow lunchtime.
Right, I wish you all a clown free Saturday (unless you’re going to see IT in which case a clown-free version would not be that great), and I’ll leave you with yesterday’s Arsecast going over everything that happened on Thursday night against Cologne, looking ahead to Chelsea and lots more. Have a good one.
