Before we begin with our business, here’s some interesting things that has happened around the world of football. Madrid and Mbappe humbled the great Pep Guardiola and Erling Haaland. Aston Villa made sure Liverpool lost 2 very important points at this stage of Premier League. We won, thanks to a double from Mikel Merino, against Leicester and things are looking a wee bit better at the moment. Lets dive into it.
Liverpool dropping points against Aston Villa has put us back into the mix. We are 8 points behind them with a game in hand against West Ham. And they have to play Man City away next. If things go our way and City decides to take Madrid’s revenge against Arne, we can bridge that gap to 5 points with a game in hand. To top it off, the next to next game of Liverpool is against Newcastle so yeah, lets hope the stars align.
We have been given several lifelines throughout this season, and the season before and we have always failed to capitalise. We can fix it by winning our game against West Ham. We must remember that we will visit Anfield in the last stage of the league, and we need to make sure that we accumulate as much as points as possible. If it goes down to getting a win at Anfield, that lot can make it very difficult for us.
Champions League – Round of 16
The draw for round of 16 is today, 11 AM English time. As we finished third, we could only play against the winners of PSV v Juventus or Milan v Feyenoord. PSV eliminated Juventus on a 4-3 aggregate while Milan lost Feyenoord in a penalty shootout. That narrows it down either PSV or Feyenoord for us. Considering that there’s Bayern, Madrid, PSG in the mix – I am sure every one of us will be happy with our next fixture.
If we managed to win against one of the Dutch sides, we will be facing one of the Madrid, Bayern, Leverkusen, and Atletico in Semis – so yeah, round of 16 is the easiest one we could get. Road ahead will be much tougher.
Injury List
Ben White is back. That’s some relief in the defence considering we were walking on a thin line and had to reach out to a 17 old MLS to save us. MLS has been very impressive though keeping Calafiori on the bench.
Tomiyasu finally went for the knee surgery. I was cheering for that lad because he was very good defensively, was a work machine and had those runs in him but the injuries has not let him play at Arsenal. Unfortunately, he won’t be back before the summer window, just like Jesus and we are stuck with 2 players costing us 350k+ / week wages for the rest of this year.
Martinelli and Havertz are still far away from a return, so we have very limited options upfront. Nwaneri is holding one side, Trossard the other and we discovered a CF in Merino. Sterling has been so poor, we needed to move a CM in front of the goal, and he scored 2 in 30 min. It sums up our problems in the attack.
Arsenal financials
Not that it’s my money or I am too concerned, but we did well financially this year. Thanks to the Champions League money and finishing 2nd in the Premier League, we have managed to lessen our losses. Our revenue increased by 31%, broadcasting revenue increased, profit on player sales increased, and we didn’t need to spend 18m GBP for letting players leave. Even after all these, we made a 18m GBP loss, thanks to the increase in wages from 234m to a whooping 328m. We had renewed some contracts (Martinelli, Saka, Ben White) and we brought in players on higher wages. It’s still okay, if we shed some of it in the summer. Zinchenko is a candidate, Tierney will leave and lets see what else happens.
Having a positive net spend on transfer means we will have money to spend in summer. Mikel and the club already confirmed they want to keep the money for the summer and for the right person. That’s a positive for the next season, while we manage with Merino as our local Mbappe.
Right, that’s me done. I hope I didn’t miss anything. I will be back with the match day blog tomorrow. Hope you are having a good time.
Skelly’s fucking lucky there that could easily have been a red.
what’s the harm in trying our only real Striker up top with Merino tucked in behind…likley not going to happen after the Rice subbing, unless MA actually took off one of his early subs, like Zinchenko
Skelly was so fortunate there…everyone better put their tin foil hats in the fucking attic…VAR might decide otherwise
VAR will overturn it now.
Not a penalty. The cause of action / contact was before the D
Can’t complain about that – if it were the other way round we’d be going apeshit.
maybe that’s why MA put on so many LBs?!?
I really hope the lesson learned here isn’t that we should pay a fortune for Kudus, who’s a tidy little player, but we already have Saka and Ethan on the left and the last thing we need is MA shoehorning another 70+M player into a nonsensical position
we can still salvage at least a point, as the Hammers likely won’t be more aggressive even being a man up
Just to make clear West Ham haven’t been good today and haven’t even defended amazingly – we’ve been shit in possession and going forward.
Its obviously that Arteta can’t handle the pressure in these matches (we win and go 5 points behind Liverpool they then lose tomorrow and we’ve got a game in hand) and it transmits to the players.
Its not the first time we’ve seen it and it’ll keep happening until we sack the cunt.
Odegaard doing the dog chasing cars routine.
Normally we lose when he does that. Indicates fear ?
Oooh vow
Sterling and Ferguson coming in
Ethan and Bowen out
Ethan looks to be carrying a bit of a knock…surely you wouldn’t replace him with Sterling if that wasn’t the case!!!
TRVL
When Arteta’s making the decisions?
Tross pulled a Havertz there, as that contact was negligible…a bit of a gift from our old buddy Mavro
if only it wasn’t Gabriel out wide there
Who the fuck let Sterling take the free kick.
btw what has Sterling done to earn that sort of free kick??? speaks to our piss-poor options
And White who we read was for now coming for Saliba.
ElB™ is trying to fix Potter
Has Arteta ever made a substitution that wasn’t like for like?
Remember when Wenger would throw every attacking player onto the pitch when chasing a result? The simple truth is losing 2 nil today is no different to losing 1 nil but we haven’t gone for it.
That was a good strike by Tossard.
But went over the crossbar
Oops
ElB trying to fox Potter
Another season bottled when we had the chance to put the pressure on Liverpool.
The only thing that changes with Arteta is who we’re chasing.
What a cunt.
That’s our season over if Pool beat City whose tails will be up for I now.
ElB™ …what a cunt.
Thank you Art Fuck for schooling us all
Just getting into Madrid but able to see the game and asking myself why I bothered?
I’m going to have a long walk and a good think before responding further…
I’ll catch up with comments later couldn’t comment and watch
I’m sure some of you would agree that Odegaard is showing*t after returning from his injury.
I don’t know what else to say about today’s performance. We lost the advantage and the league is gone now. Happens when you try to win a game with Merino as your CF, bring in Sterling and has your hopes on Odegaard.
Good luck with that.
Mika Biereth scored again for Monaco.. and we sold him for 12 odd millions because Mikel Arteta didn’t want to upset Havertz.
Chelsea keeper just massively fucked up on 89 minutes to concede.
What annoys me the most is we just play a slightly more mobile game that Wenger deployed to make sure of CL qualification for his self preservation each season.
As Ambarish highlights we’ve sold youth who should be making a name for themselves pushing us to a title. If a kid isn’t up to Saka’s level, MA isn’t interested favoring his pets who continue to let us down.
Mathematically, it’s still possible to overhaul Pool with 12 games to play, but it’s a tall order to expect to Slot do a typical MA capitulation.
We have no cutting edge because Ode is a player who needs quality around him as we saw with Saka . Now Saka is injured managers are keeping Ode’s spaces limited for him to operate in. He needs a Mbappe to feed not Merino or Havertz our 8 PL
Ode also needs to score more than his one goal this season. Assists alone are not enough for our play maker, especially when the barely used Nwaneri by comparison has 4 goals.
That stifles our play reducing any real cutting edge necessary to break down the low blocks.
Why do we need to keep such high defensive lines? It makes no sense where we keep succumbing to fast counters. As I said earlier Bowen stated the move for his goal deep in West Ham’s half.
Knowing Bowen was their biggest threat, Rice and Partey failed to track him the 70 meters he made up to score un challenged.
Our football is stale and repetitive, has been all season except for the odd game, which has given us more or less a point a game with 26 games played with 53 points.
I just don’t see us upping our game with consistency in the remaining games: just more of the same. 15 games unbeaten for 15 points is nothing to crow about.
Pool can make a big league statement tomorrow to go back to 9 points ahead of us, which would mean our point per game a very poor return.
They would have to lose 3 from 12 and we make up the deficit when in reality we keep blowing chances to gain points when Pool drops theirs.
We still have to play Pool but by then Pool could be already be champions and we’ll probably beat them in their back yard.
With MA the song always remains the same……
Today was a shambles, sloppy in and out of possession of the ball and our supposedly big players failed to turn up.
The goal we conceded was a catalogue of errors , it started with a sloppy ball from Odegaard, that was followed by calafiori allowing wan bissaka too much space, he should have been forcing him out wide instead of allowing an easy cross that for some reason Gabriel decided to duck under which in turn meant that Rice was not more aware allowing Bowen a simple header.
I thought we would start the game on the front foot playing with intensity….we didn’t, Odegaard has returned to his recycling of the ball and Rice was charging around like a headless chicken.
Arteta should have recognised early on that our wide players had very little space to work in due to West ham basically playing 5 at the back, Nwaneri should have been allowed to roam inside to try to create , instead he remained tight to the touch line with no room to work his magic.
My only argument with the red card was that I believe the west ham player gave skelly a bit of a forearm smash across the back of the head at the first point of contact which on another day could have resulted in a free kick for Arsenal …unsurprisingly VAR never even showed the first point of contact.
There will be a lot of doom and gloom and rightly so after such an inept performance, however if city do us a favour tomorrow it will mean Liverpool have dropped 7 points this week to arsenal’s 3 points dropped, so all is not lost yet…though of course a Liverpool victory v city will be the final nail in the coffin.
Today’s performance does raise serious doubts for the remainder of the season , what we will need to do is get a scrappy win v forest in the week