The Soccer Blog: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

Monday 25 October 2010

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

By: Martin | October 25th, 2010

A couple of thoughts on yesterday’s victory over Manchester City, and looking forward to Wednesday’s match against Newcastle:

Sairax did a great job writing up yesterday’s match, but here are some stray thoughts I had on the match:

–Great performance, and great result. Match of the year for us so far.

–That having been said, let’s not get carried away. It was just one match. Against a team that played pretty much the entire match a man down, we really should have won the match against any team in the world. This was the same team that crapped out at home against West Brom just a few weeks ago.

–But it was a good result. Manchester City have dominated us at Middle Eastlands the last few seasons, so it was cathartic and hopefully symbolic for us to hand them their worst home loss in years. And let’s not forget, not even considering all the meta- and symbolic factors, this was a big result — if we had lost, we would have been in 6th, but now we’re in 2nd. And with West Ham (h), Newcastle (h), and Wolves (a) our next 3 away matches, you’d have to think there’s a very good chance of us taking maximum points in the next few weeks, solidifying our grasp on 2nd and making up some ground on Chelsea.

–That was a bizarro Arshavin performance. Hustling, harrying, tracking back, passing when he should shoot, etc. He did pretty well most of the things he does atrociously. Unfortunately, aside from his assist on Nasri’s goal (which really was an amazing pass — very few guys would have had the calmness to hold onto the ball for a beat that close to the goal while Nasri made his run), he didn’t really create anything, which is normally the one thing he does well.

–One thing nobody seems to be talking about regarding the refereeing was the linesman’s incorrect decision to flag Arshavin for offside when Cesc put him through on goal right after the game started. If the flag had stayed down, Arshavin was in a position where odds are he would have put Arsenal up 1-0 almost immediately.

–Mancini has been complaining about the referee’s decision to send off Boyata for his foul on Chamakh at the edge of the box. I can kind of see his point, because it did look like Chamakh’s last touch before the foul put it quite a bit out ahead of him, so I’m not sure how much of a clear scoring opportunity it would have been had he not been fouled. But the reality is that one of the reasons his touch was a bit clumsy was that he saw the foul coming, and that call is always going to go to the attacker. He can’t honestly have much in the way of complaints about the sending off.

–On the penalty miss, I think Cesc telegraphed it a little bit and Joe Hart made a big save. That’s it. It was hardly the terrible penalty many people made it out to me, as I think that kick scores from 9 out of 10 penalties. But people online saying that Cesc, who’s generally been a very good and composed penalty taker for us, should be removed from the job and replaced by Nasri just because Nasri has taken a couple of penalties well lately, is ludicrous.

–And speaking of Nasri, he really is off to an amazing start. Unquestionably our player of the season thus far, and really looks like he’s making the leap this season.

–As I said in the comments yesterday, I thought Flaps was the man of the match for us, as he made several world-class saves, commanded his area well, and didn’t make a mistake. Almunia’s injury just got that much worse, and at this point you’d have to say Flaps is our # 1 keeper. And if he hadn’t made some of those saves, the outcome of the match could definitely have been different.

–Nice to see Adebayor still hasn’t learned the offside rule.

–How in the world did Nigel de Jong make it through that match without picking up so much as a yellow card? Unbelievable.

–Thought Denilson did well for having been put into the lineup just before the match started when Diaby hurt himself during warm-ups (seriously). He really does help keep the ball, makes smart passes, and has much better tactical awareness and positional discipline than Song. If only there were some way to combine him with Song’s physicality and ball-winning ability…

–Nice to see Bendtner open his account on the season. Granted, you all know I’ve backed Bendtner for a while now, but the criticism of him online from Arsenal supporters is just puzzling to me. Did people forget that he scored 9 goals in 12 matches last season, including several late winners which kept us in the title hunt? He has a lot of weaknesses in his game and his personality makes him hard to completely embrace, but let’s show some gratitude, folks.

Okay, but now it’s on to the Carling Cup fixture at mid-week. We travel to St. James Park to play Newcastle in the fourth round of the competition. Ordinarily this would be one we don’t care too much about, but this one feels a bit different somehow. We’ve been eliminated in the fifth round of the Carling Cup the last two seasons, so it would be nice to show some improvement over past performances. And although I think it mainly had to do with the fact that it was a local match against Spurs, Wenger did play a lot of first-team players last round. And given our trophy draught, plus the fact that pretty much all the big teams except Manchester United have been eliminated (6 out of the 16 remaining sides are non-Premiership sides, and only us, United, Aston Villa, and Birmingham are still in it of teams that finished in the top half of the table last season. If we get past this we’re in the quarterfinal, and inching closer to ending the trophyless streak.

I don’t think we’ll field quite as strong a lineup as we fielded against Spurs. And with us only having two fit first-team center backs, that’s going to be a problem. Will Wenger roll out Squillaci and Djourou again, or maybe throw Havard Nordveit, Ignasi Miquel, or Craig Eastmond into the fire? I suspect we’ll see Eboue and Gibbs at fullbacks, Denilson, Lansbury, and someone else (Aneke’s first team debut, perhaps? Rosicky?) in midfield, and probably JET, Vela, and Bendtner (or maybe Rosicky or Walcott playing up front) on the frontline. That’s hardly our first XI, but that’s still not a bad mix of experience and young talent, and a team capable of getting a result.

Other than that, not much in the way of news coming out of the Arsenal camp. Will have a Newcastle preview tomorrow. Until then.

**********

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Category: Arsenal News, Manchester City, Newcastle

Tags: Arsenal News, Manchester City, Newcastle
« Manchester City 0 – Arsenal 3: Red Cards and Fouls and Clean Sheets, Oh My! | Home | FelegyI think some folks mentioned this yesterday but I needed to bring it up again....Djourou has no place playing in the back line for Arsenal at this point in time! Did the guy do anything right yesterday!? His allowing Tevez to beat him to that loose ball in the 2nd minute could have cost us the game. If it wasn't for "Fabs" great reaction save on the flick from Silva this game could have turned into something completely different. Djourou had no answer for anything yesterday, either defensively or offensively. He was beaten easily on more than a few occasions and he missed a wide open header on a corner to put us up 2-0. We need to get Verms or Koz back in the lineup ASAP and let Djourou work out his kinks with the reserves or in the Carling Cup. With his performance yesterday, the clean sheet is that much more amazing to me.MartinHe was pretty bad. I'm willing to cut him some slack since he missed so much time, and he is our 4th-choice CB, after all. But he definitely needs to start showing something in this time he's being given or Wenger needs to decide he has no future at the club.Jacob David FriedmanPlay wilshere in the midfield, or does his suspension extend to all domestic matches?MartinYeah, it's for 3 domestic matches, so he's out for this one and West Ham on the weekend, then he's back.SairaxMOTD highlights of yesterday's match http://www.soccerclips.net/videos/man-city-v-arsenal-motd-highlights-2010SairaxI said last season that Cesc shouldn't be first pen taker, so I'm not flipflopping on this. I said Nasri should take it because I think he takes them better and he's already next after Cesc. vanPersie though is our #1 pen taker. Cesc puts it in the bottom right way too often, it's getting too predictable. Just my opinion.Darren_VYou know...except against Shaktar of course, where he went top leftblog comments powered by Disqus

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Monday 25 October 2010

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

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