Morning, it’s gonna be a quiet bank holiday blog this morning. There’s really not a lot stirring.
No doubt Arsene will be keeping his remaining centre-halves wrapped in cotton wool this week. We know what kind of a position an injury would leave us in so I’m sure vigorous challenges in training will be outlawed.
It’s a big week for us though. Come Sunday we could have little left this season than to play out our remaining league games and ensure we finish top four, at least. Yesterday’s draw between Villa and Everton was the ideal result for us, leaving them 8 and 9 points behind us respectively. There are still 18 points to be played for and the schedule is fairly hectic so there’s no counting chickens just yet.
But while we could find ourselves with no silverware left to play for, the flip side of that is that we could just as easily find ourselves in the FA Cup final and in the semi-finals of the Champions League. The team has been playing well, neither game is easy by any means but there’s no reason why we can’t get results in both games.
Villarreal are without Senna and Cazorla, two of their best midfielders, so their squad is stretched a bit as well. How they cope with the big pitch at the Grove compared to the Highburyesque one at El Madrigal will be interesting, and all through this season we’ve performed well in Europe, for the most part.
On Saturday we’ll be playing Chelsea and they’ll have been through a bruising encounter with Liverpool in the Champions League. Bolton proved they’re not the defensive force they once were and in a local derby against a team with whom we have plenty of history, particularly in recent years, form isn’t even really a factor.
So two big, exciting games to come, and the manager says:
We love the fact we have these big games coming up. There is tension but we like that because if there’s no tension, it means you are not going for anything.
It was interesting to hear the manager refer to the Man City as the ‘bottom’ in that interview that the News of the World stole from L’Equipe. At that point the idea that we’d be on the brink of one final and one game away from the semi-final of the Champions League seemed a bit optimistic. But he, and the players, have turned things around, slowly but surely, and deserve credit for it.
Now we’re into the business end of things we’ll see what they’re really made of. Big players relish big games and we’re going to need our big players to perform. Adebayor, van Persie, Arshavin, Nasri from an attacking point of view. We need Kolo Toure to be a leader at the back, we need Cesc to take control of games and dictate the play from midfield and the team is going to have to work hard to try and cope with the losses at the back which do make things more difficult.
But I’d much rather be here with problems than having a fully fit squad with nothing to play for. Who would ever have thought that a back four of Eboue, Toure, Senderos and Flamini would get us to a Champions League final setting a record for clean sheets/time without conceding? So nothing is impossible. It’s gonna be nerve-wracking but that’s what football is all about. Bring. It. On.
You might have seen stories this morning about Andrei Arshavin complaining about life in London. It’s just selective quoting from this interview in the Telegraph which gives a much more rounded view of how he’s settling in.
So that’s really about it. There’s plenty more to come this week so hold tight.
