Arsenal need a winning mentality

Good  morning,

It’s been a while since I’ve sat in my chair at home, laptop...on my lap, composing a post on the mighty Gunners. The reasons are twofold. One, work has left me extremely busy of late. Two, the thought of going over the United game put me off. I thought about leaving it even longer, the international break leaves us with little in the way of Arsenal news and views.

There’s talk of injuries mounting for Arsenal players whilst away on international duty. Vermaelen, Szczesny, Mertesacker, Rosicky and Ozil are to name a few. Add that to the list which is keeping the Arsenal medical staff from ever taking a break and that’s a long list. If it wasn’t for a two week break u=i might be worried...*gulp*

I don’t think any of these new injuries will be anything to worry too much about. I expect they’ll be little niggles that will be miraculously sorted in a few days. Either that or those players mentioned are established internationals who realise that these fixtures are meaningless, pointless and shit-givingless. I imagine that the players realise that they are at a crucial point in the league and any rest that can be gained will be valuable.

Our next fixture is Southampton at home, not the easiest fixture considering they’ve managed to place themselves 3^rd in the table. I sure I am among many that believe this won’t be a permanent sight. It’s fantastic for them but realistically we all know it can’t last. The same can be said for City, Chelsea, United and even Sp*rs. They’re not going to remain in a position of dropping points against smaller teams. Sooner or later they’re going to click and we’re going to have to keep pushing them all the way.

United was out toughest test so far this season. Dortmund was tough but relatively unknown. Yes we know they’re good but how many times have we played them over the past 5 years? To date 4 times in the champions league. With us edging it at 2W 1D 1L. Compare that to United over the past 5 years and that’s a completely different story. Over the last 5 years (if my stats are correct) we stand at 2W 3D 12L, 17 times in the league, FA cup and Champions League. Looking at those stats it’s easy to see who Arsenal find it tougher to face.

Considering the amount of times we’ve faced United, we know what they bring every time. The team knows all about the pressure, the quality and history of the team, the players and the coach. Even Moyes has been around for ages even if it was at Everton. Dortmund was relatively unknown. We knew they we good and had some good players but because they hadn’t been getting the better of us over the past few years we had nothing to fear.

I’ve left it until now to talk about the United game because it’s given everyone time to read match reports and analogies. Everyone will have been able to look into the areas of the team which underperformed. The fact is physiologically they already had us beat. Massive amounts of money are going into the mentality of sportsmen and women. It’s the next big thing along with nutrition. In some respects it’s just as important as the fitness. If a player isn’t mentally ready and fit then all the fitness in the world won’t do them any good if they cannot concentrate for 90 minutes.

Until we can beat that mentality then we’re always going to be struggling. Perhaps if we’d been undefeated in all competitions from the start of the season then that would have given us an extra advantage. Yes we’ve been playing well but like everyone else we haven’t been without fault. Winning a cup, or the league would do it but there’s a long way between now and then.

The “fear factor” is a huge thing. Look at City. In the past 5 years (since they’ve been taken over) our head to head is W5 D3 L6. Fairly even but if you look at our results the 5 years before the millions W9 D1 L1. Just shows what a bit of money, success and a case of the “Barry big banana’s” will do. I know it’s not all down to mental state. They’ve spent all that money on trying to buy the best players around. But you have to admit, we all get that nervous feeling against those top teams. Call it respect, call it fear, call it what you want it’s a factor that’s holding us back.

If we want to seriously compete this season e need to eliminate those factors. We can’t rely on the big teams to keep dropping points, we need to take them off them.

Until next time.

Title Contenders....We will know Sunday evening

By Michael Lee @michelplatinlee

Well, heading into the Saturday game against Liverpool they said ‘Arsenal have had a great start but they really haven’t beaten anyone of the big guns’. I disagreed, we beat Tottenham when nobody was giving us a hope in hell of reaching the top four. We dismantled Napoli at the emirates, but that still wasn’t enough to please some. After we lost an unlucky tie against Dortmund a fortnight ago the claws where back out, and it kind of felt like Pundits, the writers,rival fans and even a few of our own where happy that we had fallen at the so called first hurdle. But the team dusted themselves off and started a gruelling 8 day triple head against the scousers.

We took care of Rogers men with ease, we dominated the game, dictated the pace and it looked like top vs mid table rather than current positions pre kick off. So that’s another big win. Hooray. Not a shock in my opinion, While Liverpool have started strongly I don’t see them keeping pace after the new year and what was evident on Saturday is that Brendan Rogers really doesn’t have a plan B. Gerrard looks like he has had his best days as part of an average midfield. Their defence looks not very mobile at all and as good as Suarez is He won’t be able to carry them all season, as will David Sturbridge ©John Anik (UFC Commentator)

Still a very satisfactory win, but what happened last night in Dortmund was something else. Nobody gave us a hope in hell. While I was optimistic we could get a point I didn’t think we could turn over Klopps men in their own back yard. But I was perhaps Naïve to think this, after all this was an Arsenal side who going into the game had won 13 and drawn 1 of their last 14 away games in England and abroad. And we saw why. Last night Arsenal where organised, hard to break down, the pressing from midfield was frantic. Mertesacker and Koscielny played out of their skin, Arteta provided a defensive midfield master class despite being booked early on. After Klopp bragging about how his team out ran us at the emirates our very own Welsh Maestro Aaron Ramsey ran further than any man on the field that night and capped off his 4 consecutive player of the month awards with another goal, anyone else just getting bored of seeing him hit the back of the net ? I’ve ran out of things to say about the lad, this season he has simply been football porn. But what was impressive is that last night we may not have been at out fluent best, the passing was a little off but every man to a T run themselves ragged, not least Thomas Rosicky who I think set a new record with 197 sliding tackles or something. The Czech Midfielder just makes us better wherever he plays in that midfield. I have to say if this is winning ugly, I don’t mind it at all.

So now the rest of Europe is taking notice, Gary Neville summed it up nicely in the post-match analysis as he usually does, Jürgen Klopp thinks we can win something this season, so why shouldn’t we? Well I think the biggest challenge comes on Sunday when we go away to old Trafford. This is easily the worst man united team we have seen in a long time, however they still have a mental edge over us which has been evident in previous seasons. I have no doubt we have the quality to come home with the 3 points, which would in turn give us an 11 point lead, but the big questions is do we believe we can beat united, I for one do but only when we do will I be bold enough to call us champions elect. Maybe if we do win Arsene could do his own Kevin Keegan style rant ‘ I would love it if we beat them, absolutely love it’.

Come on Arsenal, let’s make this week the perfect hat trick, until next time have yourselves a good weekend. ML

Football, more brain power than you think

Good morning,

How many of those have we had lately? I think I might start counting how many mornings have been good in a football perspective from the start of the season, I bet this season there’ll be more than those in our recent past.

Going into the Liverpool game I was really nervous. I usually only get nervous over two teams in our league, Sp*rs and United. The only reason I get nervous about those games is because along with the three points there’s also bragging rights at stake, not only for the teams, but for the fans too. I know it’s not the be all and end all, but when you’ve got those two sets of fans giving it the big’n it’s quick and easy to give them the shut up juice with a defeat.

Not too long ago it was United and Arsenal battling it out for the title making the rivalry a bit hotter. It cooled slightly when we dropped off the boil but now that the tables seemed to have turned, the rivalry could hot up again. There were a lot of people clambering about how in the league we haven’t faced a big team. Liverpool are a pretty big team, they were the closest to us in the table and we got a great result.

United however will be our toughest test yet. While they’re not having a great time at the moment we get to face them after they’ve strung two league wins together and after we have to travel to Dortmund. Not ideal but yet again with this season being our best opportunity to pounce, we need to make the most of it. The question is, which is the more important game?

The Dortmund game is still only a group stage game. Losing it doesn’t make qualification impossible. It makes it quite a bit difficult and will probably see us depending on other results but not out of reach. Ideally we’d want to finish top so that we get an “easier” opponent. Realistically if we’re serious about this competition, we’re going to have to face Europe’s elite at some point so there won’t really be any easy games.

The United game doesn’t have as much pressure on it as it usually does. Usually we’re chasing the pack or the leaders, this time it’s the other way around. Being 8 points ahead of them and 5 points ahead of anyone else gives us a bit of breathing space. A defeat for them puts them 11 points of the lead and struggling. As much as I’m enjoying our form at the moment it’s made sweeter by United struggling, if Sp*rs, Chelsea and City want to join them then I’ll be over the moon. This time around the pressure is on United.

I’m not sure if that’s answered which is the more important game? In a perfect world we’ll get 3 points in each but if you had to chose which one would you take? I don’t like to think like this but there’s this thought in the back if my mind that we have more chance of winning the league than we do the Champions League. Neither are going to be easy but I think we stand more of a chance, as things stand, with the league. Does this mean we should treat it the same as the COC and save our players for the league game?

If that means fielding Bendtner, then the answer is a straight up no. If it means a bit of rotation (do we have any players fit to do that) then I think it would be worth it. We rested players against Chelsea and suffered an early exit from the COC however we also got a great victory against Liverpool. Resting certain players probably helped but did it guarantee the result? If we’d fielded our best team against Chelsea would we have won? Who knows, probably not?

What I think I’m getting at here, in a roundabout way, is that football is more than the game being played on the grass. The decisions made over who to play for which games, players to rest and rotate and which competitions to prioritise. Each decision has repercussions on others, making hundreds if not thousands of possible choices and options for the boss to consider. Some, hopefully most, will be carefully thought, expertly analysed for the potential butterfly effect. Some, hopefully few, will be done with fingers crossed.

I’ll harp on, moan and groan about the manager when things go wrong just like most but I’m not sure I have the brain power to compute all those decisions. Making me glad I don’t have the job, but equally glad that we have a boss that is regarded as one of the most intelligent in the game.

That leaves me to wish a bitter failure for United and City tonight and a great result for us tomorrow. Until next time. 

Missing Theo badly, but it was a Mata of class

By Michael Lee @michelplatinlee

Well I didn’t feel good going into Tuesday night’s game with Chelsea and I sure as hell didn’t feel any better afterwards. I don’t want to try and dissect the game too much as it really won’t do us any good now. To sum things up they have a better squad than us, and when you see those squad players are Samuel Eto’o, Willian, David Luiz and my favourite non arsenal player in the premier league – Juan Mata, then I couldn’t really expect more. I don’t really need to vindicate that statement because we all know what the Spaniard is capable of on the pitch, but if you see his post-match interview with sky sports you will see the guy just exudes class, he’s really not a Chelsea-esque player at all.

As the vigilante pointed out in yesterday’s post, individual errors proved costly again. Nicklas Bendtner did nothing out there, Ryo just is nowhere near ready for premier league football. In the middle of the park Jack and Aaron really tried to drive us forward but Chelsea where far too organised in the middle and shut us out with ease. Maybe with Flamini in there we could of pressed a bit harder and won the ball more and played with a higher tempo but I don’t think it would of made a great deal of difference on the night.

What I do feel would of made a great deal of difference on the night is having an outlet in the wide areas. It’s becoming more apparent with every passing game that we are missing that. At first we didn’t feel the full effects of Walcott’s absence as Serge Gnabry came in and did very well. He is a very similar player, lightning quick, playing off the shoulders of the opposing defenders with instinctive finishing ability. Since he last played, against Napoli I believe, the performances have been in gradual decline. While I maintain we have an embarrassment of riches in central midfield we do need this kind of outlet, a direct player to stretch a defense, or get in behind when the opposition defensive line plays high. And right now the four players we have who can effectively do that are all injured. When Podolski, The Ox, Gnabry, and most importantly Theo return to action we will have that option back as well as they goals they all contribute. In the meantime our highly talented and interchangeable midfield is just too easy to defend against and we are always likely to concede one. While we will get away with this against the lesser teams it’s going to make it harder against the big boys. I feel that until we get these player back maybe we should do what we done so well in the last 10 games or so of last season. Defend well and organised, try to be efficient in front of goal and make the most of the set pieces, we have a killer dead ball specialist in Ozil and a couple of towering presences in Giroud and Mertesacker. So maybe let’s just focus on not losing and build on those performances.

On Saturday we see the first of 3 big tests in just over a week when we host the scousers. They are enjoying a consistent season and Suarez is on fire but I think we will beat them, I think it’s exactly the game we need right now and then we face Dortmund midweek. I will stick to my prediction of 1 point from the 2 games against the German outfit. I don’t want to think further ahead to United and the Dutch skunk and the little boy he’s inside etc, it was something like that right? We’ll save that for next Wednesday because any opinion on that game could well be invalidated. The poor Man united side we have seen this season could be riding a 6 game win streak by then, it’s like they say…….a week is a long time in football. Iets have a better week ahead than the one just gone please Arsenal.

Oh and one more thing, How can the very best of Crowded House truly be the very best of Crowded House when it doesn’t feature the Hit single ‘chocolate cake’? I know it upset a few American’s back in the day but………I’m digressing here. I’ll be in a better mood next week if we get a euro/domestic combi 4 or 6 points in the bank.

Come on you Gunners!

League cup exit every bit as painful as always

Good morning,

Like Feck it is.I suppose that we should touch on last night’s game against Chelsea in the COC.

The first goal we conceded infuriated me for the simple reason that it’s the second time in as many games that we’ve been exploited from an attacking corner. This time it was a combination of faults between Jenkinson and Fabianksi. Jenkinson’s header wasn’t strong enough to get to Fabianksi, Fabianksi should have come out quicker to meet it.

After what happened at Palace you would have thought that type of mistake would happen again. Yes this time it was different players and a goal instead of a red card but it still cost us at the time. These incidents are forever more highlighting our inadequacies without the ball. For the most part these haven’t been on display against the weaker teams as we tend to enjoy more of the ball. But against the stronger teams it sticks out like a sore thumb.

We can make all the excuses we want about how it’s only COC and that we had no real defensive midfielders and a weakened team but it’s all crap. We should be looking to win every game we play no matter what the competition. The defensive midfielders aren’t the only ones who should be working off the ball, the defence should start from the top and act as a unit of 11 players when we don’t have the ball. And lastly yes we had a weakened team, but so did Chelsea, the difference is they had Eto as their back up forward and we had Bendtner. We had Ryo, they had Mata. But I suppose that’s what money gets you.

                “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results”

I’m not usually one for quotes, but this one hits the nail right on the head. It shows that with Bendtner as a back up and not making the most of our transfer fund that we’ve repeating mistakes of not capitalising when we can. This is a man who was “80% gone”, never playing for the club again if he had his way. Now we’re relying on him to give Giroud a break. When you look at it in those simple terms, it’s madness.

Some people have been defending Bendneter saying he’s a decent player, he may have been at one point but we haven’t seen that in a long time. I’m not sure anyone has seen it for a while. He’s managed to get a few goals for Denmark but that’s a different set up, he’s just not up to the same quality to those around him and last night it showed. He was slow to react to the changes in play, slow on the ball, without and looked tiered from the off. It’s telling that in that from what I could gather he had no part to play in any of our chances on goal. Not to mention his famous attitude hasn’t done him any favours in winning over the fans.

As if that wasn’t bad enough we had Park on the bench! Park! I’m not sure I’ve actually ever seen him play for Arsenal. He’s nowhere in the managers plans and we can’t get rid of him so he must be there simply to make up the numbers on the bench again showing up our shallow squad. If we didn’t have the injuries we have at this time it may have been different but at some stage in the season every team will suffer with injuries. You need to have the depth to cope with when they strike.

One thing that was good to see was Vermaelen’s performance was pretty solid. He didn’t wow us with goal line clearances or last ditch tackles, but he didn’t need to. He was good with his positioning and tried to do his bit up top when we had a set piece. That’s what’s needed from him at this point. Doing the simple stuff well in his first few games is what will get him back in contention. Getting yourself noticed is risky, if you try something and it doesn’t come off and it costs you. The mountain will be even harder to climb. Maybe he could have done more with the second goal but I think it was just a very good strike, not much any team could have done except prevent the chance before it came to Mata.

That’s us out the league cup again and our second loss to tough opposition. If we win the league I’ll look back on this as a moody rant but that’s a long way off and a big if. This was the first of a run of hard games against good teams. It’s easy enough to say we need to get our chin up and focus on the next one but it’s easier said than done. It’s going to be a long, tough month for Arsenal and for us fans. There will be plenty of opposing fans lapping up our defeats i just hope they’re few and far between.

Until next time

A costly win, how costly?

Good morning,

We start this week like several others before it, top of the league. I'm still not quite getting used to it. I really wish the other teams would slip up a few more times just to give us a bit more room at the top. I thought Stoke were going to put one foot on the path of redemption and beat United. Obviously they like being oafish c**t's anf removed that foot swiftly, rolled over and let United take advantage of them. Then City, Chelsea and Sp*rs were drawing on Sunday. All the way into the final 10 minutes until Chelsea and Sp*rs manged to bag the wins.

I know that we shouldn't have to rely on others to drop points but with the way things are going with our injuries and now suspensions, I'll take all the help we can get. Most of you will be aware of the cost of our win at Palace. Flamini out for 2 weeks and Afteta out for one game after his red card. When entering our toughest run of games yet, it doesn't look good to have both our holding midfielders out. Chelsea in the COC, Liverpool and United in the league and a trip to Dortmund in the Champions league.

We're going to need a bit more fire behind us for those games. We only looked like we were 80% there on Saturday. Palace put 11 men behind the ball and were happy to invite us on. We didnt have the killer ball or defence splitting passes. We looked out of touch. It took the penalty to open the game up because then Palace needed to press to get a goal back.

Watching match of the day made me feel sick. For the simple reason that I had to agree with Alan Hanson (just puked admitting it) our defensive set up for when we had a corner was diabolical.  We can argue all day long over the red card decision the main fact is we shouldn't have put ourselves in a position where Arteta had to make any sort of last ditch challenge. Where were the covering defenders? We made it harder than it had to be and we gave the ref a difficult decision.  A ref that struggled with easy decisions so why trust him to make the right call when its a game changer.

We didnt look very comfortable without the ball at all on saturday, we couldnt seem to get the correct shape to enable the team to cover all positions.  If we were playing better opposition we could easily have conceded a couple of goals in the first half. Our passing wasnt as crisp as it was against Norwich and it seemed we always wanted one more touch or pass than necessary. I said on twitter durring the game that we looked like we turned up expecting the win. Something we've been punished for in the past.

Thankfully it had no short term damages in that we still managed to get another goal and seal the 3 points. But the true cost of the red card could be catastrophic,  we could survive, only time will tell. A huge positive to take away from Saturday is that this is another game that we managed to grind out a result. In years gone by we could easily have collapsed under the pressure of being a man down and being frustrated by an opposition merely looking to cancel us out rather than compete.

It's what United always used to be able to do. If we can twin that with also playing brilliantly like we know we can then this season should be a good one. Dortmund ws our first real test against tough opposition Chelsea will be our second. This time hopefully we won't be held to ransom by our mistakes,  hopefully there wont be any mistakes. I think we will see a changed team as its a COC game but it's still a game we need to win. I don't want us to change it too much if it's going to weaken the team. At the same time we need to rest players for our league game against the scousers. I'm so glad I don't have to make the decisions,  good luck Wenger you wont please everyone.

Unil next time