Morning,
I feel a bit groggy after a crap night’s sleep. One of those where you keep waking up for no good reason but with vivid dreams between wakey-up bits. Bah.
Anyway, a fair amount on the agenda this morning so let’s get to it. We’ll start with Emmanuel Adebayor who says he’d be happy if he didn’t score another goal this season once the club won a trophy. To be fair to him he’s giving that a good go.
I know what he means though, the team is the most important thing and you can’t really argue with that. He says that replicating his 30 goal season last time around was always going to be difficult but claims he’s a better player now, saying:
I am getting assists now too and getting closer to being a complete footballer. I can miss with my left, miss with my right and miss with my head too, which is good for a striker.
It certainly is! We’ve been over the ‘What’s wrong with Adebayor?’ thing a few times. 30 goals in a season is something not many forwards do. Thierry Henry did it consistently for us but Adebayor is no Thierry Henry, I think we all know that. I suppose what’s irked people most is the apparent lack of workrate and effort which had made him so effective.
If, on return from his injury, he starts to do that again then I can certainly see him miss another few goals before the end of the season. And the competition for his place might not do him any harm at all either.
Meanwhile Samir Nasri has his own opinion on what Arsenal have been missing this season. He says:
I don’t think it is a central midfielder that Arsenal have been lacking. What we have really been missing is the injured players and when they come back you’ll see a different face to this Arsenal team.
Given that one of those players is a central midfielder, and by far the best central midfielder we’ve got, then I’m not sure I can agree with Nasri. But when you consider we lost games this season with Cesc, with Walcott etc then it does hint at the problem lying elsewhere.
Certainly we’ve become more solid at the back. William Gallas is playing as well as he ever has done. Cynics might suggest that he’s keeping his head down, playing well and staying out of the limelight to put himself in the shop window. If that’s the case then fair enough, in the short term we’ve got greater worries than what’s motivating certain players, as long as they’re motivated.
Kolo Toure says new signing Andrei Arshavin will need time to adapt to English football. A run of the mill article on a slow news week or the first little hint that he might not start on Saturday due to the incredible form and passion of Eboue?
There’s some stuff from new CEO Ivan Gazidis but it appears to be a rehash of stuff from a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty sure it’s from an interview with the official site. He talks about stability in the managerial position, the benefits of that, the long-term future of the club and the goals in the short term.
As I’ve said before fans, generally speaking, find it difficult to show too much interest in the long term, particularly when things aren’t going as well as expected on the pitch. We don’t really care that we have a group of young players, we just see a group of players who aren’t getting results. We don’t care about season ticket waiting lists, financial fundamentals or anything else when it comes to the 3pm on a Saturday (or 5.15pm on a Saturday, or 1.30 or 4pm on a Sunday or ….)
When you hear some fans wonder if Usmanov taking over might not be a good thing for Arsenal then it’s a measure of how ‘in the now’ some fans are. The task for the manager is to ally short term achievement with the long term thinking. It’s certainly going to be an interesting run in this season.
Despite the transfer window being closed and summer moves being the last thing on anyone’s mind there are a couple of speculative stories this morning. The Mirror links us with a summer move for Real Madrid’s Klaas-Jan Huntelaar. He only moved there in December but is apparently unhappy and willing to move. We have so many strikers as it is though. Unless we’re going to start playing 3-2-5 I can’t see it happening.
Elsewhere The Sun says we’re after French defender Mamadou Sakho. He’s 18 and plays for PSG, that’s as much as we know.
Right, that’s about that. More tomorrow.
