We come to it at last...the great battle of our time...

“We come to it at last…the great battle of our time…”

Ahhhhhh, that Friday feeling.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that bank holiday feeling.

Smashing out nine hour days (commute not included) can really take it out of you I'm sure you’ll all agree, and there's no better feeling than an oncoming weekend of football. We’d better make the most of it before a spectacularly ugly “international break” rears its head, or an “international break” rears its spectacularly ugly head, which ever displeases you most.

So, it’s Stoke this weekend, and I think we only played them about 5 games ago if we include last season. I don't know about you, but this fixture always evokes a certain Lord of the Rings-esque, “Elves against the Orcs”, type feeling. It’s the beautiful against the ugly, the successful against the failed, the good against the bad, one style being a gross perversion of the other. That’s about as biased a view as one can hold if you ask me, but it’s what I'm known for.

Delving straight into team news and we have little difference from last week. Wenger mentioned in his press conference that Koscielny is still injured and resting, while our longer term infirms are all still infirm. Oxlaide is apparently ready to make an appearance however, which is a boost to the squad for sure. In the last game there wasn’t too much replacement material in the wide areas after Podolski and Walcott left the pitch. While Wenger has recently stated that Oxlaide officially comes under the CM label nowadays, he certainly has his uses out wide and can provide a huge injection of carbs off the bench. With Kos out for another week it all but guarantees Mertesacker a starting place for the second week running, no bad thing in my opinion.

I’d like to see a line up resembling:

Szcz, Jenkinson, Mertesacker, Vermaelen, Gibbs, Diaby, Arteta, Cazorla, Gervinho, Podolski, Giroud.

I think that while Jenkinson hasn’t quite blended with the teams attacking movements as yet, he had a solid defensive game last week and can offer this team a traditional right back, defending first and crossing second. I think the middle 3 pick themselves while Oxlaide regains match fitness and Rosicky and Wilshere are still injured. Wenger had better get in a decent supply of Lemsip because he’ll have quite the midfield headache when those three are all fit.

Walcott is stalling worse than I do when behind the wheel (contract extension wise); while he has unplayable qualities in certain situations, and I’d rather see him at Arsenal than anywhere else, he showed far less desire than Gervinho did to take people on and create threatening situations. Starting Pod out wide and dropping Walcott to the bench could remind him that he isn’t the guaranteed starter he might think he is. Giroud up top could be the battering ram we need to unlock this Stoke defence, much less the key. His physical qualities ought to give us a presence up front that we have lacked in recent seasons (read height and muscle and/or unparalleled handsomeness from that), and the sooner all the new boys are used to starting together the better.

If we can keep them from opening the scoring on Sunday I’ve no doubt that we’ll walk away with the three points. These affairs tend to be tighter than a tightrope walking, tight wearing tightrope-ist, so I think one goal will swing it either way. The ball will spend a lot of time in the air on Sunday, so we’ll need to see a dominant display from our 2 internationally renowned centre halves.

While I'm a big fan of Santos, I think his cavalier attitude towards defending would mean that Gibbs would always start in this fixture, and Wenger seems to have learned that just because a Brazilian calls himself a left back, it doesn’t necessarily mean that his. Wenger did say that Santos may make the squad, but apparently it depends on his behaviour because he’s still on the naughty step.

Anyhow, regardless of who starts where, I'm confident that we’ll bag out first 3 points of the season (driving licenses not included Santos…ahem).

Can’t wait boys.

Up the Arsenal.

@halls_dja

   

So Long, Song Billong

So Long, Song Billong

So Alex Song has signed for Barcelona, signalling an end to his affiliation with the club. I remember when he first came to The Arsenal, looking a little awkward to say the least. He didn’t seem to be particularly good at anything and was quite representative of our change in policy since moving to Ashburton Grove; buying a player for a pittance and hoping that he would become a first team regular through expert training and plenty of pitch time. There was at least one game where he was booed by fans, harassed and hounded and eventually subbed off if I remember correctly. His first touch wasn’t great, he was supposed to be a defender but couldn’t really tackle and didn’t dominate the air, he wasn’t overly quick, and his shirt always looked far too big for him.

 Quite the contrast to how he left the club, having blossomed into a fine athlete and a commanding central midfielder. He became quite pacey, he filled his shirt with knots of sinew and he could hold off players as well as he could hold onto them (a bit too much pre game opposition hugging for my liking). I don’t care if people say he wasn’t the out and out defensive midfielder we craved, he made more tackles and interceptions than anyone else did, and he developed a killer final ball in the last year of his tenure, something that the Dutch twat made full use of. 

   

He was the penultimate bastion of African vibrancy in a squad bereft of the likes of Toure, Adebayor and our cult hero Eboue (who should still be at the club in my opinion). There was no one to accompany him in a tribal jig after scoring a goal, surrounding the corner flag and making us all doubt our abilities on the dance floor. Santos seemed keen to join in the jives, but he clearly wasn’t up the standard that Song was used to, Gervinho’s forehead obviously hampers any dance moves he may wish to make, and Chamakh doesn’t possess quite the ilk of African vibrancy required. I don’t think anyone else in the squad could pull off the hairstyles that Song did on a weekly basis, and certainly no one looks as good as he did with green, red and yellow sweat bands on. I’ll be honest, I'm genuinely gutted that he’s no longer with us.

I think that anyone who claims that we don't really need Song is correct; but you could easily say that about any player. We've certainly had enough practice at saying it over the last two seasons, what with Cesc, Nasri, and Van Persie all making good use of the exit door. Yet the implications of his departure are less than decent from an Arsenal perspective. If you'd have told me during the middle of the last campaign, after having just lost Nasri and Cesc, that by the start of this season we’d have lost Song and Van Persie too, then I would have been flabbergasted. Don't be under any illusions; Van Persie and Song were the two first names on the team sheet last year, contributing towards 52 goals in the Premier League alone. The Van Persie situation is unique in that it was a player in the last year of his contract (so unique it happened twice in two years!), yet Song had three years left. For a midfielder as effective as he is, with the ability to pass the ball as well as he does, and who fits into our system as perfectly as he does (it was a system developed in tandem with players of Song’s generation), I'm staggered that we sanctioned his sale.

What turns that stagger into full on bewilderment however, is the feeble fee that he went for. £15 million for a 24 year old CM who has the passing potential, in basketball terms, of Magic Johnson. That is perhaps a slight over statement but you cannot deny his effectiveness for us last season.

Footballing intellectuals who sip glasses of orange juice on the Sunday Supplement like to profess that we are a “selling club”, and many of the keenest intellectuals that you’ll find sucking kebab fat from yesterday’s newspapers assert the same. The art of football journalism is a reactionary business. It considers only the previous 90 minutes if we are discussing the entire season, and only the previous season if we are discussing the fullness of association football history in this country. This is how toilet paper like The Sun comes out with headlines proclaiming that we are a club in crisis off the back of an opening day draw, even though in reality we are one of the best run football clubs in the world off the pitch, and pretty bloody good on it too. Simply looking at the Wenger era alone, we have always sold players; we sold Anelka, we sold Petite, we sold Overmars, we sold Vieira, we sold Henry. We’re not the only club; Sir Alex Ferguson sold Beckham, he sold Stam, he sold Van Nistelrooy, he sold Ronaldo, and they were some of the best players in their positions at the time. To be branded a selling club doesn’t necessarily mean that you lack ambition or lack a manager with the strength to rebuke all-comers, it simply means that you have a manager who functions in the real cold and unforgiving world where money doesn’t flow from a hole in the ground in the Arabian peninsula or isn’t taken at gun point by Soviet gangsters.      

In more recent times, Cesc felt the need to return to his home land, Nasri was in the last year of his contract and could earn us a pretty penny, as could Van Persie. The only point of question that I have with Song’s departure is that we didn’t get any significant money for him, and that he genuinely seemed very happy at this club. There have been rumblings of a rift between Song and Le Boss, the result of tardy arrivals to training sessions and complimented by a lack of focus during those sessions. As far as I'm concerned this is just speculation, and as with a lot of the unknown about Arsenal Football Club, we may only know for sure when (and if) Arsene releases a book.

Until then it’s a great player lost, another to add to our collection, but a position which can certainly be improved upon; we are crammed with talent in the middle of the park, so it’s probably the one area of the pitch I don't mind losing a player. Still, I'm pretty gutted.

Oh, and it turns out that Man United are a  club in crisis after losing their first game of the season, having spent £70 million on an aging centre forward who’s only had one decent season in eight attempts. Who’d have thunk it?      

Best regards

@halls_dja

Arsenal’s season over..? Match review

Arsenal’s season over..? Match review

I guess the result was something of an anti-climax in the end. In the build-up we had news of Van Persie’s back stabbing move into bastard country, leaving the last eight years of his footballing career in a brown and putrid mess on the floor. He assumed that our ship was sinking and hopped across to one he thought was sailing comfortably towards the horizon, leaving his mates behind to bucket out the sea water and patch up the holes from when we hit Ferguson’s transfer sniffing nose. I don’t know what the antonym for “mutiny” is, but that’s basically what our Captain did. The opening game at Ashburton Grove was going to be the big middle finger thrust firmly in his direction, a resounding “we don’t need you anyhow” bellowed up the M1. We could then sit back, enjoy Match of the Day this evening and wait eagerly for Persie to roll his ankle in his first match on Monday night, getting the working week off to a good start.

Yet rather than the game being read from that particularly well written script, the match turned into more of an impromptu improv session which didn’t rouse too many laughs. Even though we dominated the ball and held 70% possession, even though we our passing completion was over 90%, even though we had far more efforts on goal than they did, we took away the same number of points when Chris Foy chirruped his whistle. While Sunderland will be looking at their point with eyes glistening with happiness, most Arsenal fans will be casting our point a sour scowl. The result didn’t do too much to silence those who claim that we will be nothing without the Flying [north] Dutchman.

I don’t wish to join in the throngs of over-reacting fans who take to Twitter, Facebook and other online media platforms, slating missed chances, a lack of ambition etc blah and so on. It was the first game of the season; we dominated the ball, should have scored and looked comfortable at the back. We looked a little out of practise as you’d expect, but the recent additions bedded in well and looked at home in their new surroundings, suggesting a short acclimatisation period to come. While three points would have been the ideal start, the performance and the individuals that weren’t available make for an exciting month or two ahead. Sagna is set to return to right back in the coming weeks and having the driving forces of Wilshere and Oxlaide through the middle of the park is certainly no bad thing. As someone on Twitter mentioned, this time last year we drew 0-0 and had two players suspended for three games in the aftermath, so today’s result is a definite improvement.

The nature of internet football streams often means that the viewing of a game is anything but smooth, and as a result I may have missed the odd moment where a player did well or did poorly. From what I could gather however, some players did perform particularly well. 

Cazorla seemed to play with a level of comfort that belied his virginity on English soil, nipping in and out of opposition players to create space and link with our three forwards. His pass to Giroud was superb, cutting their line and creating an opportunity to score that really ought to have been taken, but our nouveau Frenchman spurned the chance that should have provided us with the three points. It was a shame because his movement to link with Cazorla was fantastic, so I'm hopeful that this partnership will be one that thrives in the coming weeks. 

From what I have read online, a lot of people seem to be put off by Podolski’s performance, yet I thought he did well in his first start. He acted as a surprisingly good target man, holding off O’Neill’s defenders and helping to link our forward play. He didn’t really get on the end of many moves (bar one which ended up going out for a corner), but he’s got undeniable ability and doesn’t seem like the kind of player who needs many opportunities to score. He was lunching off left overs for most of the game and didn’t have any clear cut chances, but if any fans are going to ignore how good he has been over the last six years and focus only on yesterday’s debut, then I’d say those fans are thicker than clay cake.  

Gervinho was our most effective player aside from Cazorla, and if you compare his efforts to Theo’s then there's only one winning performance in my opinion. Gervinho took players on, hit the by-line on multiple occasions to pull back crosses and genuinely made a nuisance of himself. While he did still commit the odd deadly sin (running the ball out of play for example) I was encouraged by what he brought and hope to more of the same in the coming weeks.   

  

For the rest, we look like a team that needs a game or two more to really come together and develop the clinical nature that games like yesterday required. While we had 23 shots on goal we only managed a less-than-poor 3 shots on target. Teams come to Ashburton Grove to park the bus and it’s our prerogative to break them down and get the result we need. We normally accomplish this but we stalled yesterday; the car isn’t broken, it’s just lost a couple of parts, gained some new ones and needs a couple of miles to run smoothly again.

However, was yesterday a symptom of a preseason focused more on marketing than football preparation? I’ll give that a bit of thought and get back to you.

Again, thanks for reading.

@halls_dja   

                 

Persie Ponderings and Sunderland preview

Well it's that time of the year again, the time when the talking stops and the action commences. All the pronouncements of oncoming club domination over pub tables dripping with lagers and ales, ciders and jams will be put to the test. It's been a typically volatile summer for The Arsenal, the usual highs and lows complementing each other beautifully like the ups and downs of the hilly countryside, until finally we roll into the congested station and the excitement begins.

 

I'll not rattle on with Van Pur$ie jargon as I'm sure you've read and heard enough over the last day or so to make your eyes and ears bleed (if you listened to his words about how signing for United makes him feel like a little boy I'm sure you'd have smelt enough bullshit to make you nasal exits bleed too!). One thing I will say is that there's anger, betrayal, and disappointment in the minds of all gooners, yet over shadowing these emotions is a wonderfully British adage..."keep calm and carry on". As a fan base, we seem to have collectively adopted to stance that many mid teenagers do when they first visit Amsterdam, basically "fuck that Dutch cunt".

 

We move onwards and upwards, in that order, and look forward to welcoming him back to The Emirates in late November.
Our squad has bounded forward in leaps over the last couple of months, and we're a piece or two away from a serious challenge to the reign of Manchester. We've added firepower, we've added midfield creativity, and hopefully with the know-how of Bould we can bring in some defensive team stability. We have the parts to create a solid defensive unit, I'm sure Steve will bring the manual to build our structure.

Tomorrow sees us face Sunderland in our first game of the season, and its quite a stiff test to open with. We rarely find it easy against The Black Cats, yet on our home turf we have a significant advantage, namely that we find it easier to play our passing game on a football field than a recently ploughed field. Wenger managed to squeeze in a comment or two about Sunderland in a press conference dominated by a certain serpentine usurper, and he mentioned their potency on the counter attack. We've been caught by them before in this manner, and hopefully this time our defenders ankles won't rupture during their fast break. The lack of littered farming utensils left on The Emirates field ought to help prevent this.

 

However, on a serious note we did look susceptible to a swift counter break during pre season, so it's certainly an area we will have to concentrate heavily on. I have far more confidence in us remaining organised at the back with Mertesacker present, regardless of how superb Koscielny and Vermaelen are individually. He brings a level of concentration and discipline that I think we can often lack with Verm and Kos, as they're both fonder of a wander over yonder half way line than our gangly German is. We haven't dropped any points to Sunderland in the league for the last two seasons and our home record had been perfect against them since they got promoted, so more of the same will be required tomorrow. Wenger has placed heavy emphasis on the need for a positve start to this campaign, and even though we lost our captain on the eve of kickoff, it doesn't quite feel the same as last year; we were in control of the sale, and we have adequately replacements ready to shine.

It wouldn't feel like the start of the campaign unless we were carrying a barrow full of injuries, and players haven't disappointed in this regard. Oxlaide and Wilsher will not be available for selection, along with Rosicky and Sagna and of course Koscielny.

Therefore I would pick the following team:

Szcz, Jenkinson, Mertesacker, Vermaelen, Santos, Song, Arteta, Cazorla, Walcott, Gervinho, Podolski.

 

Jenkinson is a young player who has red running through his veins (!) being an Arsenal lad, but I think he has a lot to prove with Sagna unavailable. While his crossing is probably the best at the club, and he has a fair portion of pace, his positioning can be rather poor so he'll need to be heavily marshalled by Merts and Verm. While Santos is clearly an attacking midfielder masquerading as a left back, he can make a tackle or two and his strides forward can be very productive. I'd start Gervinho based on his good work in preseason and his premier league experience, and tomorrow will be a good opportunity to show some "end product". Song appears to be on his way out of the club, yet while he's here we may as well make use of him.

 

Thanks a bunch for reading, plenty more to follow on the site.

UTG.

Hall's Debut

All I am intending to do with this initial post is gather the aesthetics of the blog, and how it will look to the viewer. Not only will this piece have nothing to do with Arsenal Football Club, but it will mention it just once.