December 26th, 2008 12:27am
GilbertoSilver
Hello all.
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s festivities – thanks to all those you sent seasonal greetings through the site. I had a great day, and ate twice my own body weight in various roasted meats. Moving has become difficult.
Boxing Day is always a great day for sport. Today Arsenal travel to Aston Villa in what has become a massive game. In the week we lost Cesc Fabregas for almost the rest of the season, we face our closest rivals for a Champions League spot. After they won at the Emirates, defeat would leave us six points adrift and facing a real uphill struggle.
The long-term absentees (Cesc, Walcott, Rosicky and Eduardo) are all out, with Adebayor suspended, but beyond that the holiday period has meant a slight of absence of up-to-date team news. We don’t know if Kolo Toure is available for consideration, or if Nicklas Bendnter will be fit to partner Robin van Persie upfront.
Whoever plays, we simply have to put in a performance today. I don’t need to build it up anymore. Everybody knows how big a game this is.
I hope the match goes in such a way as to permit your Boxing Day to be enjoyable. Till tomorrow…
December 25th, 2008 12:15am
GilbertoSilver
I typed this on Christmas Eve, so if the world ended today or anything, apologies if this now seems a little out of date.
Just a really quick note to wish you all a very merry Christmas, and if you don’t celebrate Christmas, simply to say I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season. Thankyou all so much for reading the blog – the degree of feed-back and comments is massively appreciated. I really believe the site will continue to go from strength to strength, and that really is all because of you guys.
It hasn’t been the best few months for Arsenal Football Club, but it’s great to support a team who have such a massive online community – it enables you to vent all that frustration and anger at the way things seem to be going, for one thing. At a time when many fans feel increasingly alienated by ticket prices and availability, it is my firm belief communities like this help bring supporters together.
Best wishes to you all, and have a great great day,
GS
December 24th, 2008 01:16am
GilbertoSilver
You might have noticed that unlike a lot of other sites, I didn’t report the news that Cesc would be out for several months yesterday. That’s because a) at that stage it was an isolated story in The Sun, and b) I was in denial, desperately banking on The Sun’s unreliability and hoping that Arsene would announce today that Cesc would only be out for a week.
I was wrong. It’s worse than any of us imagined: four months. The Times calculate that if Arsene’s projection proves to be correct, Cesc could take part in a maximum of eight games at the back end of the season. By that time, who knows what we’ll have left to play for?
I can’t beat around the bush: this is disastrous. I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there who needs me to spell out why, but I’m going to anyway:
- Cesc is our best player
- He is our captain – the decision to bestow the armband upon him was a brave one and now Arsene is without his shiny new unbeaten skipper for the forseeable future
- We have no cover
- We now have to buy cover whilst what we actually need to do is supplement our existing squad
- Alex Song will inevitably get yet more playing time
This Arsenal team has no chance of winning the league without Cesc Fabregas. None. In fact, this Arsenal team without Cesc Fabregas could well struggle for fourth place. He is that important.
So where do we go from here? Well, the answer is simple: the transfer market. At the moment our squad contains three realistic options for central midfield: Denilson, Song, and Ramsey. Diaby is not yet considered as an option, as the quotes from Arsene in this piece make clear. Of the other three, Denilson and Song have many deficiencies, whilst Ramsey is not even 18 until the day of the Villa game. With such a shoddy squad, we really have brought this crisis upon ourselves, and now reinforcements are badly required.
The problem is that we already needed signings before this blow. You assumed we were on the lookout for a partner for Cesc, with perhaps a centre-half and a creative wide-man on Arsene’s shopping list. Now the most pressing concern is finding someone who can fill the void left by Fabregas’s injury.
What would I do?
For me, there are two options. The first is the most obvious one: we buy a new central midfield pairing. We buy the destroyer we’ve lacked since Flamini and Gilberto left, and a more creative partner who can replace Cesc and challenge him for a place when the Captain returns. For the sake of argument, we buy a ‘Barry’ as well as an ‘Arteta’ (the latter being a suggestion made last night by the venerable arseblogger).
The other option? We buy the defensive midfield player, and put him alongside Denilson in the middle. We then buy a creative outlet who plays further up the pitch, possibly on the right or behind a striker – again just for the sake of naming names, let’s say an ‘Arshavin’. Although this would require us to alter the shape of our side, it would mirror our more successful teams of previous seasons, which tended to have two primarily defensive central midfielders, but with wider players granted greater license to roam – it’s a system Man U often employ these days.
The obvious problem with these ideas is that they both involve buying at least two players – and that’s without even looking at the issues we have in defence. Neglect to the squad over the past few transfer windows has left us in a situation where leaks are springing up all over the place. I somehow doubt Arsene has enough buckets to deal with them all in one transfer window.
Before I go, I really do want to wish Cesc the speediest of recoveries. It’s the first remotely serious injury of his career, and I’m sure it’ll really hurt him that he’ll be unable to help the side, especially since he only recently took on the responsibility of the captaincy. If there is one positive to arise from this event, it’s that I know Cesc will be determined to come back from this better than ever, and will doubtless be absolutely committed to remaining at the club and proving himself to be the leader we all know he is capable of being.
That said, it would arguably be unfair of any us to expect a player of Fabregas’s undisputed class to miss out on Champions League Football. Which is why Arsene must act, fast.
Merry Bloody Christmas, eh.
December 23rd, 2008 01:58am
GilbertoSilver
In The Book of Revelation, Four Horsemen are sent as harbingers of the apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. On Friday at Aston Villa, Arsene might field four men who are symbolic of the apocalyptic nature of our midfield options: Eboue, Diaby, Denilson, and Song. Those four aren’t in any particular order, so don’t look for any clever jokes that correspond to their biblical counterparts – I’m far too tired for that kind of wit.
It is going to be a tricky game, though. With Adebayor and Fabregas out, and Nicklas Bendtner also struggling with an injury, we may be forced to field the aforemention Diaby just off Van Persie, with the other three lamented players joining Nasri in midfield.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that we’re being linked with creative players, despite the more pressing need for destructive ones. Zenit St Petersburg seem to think, despite Arsene’s protestations to the contrary, that Arsenal will soon be making a bid for Russian playmaker Andrei Arshavin. Zenit’s General Director, Maxim Mitrofanov, told Russian radio:
“The price tag for Arshavin is £20m, and we are hopeful that Arsenal will make such an offer soon.”
There is certainly one man on the board who has openly admitted he’d like to see Arshavin at Arsenal: Alisher Usmanov. The Russian has also been talking openly about the recent changes in the boardroom:
“What has happened in the last year poses questions. When in the space of a year four members of the board of directors are sacked, when the general director whom everybody had praised is changed, we consider that to be a huge matter — just to sack a major Âshareholder Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith without explanation. Mr Moshiri is now in London and is trying to find out the Âreasons for these sharp changes and according to what explanation we get, we will decide our strategy.”
His seeming ‘disapproval’ at the board’s actions implies an empathy with Bracewell-Smith, and it would be no surprise to see them jump into bed together (figuratively - please) sometime soon. Although Usmanov insists he has yet to speak to Lady Nina about acquiring her stake, he does not deny that he is keen to increase his shareholding in the future. He’s so very very slippery, this one. More to come, I’m sure.
Christmas creeps ever closer. I suppose it’s Christmas Eve Eve, today. I did 90% of my Christmas shopping on Amazon. Stock is no longer limited to CDs and DVDs – I bought all sorts, ranging from a diary to a hot water bottle cased in pink fur (the latter, admittedly, was just for me). As Arsene prepares for his own belated Christmas shopping spree, the question on everyone’s lips must surely be: can you get midfielders on Amazon?
December 22nd, 2008 03:45pm
GilbertoSilver
Arsenal 1 – 1 Liverpool (Van Persie 25, Keane 42)
Highlights here; Arsene’s reaction here
It’s hard to guage how good a result this was. A draw with Liverpool is always somewhat creditable, especially when one considers that they currently top the table. When you factor in that we had ten men for much of the second half, it becomes all the more impressive.
And yet our faint title ambitions probably required a victory. Though to be honest, those ambitions are so faint as to be almost invisible, and I’m inclined to view this as a helpful point towards Champions League qualification rather than two points dropped in the title race.
We may well have won but for the ineptitude Howard Webb. Adebayor’s first booking was, on reflection, justified, but I still don’t believe the secound ‘foul’ even warranted the award of a free-kick.
It was really pleasing to see the way both the team and the crowd rallied after Adebayor’s dismissal. There’s nothing like a sense of injustice to inspire the troops, though inevitably one wonders why neither element can perform like that from the kick-off.
We took the lead through a quite brilliant goal – an inch-perfect long pass from Samir Nasri brought down by Robin van Persie, who chested the ball inside, flipped it back outside with his left-foot, and slammed it in with his right. Deliciously chocolately.
Liverpool’s equaliser was a far less aesthetically delightful version of Van Persie’s strike. Rather than a beautifully flighted pass, they simply hoofed it long up the field. Robbie Keane ran on to it (untracked), and leathered it thoughtlessly (though impressively) into the top of the net. No defender in the world could have prevented Van Persie’s goal. Any defender in the world ought to have prevented Keane’s. Naturally, ours didn’t.
Like I said, after going down to ten men we bossed the game. We also lost Cesc Fabregas to injury, but Alex Song and Denilson stepped up and put in big performances. Their work-rate was exemplary, and Song in particular covered more round with his shuffling run than I’ve ever witnessed him do before. That said, the injury to Cesc exposes just how light we are in that area, and reinforcements remain essential.
Now attention moves to what is arguably an even bigger game: the match at Villa Park on boxing day- and it seems we’ll be without Cesc and Adebayor. It’s vital we don’t lose there – this is our last chance to take points directly off Villa.
One last point before I go: Liverpool cannot win the title. The way in which they entirely failed to take charge of a game against ten men yesterday was indicative of their principle problem: a lack of attacking ambition. They will draw too many games because Benitez is simply too cautious.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Hope everyone is having a good week.
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