Posts filed under 'Premier League'
September 25th, 2011
RVP celebrates his 100th Arsenal goal
Match Report | Highlights | Arsene’s reaction
In the circumstances, this was just the result we needed. Three goals, three points, a clean sheet, and a landmark moment for the talismanic Robin van Persie.
At half-time, the result was still very much in the balance. It was 0-0, and Wojciech Szczesny had produced an outstanding early save to keep his sheet clean. Arsenal should have gone ahead when Mikel Arteta played in Gervinho, but the Ivorian’s touch was too heavy and the ball ran through to Jussi Jääskeläinen.
Bolton were marking very tight in midfield and Arteta seemed to be carrying all the creative responsibility. Aaron Ramsey was having little impact, and Walcott and Gervinho struggled for space on the flanks. Despite missing Gary Cahill through illness, Bolton looked secure at the back and a threat on the break.
Occasionally, Arsene Wenger’s critics accuse him of lacking tactical acumen. However, his post-match explanation of his half-time team-talk instantly dispels that myth:
“I felt that in the first half we were a bit impatient sometimes, that we didn’t move the ball quickly enough, that our midfielders came a bit deep because we were man-marked. That exposed us a bit to counter-attacking and we had less support up front. In the second half, maybe because they were fatigued as well, our midfielders played higher up and we became straight away more dangerous.”
Our second half display was also helped by two things that settled our obvious nerves: an early goal, and a sending off for Bolton. First, Van Persie finished superbly from a narrow angle after the referee waived play on when Gervinho was brought down in midfield. Then David Wheater was dismissed for tugging back Theo Walcott after he’d been played in by an improving Ramsey.
It was a game in which we saw the good and the bad of Walcott. He showcased his electrifying pace, racing behind the defence to leave Wheater fatally training, and reaching a Ramsey pass to cross for RVP to nudge home his second goal of the game and 100th for Arsenal. He also showed just why he frustrates, missing a couple of glaring opportunities – one when set clean through by the impressive Alex Song. On balance it was an effective display, and Arsene will hoping that the knee injury which forced him to limp off is not too serious.
It was that second goal, created by Walcott, that killed the game, and made for a fantastic landmark for Van Persie. He joins sixteen other Arsenal centurions in passing the milestone, and his pride in doing so will only be tempered by the thought of how many he might have were it not for a succession of injuries.
Alex Song gabbed a deserved late third, stepping inside his man to curl in to the top corner. The three points mean that a win at White Hart Lane next weekend would take us above them in the league – as if any more incentive for a North London Derby were needed.
I thought there were plenty of positives to take from today’s game, albeit against ten men. Mikel Arteta continues to look every inch the class act we hoped he would be, and Alex Song appears to be stepping up to the midfield mantle with some incisive passing to match his essential physical presence.
At the back we coped well with the supposed threat of Kevin Davies, on as an early sub for the injured N’Gog. Mertesacker and Koscielny were happy to let Davies win the majority of long-balls; they got tight enough to him to prevent him bringing the ball down, and were able to intercept the second ball every time. For all the headers Davies won, barely a single one reached a team-mate.
Our concentration at set-pieces was better too. It was heartening that when defending a corner in stoppage time, at 3-0 up, Wojciech Szczesny was bellowing at his team-mates to concentrate. A clean sheet will do the defence a world of good.
Next up it’s Olympiakos in the Champions League. Another home game, and a chance to maintain that momentum ahead of that crucial derby game a week today.
September 24th, 2011
In the build-up to today’s crucial match with Bolton Wanderers, Arsene Wenger has compared himself to ursus maritimus – that cuddly killer, the polar bear.
“Since I arrived in England there have been a lot of things said.
Personally I do not complain. I am supposed to take the bullets and absorb them. Like a bear, a polar bear.
In fairness, they don’t hurt me too much. You worry more about the young player who gets in the team at the moment and gets slaughtered. I remember when I was 19 that was much more difficult for me to take.”
Whilst I understand Arsene’s intention – to depict himself as a shield for his players, taking the weight of criticism upon his experienced shoulders – I would question some aspects of his chosen analogy. I’m not sure where Arsene’s got his info, but I’m not convinced polar bears are “supposed” to take bullets at all. When plucky Tommies went over the top in the Great War, they did not send a squadron of polar bears out first as cannon fodder. Shooting a polar bear is, I’m pretty sure, illegal. They’re endangered, after all.
It’s here that Arsene’s analogy begins to right itself and come bobbing up on the side of truth once more. The threat of global warming has led scientists to suggest polar bears could be eliminated within 100 years. Lose against Bolton today, and Arsene could find himself under an even more immediate threat of extinction.
The team will be very similar to the one that started at Blackburn. Tomas Rosicky has recovered and is back in the squad, but is unlikely to dislodge any of Song, Ramsey and Arteta. The only possible changes are on the flanks – Arsene Wenger will have to choose between Kieran Gibbs and Andre Santos, and is likely to reintroduce Theo Walcott, most likely at the expense of Andrey Arshavin.
Alex Chamberlain is in the squad, and Arsene insists, “ready to play”:
“With the ball, he’s ready. Off the ball he plays now like a young talented boy and he has to take responsibility in the senior team.
That will demand two or three months and after he will be there.”
If we’re in a winning position he might get off the bench today to make his home league debut.
I’m optimistic we’ll begin to turn out form around this afternoon, but the day’s undoubtedly been clouded by some bad news: Jack Wilshere will undergo surgery on his ankle and is likely to be out until Christmas at the earliest. It’s huge blow. With Cesc and Nasri gone, Jack is comfortably our most accomplished and inspirational midfield player. This team ought to be being built around him – instead, he’ll be absent for half the season. The only positive spin I can put on it is that I’d rather have him fit for the second half of the season than the first, when we reach the crunch period and the accumulation of points is all the more vital.
Whether or not we get Champions League football, there are already ominous signs for next summer. The quintet of Andrey Arshavin, Thomas Vermaelen, Robin van Persie, Theo Walcott and Alex Song all have less than two years to run on their existing deals. If new contracts aren’t tied up this season, we could find ourselves over a barrel as we did with Samir Nasri. Arsene doesn’t exactly sound confident of reaching agreements with all players concerned:
“We will try to convince them. Our desire is there to do it and we are ready to sit down with them.
After that we see where we go but the gap on that front has become bigger for us so, today, I cannot say that if we go to the maximum [deal] we are sure to sign a player – even if we do that we are not sure.”
To compound your distress, Arseblog reports that Darren Dein (the machiavellian marketeer behind the exits of Henry, Clichy, Cesc & Nasri) is now representing the interests of both Song and Van Persie.
All that fun can wait for another day. For now, we need to focus on beating Bolton – who we’ve just been drawn against in the League Cup, as fate would have it. Come On You Gunners.
September 17th, 2011
Yakubu wheels away after exploiting more dreaful defending
Match Report | Highlights | Arsene’s reaction
Arsenal’s fresh start is already tinged by the familiar odour of decay. After scraping past Swansea and nicking a point from Dortmund, our shortcomings were once more horribly exposed in a 4-3 defeat to struggling Blackburn.
It was, without doubt, one of the strangest games I’ve seen. But Arsenal conspire to make the strange familiar, and the impossible plausible. Only we could twice blow a lead at Ewood Park, conceding four goals to a side that, until today, had managed just the one. It means that Blackburn, whose manager was the subject of protests calling for his sacking prior to the game, have now moved above us in the league table.
The result is made all the more baffling by our dominant first-half display. Gervinho and Mikel Arteta both netted impressive first goals for the club, sweeping home after moves which both involved incisive passing from Alex Song. Song, Arteta and Ramsey were dominating the game, and ahead of them the movement of the Ivorian winger was causing havoc in the Blackburn back line.
The Arsenal strikes sandwiched Blackburn’s first equaliser, which gave warning of what was to follow. Arsenal, the replays hsowed, had a neat defensive line – unfortunately it was on a diagonal rather than a horizontal, and both Koscielny and debutant Santos were playing Yakubu onside as he raced through to toe-poke brilliantly beyond Szczesny.
That said, we still looked comfortable, and should arguably have gone in at half-time at 3-1 – Gervinho choosing to shoot rather than square to an unmarked RVP after a brilliant burst from an in-form Arshavin. The news boys were slotting seamlessly in to our swashbuckling style, and I expected us to come out after the break in search of the crucial next goal – the one that would define the pattern of the game.
That goal, as now know, went to Blackburn. Andrey Arshavin was harshly penalised for a backtracking slide on the left-flank. When Ruben Rochina clipped the resulting free-kick in to the box, Scott Dann’s flicked header was turned in to his own net by Alex Song. Arsenal’s new zonal marking system, which had looked ropey in the first half, relies on preventing a Blackburn player from reaching the ball. It does not, however, legislate for our own men accidentally putting the ball in the net.
Blackburn couldn’t believe their luck, and began to play like a team believing it might be their day. Within nine minutes, they were ahead. Another set-piece, a corner this time, found N’Zonzi unmarked at the back-post. He fired across goal and Yakubu – offside – tapped in.
There was worse to come. From an Arsenal corner, substitute Martin Olsson broke at breakneck speed, hurdling challenges from Santos and Johan Djourou, who had a nightmare as a replacement for the injured Bacary Sagna, to see his cross turned in to his own net by Koscielny. Our third own goal of the season – more than we have chalked up in the past two years combined.
In a game as surreal as this, and with the way we had played in the first half, rescuing the tie didn’t seem impossible. Theo Walcott and Marouane Chamakh were thrown on, and with five minutes to go the latter provided some hope with a thumping header – his first league goal in almost ten months. We had chances to equalise, too: Mertesacker and Chamakh again spurning presentable opportunities created by crosses from Santos, who unsurprisingly looked better going forward than back.
All that history will record, of course, is the result; the cause of which will surprise no-one: some apocalyptically bad defending. Today we learnt what most of us already knew: that adding new personnel won’t change the fundamental problems of organisation and coaching that dog our defensive displays.
Arsene seems to admit that we were in dire straits at the back:
“It just looked like we had a lack of focus for what we knew they were good at – corners and free-kicks.
You cannot say you are not worried when you see the performance we put in today. It’s just not defensively solid enough.
At the moment we do not have the capability to focus defensively for 90 minutes to win games. It is important you do not give cheap goals away like we did.”
Staggering admissions from the manager, and one only hopes he has some idea of how to combat the malaise. Signing Santos and Mertesacker is all very well – although both struggled today – but the one addition many fans were crying out for was someone on the coaching staff to provide a bit of guidance and discipline. It hasn’t happened, and the likes of Martin Keown will continue to dissect our errors on the sofa of the BBC when they could be doing so on the training ground.
By the end of the weekend we could be eleven points behind the league leaders, after just five games. We’ve now conceded 14 Premier League goals already – in 1998/99 we conceded 17 in 38 games. Last season in took us until mid-November to ship that many.
There’s a lot of rage out there on the internet. Fuming fans are looking for someone to blame, and inevitably their ire is turned on the manager. Myself? I’m more calm. I’ve taken a lot of stick over on Twitter for being “out of touch” and “in denial”, but I think it comes down to having already adjusted my expectations.
From the moment we lost Cesc Fabregas, we ceased to be title contenders. Losing Samir Nasri merely compounded that fact. A clutch of knee-jerk signings on deadline day boosted the squad, but not enough to change our status in an evolving league. City, Chelsea and United have got the top three sewn up. We’re part of the scrabble below, hoping to maintain fourth place and our Champions League status.
That’s as high as my sights ago. We can not and will not win the league, or indeed Champions League. We might have a stab at a domestic cup, but even the hunt for an overdue trophy has to be below fourth spot in our list of priorities. As Arsene suggested on Friday, we are at the start of a new cycle. Whether or not he’ll be here to see the completion and fruition of it, we can’t know. What we do know is that retaining the financial fillip and elite status provided by Champions League football is essential to help this club get back to the top. Without it, we genuinely run the risk of slipping in to a period of obscurity.
If you’re insistent that Arsenal must achieve more this season then I suggest you switch off now, because the next eight months will be rather pointless viewing. The realistic aim, that fourth spot, remains very much on the table. I believe that come the end of the season, we will be in contention. In fact, call me crazy, but I still think we’ll get it.
There were, amidst the chaos, positive signs. In the first half, and right at the end of the second, we played the best football we have mustered this season – possibly since around February last season. Arteta and Gervinho looked fine additions, and I began to see just how Arsene might manage to pull us out of the fire.
There was misfortune, too, in the goals we conceded. Any side that wins a game courtesy of two own-goals will hold their hands up and say they were a tad lucky – and therefore, by default, we were a little unlucky. Yakubu, too, was offside, and Arsenal had a decent shout for a penalty denied in the dying moments. We had 24 attempts to Blackburn’s 10, and 13 corners to their two.
I can’t sit here and tell you that Arsenal defended anything other than dreadfully. Nor can I tell you that we’ll turn this round and become title challengers. What I can tell you is that I saw signs today that we are perfectly capable of finishing fourth in this league. It will take a lot of work, and a few changes, but it can happen. And if you care about the future of this club you had better hope it does.
The manager will not walk away. Nor will he be sacked. Like it or not, he is here for this season. You may believe that this mess is of his creation, and I’d probably agree. However, I still believe he can get us out of it.
September 17th, 2011
With the tumultuous start to the season we’ve had, it’s easy to forget that there are clubs far worse off than us. Arsenal fans have been so disillusioned that they’ve even forgotten to laugh at Tottenham, who had a nightmarish summer and look all but certain to drop out of the top four. Today’s opponents, Blackburn Rovers, are even worse off than our neighbours. Arsenal’s visit today coincides with a march of protest against manager Steve Kean.
Kean was a marked man from the day of his appointment. Like Roberto Mancini at Man City, he committed the cardinal sin of replacing a manager much-loved by the British media – in this instance Sam Allardyce, rather than Mark Hughes. He’s also a client of unpopular football agent Jerome Anderson, who since brokering the Venky’s takeover seems to have become the wizard behind the curtain at Blackburn. His influence extends so far that Blackburn have now added Jerome’s son Myles to the playing staff.
Kean, it seems, is a sacking waiting to happen. Even the bookies agree. But his players seem to feel differently, as anyone who watched their spirited draw at Craven Cottage last weekend will know. Defeat would reportedly have cost Kean his job, and his team ran through walls to earn a point – almost literally in the case of Junior Hoilett, who was flattened by Mark Schwarzer as he chased on to a loose ball.
Hoilett is part of exciting group of young attacking players, along with Mauro Formic and Ruben Rochina. At the back, they remain sturdy, with the towering Chris Samba now partnered by fellow one-time Arsenal target Scott Dann. Blackburn’s league position is not representative of their squad. And, regardless of how they’re faring, they always seem to raise themselves for a game against Arsenal.
There is positive news on the squad front. Aaron Ramsey training normally on Friday and should be fit to start, whilst Alex Song and Gervinh0 are finally back from the suspensions they carelessly picked up on the opening day. I expect all three to start, with Ramsey for Benayoun the only likely change from the team in Dortmund.
Slowly, our season is beginning to move in a positive direction. It’s essential that momentum isn’t halted today. Come On You Gunners.
September 11th, 2011
Mikel Arteta congratulates Andrey Arshavin
Match Report |Â Highlights |Â Arsene’s reaction
One senses it could all have been rather different. An early goal would have settled Arsenal nerves and shattered Swansea resolved. We should have had one, too: inside the first minute, an eager and energetic Mikel Arteta hassled his man off the ball and played in Aaron Ramsey, who slipped when put through on goal. Had he kept his feet and his composure, Arsenal might have gone on to record a resounding victory.
Doubtless some would still have complained. There has been much whining about how we failed to put a newly-promoted team to the sword, but I think that shows a lack of respect both for Swansea and our current predicament. Yesterday, all we needed was a win. After shifting eight goals in our last game, a clean sheet would have been nice too. We finsihed with both. To complain would be churlish and naive.
Arsenal started with two debutants. Per Mertesacker partnered Laurent Koscielny in front of Wojciech Szczesny, whilst Mikel Arteta formed a midfield trio with Aaron Ramsey and Emmanuel Frimpong. Gibbs and Sagna supported Arshavin and Walcott on the wings, and Robin van Persie led the line. The substitutes bench contained remaining new boys Park, Santos and Benayoun – Alex Chamberlain was unlucky to miss out after showing some fine form for the England U-21s.
Aside from Ramsey’s early chance, there were other opportunities – Arsenal were generally better in the first half than the second, and on-loan Spurs defender Caulker had to produce a brilliant goal-line clearance to deny Theo Walcott after he had been played in by Arshavin.
It was the Russian who got the goal, in bizarre circumstances. Michel Vorm, who had started his career in English football in fine form, collected a loose ball and went to throw it out to his midfielder. Just as he did so, the improbably named Angel Rangel wandered in to his path. The ball bounced off the defender, leaving the retreating Arshavin to pass the ball in to an abandoned goal. The goal was comical in circumstance but brilliant in execution: a left-footed opportunity from such a narrow angle left Andrey with plenty to do.
It was Arshavin’s first goal at the Emirates since the victory over Barcelona – and his best performance in a long-time. Although nominally playing from the left, he drifted inside to combine with Arteta and Van Persie and looked, for the hour he was on the field, our most dangerous attacker. The aftermath of the Barca game saw us embark on a dreadful run that has stretched across the summer – perhaps this strike can book-end that spell and start us off on a good foot once again.
The second half was tense – Swansea struck the bar with a free-kick, whilst RVP thrashed a fight-footed effort against the post. The Welsh side were playing with nothing to lose, whilst Arsenal’s psychological handbrake was firmly on. In the game’s dying moments, Danny Graham ought to have done better with a volley on the turn from six yards out. The full-time whistle was greeted a sigh of relief rather than a roar of approval.
But we got there. We have our first league win of the season, and the smallest of blocks on which to build. There’s a big week ahead with trips to Dortmund and Blackburn. Positive results then could change the complexion of our season for the better. Like Luke Chadwick after a dose of isotretinoin.
This was an unfamiliar-looking Arsenal team – one still learning to appreciate and take advantage of each other’s patterns of play. I thought Mikel Arteta made a seamless transition in to red-and-white, particularly in the first half, when we was certainly the general of an otherwise inexperienced midfield. How he’ll relish returning to the grand stage of the Champions League on Tuesday.
Per Mertesacker was steady if not spectacular. In the first-half Szczesny had to produce a fantastic stop after Graham beat the big German to a cross, but after that he seemed to settle. His distribution was intelligent, and some of his tackling immaculate. He’s not the quickest, but seems to have the positional awareness to prevent that being a problem.
Yossi Benayoun made it a hatrick of debuts with a thirty minute cameo as a replacement for Andrey Arshavin, and I thought he did really well (video highlights). He’s a dynamic, creative player who isn’t afraid to put in a defensive shift too.
There were aspects of our performance which concerned me, certainly. Emmanuel Frimpong showed that whilst he is undoubtedly promising, he has much to learn in when it comes to his use of the ball. Kieran Gibbs, too, looked unconvincing. Perhaps he was bemused by the comically small but effective Nathan Dyer, or suffering from a lack of support from Arshavin, but Swansea certainly had most joy down his flank.
All that said, come the final whistle, we had what we needed. Dortmund will be a far sterner test, but we’ll be far better prepared with a victory under our belts. Bring on the big boys.
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