Unfortunately work meant I could only see the first 30 minutes of the game, right up until the point they equalised, so I’m not really in any position to comment on the game as a whole.
Obviously a defeat is never much fun but when you have important players rested and others coming back into the team after long absences due to injury and an inability to get in the side in the first place it doesn’t make your life any easier. A back four with one Champions League debutant (Traore), Hoyte who hasn’t played much this season and Philippe Senderos who is really struggling to become the player we all hoped didn’t help our cause.
As well as that I’m not sure quite why Arsene is so taken with the 4-5-1 at the moment. I know we’re missing van Persie but if Robin was fit we’d play 4-4-2 so I’m not sure why the manager seems to lack confidence in the other strikers in order to play that formation. Our goal was very nice though. We saw the best of Eboue with a ridiculously good backheel down the line and Nicklas Bendtner’s cross was calmly taken down and put away by Eduaro for his 5th of the season. We then saw the worst of Eboue with more over-reacting and diving and rolling. It’s made more frustrating when he follows up genuinely good play with shit like that. A mistake by Senderos gave possession back to Sevilla and when a clearly rusty Gilberto’s weak clearance fell to Keita he put it away beautifully with the outside of his foot to equalise.
And that’s as much as I saw live. Fabiano’s second was a great header but who was (not) marking him(?) and the penalty looked dodgy to me but there you go. There’s no changing it and it’s not really the end of the world. It would have been nice to keep the unbeaten run going but it had to end sometime. There’s still the chance that we can finish top of the group and while it’s certainly an advantage to have your second leg at home in the knock-out it’s not that much of an advantage that progress becomes impossible without it.
As well as that we’ll see how the team copes with defeat. While this will certainly dent our momentum I’m not sure that it’s going to derail us or anything like that so I think we need to keep things in perspective a bit. We said beforehand that if we didn’t perform Sevilla have the players to hurt us and that was the case. Still, let’s put it behind us and move on and pay little heed to the press who have been creaming themselves over us for months but now gleefully roll out headlines calling us ‘flops’. Shaddup. Thankfully the reaction around most of the main Arsenal blogs has been more measured.
Afterwards Kolo Toure wasn’t too happy with the referee. Neither was Arsene Wenger who was sent off for something he said and he branded the 4th official ‘shocking‘. According to the boss:
I do not know why I was sent off, I was really surprised. When Alves was down I said it was naïve to let him gain that time, that is all, and I have been sent off.
It remains to be seen whether or not there’ll be any further punishment because of the incident. As for the loss he said:
An unbeaten record in the Champions League is not important. We had to make decisions because we have a very important December. We had to make choices between the competitions. December for me is about the Premier League.
It’s hard to argue with that. What is telling though is that both Kolo and Arsene had no real complaints about the result, but Kolo remains positive, saying:
We knew that defeat would come but we need to start again and show character. To be a winner you need to come back from these hard things.
Quite so. It’s our first defeat since April of this year so we’re a little bit out of practice. Hopefully pride will have been stung and they’ll react in a positive way against Villa on Saturday who’ll be looking to take advantage of the situation a bit. Time for William Gallas to really earn his stripes, captaining in the face of adversity and all that.
What is worrying is the fact that Cesc seems to have picked up a hamstring strain and we’ll know how bad it is later today, I’d imagine. Even if it is just a slight tweak he could miss a week or two but hopefully they took him off before he could do any real damage to it. Anyway, fingers crossed it’s nothing too serious.
Now it’s time to dust ourselves off and get ready for the next game. December is going to be a huge month, 9 games in total, 3 away league games in a row coming up and this, more than an away game with a weakened team against decent opposition in the Champions League, will show us what this squad is made of.
Elsewhere Emmanuel Adebayor tells Jens he’s just going to have to be patient but he understands where the German is coming from. Yep, Germany.
Don’t forget, for those of you interested in your Arsenal fashion accessories, that there’s still time to enter the Savile Rogue scarf competition. Just listen to this week’s Arsecast for the very simple question and if you fancy £5 off the 1979 tracksuit top then simply go to Toffs and enter the code MK4B2 at checkout. Retail therapy, is that what they call it?
Till tomorrow.
