december 8th
Yet another disappoint….erm, no, wait. That was quite good, wasn’t it?
An early goal from José Antonio Reyes (his first since 1875) settled the nerves and Thierry Henry scored his 17th goal in 23 games this season when he got to a looping Flamini block before the defender. We went 3-0 up when Robert Pires played in Cesc, who calmly knocked the ball back over the defender before finishing beautifully with his left foot. I know he’s scored before but a tap in at the end of a 5-0 against Wolves can be considered just a warm up compared to this. He nearly scored another when he dribbled his way into the box but was foiled at the last minute. This boy is something else.
That was just after Rosenborg had scored. Manuel Almunia dropped a clanger allowing their attacker to hook in. It was a bread and butter catch for the keeper but he gave Arsene Wenger something to think about with his mistake. This came after he made a very smart save to deny Rosenborg when we were just 1-0 up. He may have been nervous but to me he doesn’t look significantly better than Jens (being polite here) and if I had to choose between the two for Sunday’s game against Chelsea the Spaniard would not be keeping goal.
Not long after they scored we got a fairly generous penalty and Robert Pires expertly tucked it away to make it 4-1 at half-time. The second half was predictably slow, even we were never going to throw away that kind of a lead. It was dull stuff until Robin van Persie came on with about 15 minutes to go. Immediately he showed his class and had a couple of decent chances to score which he didn’t take until José played him in and he finished cheekily to make the final score 5-1. He’s got to be really pushing for a start now and as much as I love Dennis the new Dutchling on the block looks to really have something more than the old guy now. We looked much more threatening when he came on. Hoyte looked pretty assured at right back while Flamini was busy and much, much better than he was at Old Trafford.
So Arsenal finish the group unbeaten and thanks to Panathinaikos’ 4-1 win over PSV we ended up top of the group. That means that we play our first leg away in the second round. So lots to think about for the manager, whatever his problem with Lehmann is it’s pretty clear than Almunia is not the answer. I think it’s fair to say he’s no better than Graham Stack or Stuart Taylor and in each of his three recent first team appearances he’s made a pretty large mistake, two of them resulting in goals. I think the goalkeeping situation is something that could play a large part in our season now. I expect Jens to come back for the Chelsea game and maybe playing Almunia will have given him more focus and improve his performances (which were not that bad to begin with). However, there is the possibility that he’s now feeling the pressure which may make him nervous and cause mistakes at which point we end up with two extremely dodgy keepers. I hope AW knows what he’s doing with this one.
Afterwards the boss declared himself happy but stressed that the team had only achieved two of the three targets he set them. First was to beat Birmingham, second to beat Rosenborg and qualify for the knock-out stages of the Champions League, the third is to beat Chelsea on Sunday. With Chelsea losing to Porto does that mean they’re in crisis now?
Anyway, everything looks a lot better than it did a week ago. Credit to the boss and the team. Keep it up, lads.
