Morning, it’s Friday again and we have to get ourselves ready for the biggest game of the season thus far as we prepare to face Chelsea tomorrow.
Typically we get some team news on a Thursday evening, but with the crew not arriving back until the very early hours of yesterday morning, I suspect yesterday was little more than a rub-down day. Hopefully there’s nothing untoward involving the players who played on Wednesday, and by that I mean the ones that would be involved tomorrow anyway.
None of the guys given a chance as the manager rotated will have done anything to earn themselves a place in tomorrow’s team. But, at the same time, while we can look at it as an experiment that failed on the night, maybe it’s just too soon into the season to draw definitive conclusions about them. For example, I thought Mathieu Debuchy and Kieran Gibbs were both very poor, and I expected better from them as a response to the situations they find themselves in, but does it mean that they’re both so abject they should never be selected again?
Next week we have Capital One Cup action and you can be quite sure there’ll be more rotation then too. The opposition, given that it’s Sp*rs and not some team from a lower division, requires that we take the game more seriously than we might have otherwise (‘seriously’ is not quite the right word, but you know what I mean), but it’s those guys, along with Arteta, Oxlade-Chamberlain, and perhaps even Flamini, who will be asked to do a job.
As much as we want them to come flying out of the blocks and to put pressure on the ‘first XI’ players, maybe we do have to understand that some players need more than one game. It’s hard to find fluency and rhythm in your football if you’re playing irregularly. If you think back to Hector Bellerin’s Champions League debut against Dortmund, he had a very difficult night.
Part of that was because he was being asked to make a big step up, but part of it was because Arsenal, as a team, played like twats. We were all over the place that particular evening, and the young Spaniard struggled. It wasn’t, however, fully representative of him as a player. Circumstantially it was a bit different because he was a debutant, but while the rotation didn’t work against Zagreb, some of the failings were exacerbated by a poor team performance overall and the fact we had to play with 10 men for over half the game.
When things go well there is a tendency in some quarters to over-egg the pudding and talk about us as if we’re something we’re not. What we are is a very effective team on its day, capable of good runs of form, but one that still has its weaknesses, and those are exposed too often. Similarly, when things aren’t quite on song, the idea that we’re downright useless and incapable of any better is wide of the mark too.
Yes, Wednesday night was terrible but it’s not as if this is very first time we’ve had a bad night in Europe playing against a team we were expected to beat. It has happened down the years, and will happen again I’m sure:
I guess my point is that we’ve been here before, with title winning squads too, and pretty much always responded well. The loss against Zagreb was annoying and perhaps did expose certain shortcomings in the squad, but maybe we need to see a bit more football this season before we jump to definitive conclusions. If part of the frustration is that we know these players are capable of better, we can’t then overlook that fact when trying to analyse the game in the cold light of day.
I am interested in the response to this on Saturday because what the midweek result has done is increase pressure for a game which was already one from which we had to get something. How we approach it on Saturday will be fascinating. Do we go for it and try and take advantage of their recent poor form? They might have won in Europe, but I’m not sure a team like Maccabi Tel Aviv provides the right kind of challenge to suggest they’ve overcome the problems they’ve been having domestically.
Or do we look at this as what it really is: both teams form aside, this is Arsenal against the champions at a ground where we haven’t had much success in recent seasons, and set-up accordingly? I would hope common sense prevails, but we’ll probably get a better idea of that from the manager after his press conference later on.
Right then, time for this week’s Arsecast and to discuss the midweek shenanigans in Zagreb, the misery of Olivier Giroud, on-field partnerships, and to take a look ahead to Chelsea, I’m joined by Tim Stillman. After that John Cross joins me to discuss his new book about Arsene Wenger, plus you can win one of three copies in a little competition too. And, of course, 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 the Arsecast directly, use the link below the player, and 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.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS
We will have all the team news and more from the press conference over on Arseblog News this morning. Remember, you can follow @arseblognews on Twitter, or like the page on Facebook. It’ll all be there for you throughout the day.
In the meantime have a good one, hope you enjoy the podcast, more here tomorrow as we preview the Chelsea game and more.
