Luck, profits and balance needed

I can't be arsed to write a match report for the Fulham game. I though it would be wise to concentrate on analysing the interesting bits, rather than reproducing yet another description of a match that has been described many times elsewhere. So a 1-0 win, exactly the kind of juice we need, the slight problem I had with it was it was not a convincing grinding championship winning 1-0 win, it

Pondering preview

Well, it's been a pretty hectic few weeks, the fixtures have been coming pretty thick and fast, whole there certainly hasn't been a lack of controversy. I have been away on holiday in France so have been catching up with things since my return, luckily or maybe not so luckily i did see our defeat to Man City while abroad and the utterly pathetic behaviour of Emmanuel Adebayor, what an arrogant

West Brom pushed aside

The youngsters lined up as follows: Szczesny, Gilbert, Senderos, Silvestre, Gibbs, Coquelin, Ramsey, Wilshere, Traore, Sunu, Watt. Of note the absence of Fran Merida appeared strange, injury must have been the cause of this after his fine pre season form. The opposition were West Brom who have been on fine form of late, beating Boro 5-0 at the weekend and their starting eleven contained a lot

Easy 4 the Gunners in the Sun

The warm september sun bore down in Islington this afternoon, and the 59 odd thousand Gooners in the Emirates were treated to something of an exhibition of football from an Arsenal team that looked to have recovered well from the trials of a mid-week game away in Belgium.Vito Mannone retained his place in goal as Almunia remained in the sick bay, Rosicky dropped to the bench, Eboue came in to the

Wigan Preview

Tomorrow afternoon's game at the Emirates against Wigan should, on paper, be a stroll in the park if Arsenal turn up mentally and physically prepared. However, its been a funny start to the season so far and things are rarely as predictable as we would like them to be.Over recent years, Arsenal have had a habit of drawing games at home that we should really win 95% of the time. You can never

The Liege Stadium Mystery

Well, where to start on the shambolic performance last night against Standard Liege? Was that 3-points and move on? Or a disastrous reflection of the weaknesses of our squad?I'm not sure on the answer just yet, but it really was an exercise in bizarre football. The first 5 minutes was just a shocker. No complaints about their first goal - a stupid mistake by Eduardo and then a good finish.

Liege Preview

Pre-match posts are almost pointless given that we all kind of expect to beat Liege tonight, we know very little about our opposition, and the overriding feeling is that things are still a bit low in the Arsenal camp following consequtive defeats in Manchester.Objectively, the team news is not good. Almunia, RVP, Denilson, Arshavin, Nasri, Walcott, Fabianski, Djourou, Vela are all out. Its not

The winning attitude

As the dust begins to settle on the events over the weekend at the Eastlands, its fitting to remind ourselves just how fickle the game of football is.Yesterday's arch villain, Eduardo, is a forgiven man and I have not seen an ounce in this mornings papers to suggest that UEFA was not correct to over turn the two match ban. Yet, if that is right, then 99% of the press was wrong to criticise

Naive Arsenal pay the price

The last twenty minutes against Man City at the Eastlands was a terrible repeat episode of what we perhaps had too quickly thought was last season's weaknesses. Whilst I strongly applaud the sensible comments that are doing the rounds on the decent blogs this Sunday, there is no escaping the fact that shipping 4 goals against Man City is a shite result, albeit coming from a performance that was

Pre city thoughts

The last post on the Kakuta story and the general topic of the transfer of young players provoked a lot of good banter, thank you one and all. It is clearly one very complex area and it seems that most people agree that blanket bans on the transfer of young players is not a clever way to solve the problem. As always FIFA and UEFA are rushing to bring in new rules and regulations before engaging

A hypocritical rethink - Kakuta and slavery

I am no Chelsea fan, also the full facts are not yet out, but having collected my thoughts it does appear that they may have been rather harshly treated by FIFA. Tapping up adult players under contract is something that should be punished severely, but time and time again UEFA and FIFA have ignored the big Spanish and Italian clubs of doing this, what Chelsea have been banned for this time around

Good taste in chanting? Never going to happen.

The recent success of the informal campaign to bring the deeply unpleasant nature of Man United's fans chanting against Arsene Wenger to the wider attention of the public is to be applauded. Led by Arseblogger, the issue made it to the wider press last week, at long last, and led to widespread condemnation against Man United, and also against Amazon and Play whose website carried a CD including a

Djourou shocker, honest Wayne and BBC inadequacy

The bad news about Johan Djourou's knee means that he is going to be out of action for around 6 months. I suspect the problem with Johan's knee is an osteochondral defect, I shall try to explain this to those of you without the medical knowledge. An osteochondral defect means an area where the smooth joint lining, the cartilage, has been damaged, this is different to the meniscus of the knee

Round up as boring weekend commences

I have to start with the noble John Terry's words of great wisdom this morning, he has felt the need to let everyone know what he thinks about Eduardo:"Diving is something the England lads don't do. Sometimes we're too honest. Even in the Premier League, we see the English lads get a bit of contact and try to stay on their feet and score from the chance. The foreign mentality coming in is any

Manure fans reveal their cretinous nature

Reading Arseblogger this morning I was pleasantly encouraged that the media have finally (finally finally) started to talk about the disgraceful abuse that has been dished out to Arsene Wenger ar Old Trafford for over a decade now. This Guardian piece is particularly spot on, 'chanting cretins' sums it up nicely. These moronic chants are well below anyone's belt line and should be stopped. It

The Scottish FA - meddling self interest

One of our readers has kindly alerted me to some rather interesting information about the Scottish FA and their recent influence in all things UEFA related. As we know the Eduardo decision is a very strange one, it was a borderline dive for one thing, there was some contact and the Celtic keeper did make an uncontrolled lunge for the ball, so to see him banned for two games in the context of much

Appeal and UEFA idiocy

So UEFA have banned Eduardo for two matches, the club are set to hear the full details by Thursday and will then have three days in which to appeal:“We have been informed that we will receive a “reasoned decision” from Uefa by Thursday of this week. Once we receive Uefa’s rationale, we will make a decision on the next steps.
 We have been deeply frustrated by the perfunctory and apparently