Little and large goals beat Nazio + Arsecast 38

Morning everyone, and our awesome pre-season winning streak continued last night with a 2-1 win over Nazio. I didn’t see the game as I was out playing football myself and my aching limbs, feet, torso, skin, organs and extremeties tell me that I might have been best sitting at home watching the Arsenal.

I did catch the goals though. A smart finish from 7’2 Nicklas Bendtner for the first and Eduardo celebrated his work permit with the winner. A header from a corner of all things. At last we’ve found the 5’8 giant we’ve been looking for. It was, I suppose, a rather second string team who, according to comments I’ve been reading, didn’t exactly convince in some areas but it is still pre-season and winning is a nice habit to get into, no matter how scrappy the performance. While you don’t want to get overly positive when you win the Emirates Cup you don’t want to get too negative when you don’t play particularly well either. Results are what matters at the end of the day.

Afterwards captain for the night Philippe Senderos summed up the spirit of the squad, saying:

We want to be at the top, and are going to try our best this year. We do not mind being outsiders like everyone else thinks. We just want to play our own game and prove everyone else wrong.

Good stuff. The manager was pleased that Eduardo got off the mark so quickly, saying:

It’s good that he has not had to wait too long to score. That is when people start to question a striker’s capacity to get goals.

It’s obviously going to be a bit more difficult for him to begin with. It is a big step up from the Croatian league and he’s got to get to grips with new teammates, new language and all that, so a goal like last night’s will take the pressure off a little bit. The next game in the Amsterdam Tournament is against Ajax on Saturday.

Today sees the draw for the final qualifying round of the Champions League and you can see Arsenal’s potential opponents here. While the majority of the teams are quite beatable there are one or two very tricky ties that could crop up. Fenerbache in Turkey could be a difficult one while nobody will want to go to Moscow to play Spartak, least of all Arsene Wenger who has yet to win a match in Russia in all his time at Arsenal. The draw takes place at 11am (hopefully it’s not like the usual parade of shite before they make the draw three hours later).

Update: Sparta Prague. We should have enough for them.

And that’s about that for the news side of things. For those of you in the UK and Ireland this month’s edition of Four Four Two magazine is carrying an article all about Arseblog, so feel free to go out and grab yourself a copy, even if that fat, horrible, scouse prick Rooney is on the front. I bought mine and gouged out his eyes with a compass. It made me feel good. Oh yes.

Now, Arsecast.

In this week’s entirely humour free Arsecast (‘What’s new?’, you say. Ha, what a wag you are) I talk to the Observer’s Amy Lawrence about our pre-season exploits and potential new signings. As well as that there are details of a great fantasy football game on OleOle.com in which you can win yourself great prizes like a trip to the final of next year’s European Championships and Playstation 3s and all manner of good stuff.

To subscribe to the arsecast in iTunes – click here. To download this week’s arsecast directly – click here (14mb MP3). You can find the arsecast archives here. And you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

And there you go. Have yourselves an ache free Friday and there’ll be more tomorrow.