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.
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
Tony
I agree with everything you say except you’re wrong on one thing – Liverpool win tomorrow and they go 11 points clear of us.
Had we won today and put them under pressure that could have been 5 points with a game in hand which would have put it in our own hands.
Arteta doesn’t like that – he always blows it when the pressure is on.
Our 8 goal machine*
Marc
Thanks for the correction it makes it much worse.
Wicksy
Today was a repeat of the last 3 seasons when your hero has bottled it and fucked up massively.
Now repeat after me “Arteta is a cunt and a 3rd rate manager who should be sacked”.
Tony
Its one of those you wish you didn’t have to make.
“We never get enough positive sequence of actions, one after the other, that could generate threat and momentum in the areas we want to conquer”
Get a grip you fraudulent twat of a manager…”conquest”? Really? how about you focus your energies on devising a gameplan that might actually translate into goals on the pitch and drop the whole fake-ass Sun Tzu nonsense…with.our lineup depleted for options up top and facing an opponent who’ve been vulnerable at the back all season, there was 3 potential tactical options:
(1) do the obvious and run back the final 30 of our last match…this would fool no one and enable Potter to make the necessary tactical adjustments(only Brighton has conceded less goals from crosses)…as I suggested after our last match, it’s one thing to bring Merino on late, when it’s far more difficult to make the required adjustments, and accounting for him as the expected starter
(2) make an early push and if nothing materializes slow things down with a shitload of sideways/fruitless nonsense, then look to eke out a late victory…this would likewise surprise no one and potentially leave us vulnerable on the counter at times
(3) try something fucking different that takes into account who’s actually fucking available and the tendencies of our opponent…sorry if you don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to finally earn your keep by actually fucking managing your way into a positive result, you’re in the wrong profession
personally I would have tried a 3-5-2, with wingbacks being deployed on both sides…not only do we have the requisite personnel, with our unbalanced defender-heavy squad, the Hammers were always going to sit a little deeper and look to make hay on the counter, so why not at least try to force them out of their comfort zone by inviting pressure then attacking them on the counter with a 5-wide “spread” formation, as this would provide us with some very advantageous 1 v. 1s (like having Ethan isolated on their fucking newbie Scarles)
instead we opted for a hybrid of the first two “beat a dead horse” options and paid the ultimate price…Potter must have been fucking ecstatic when he saw what we were rolling out there, especially when we were atypically docile from the hop and then tried to run our offence through a side that included a struggling Tross, the offensively-stunted Rice and our most vulnerable to the counter defender, Cala…which begs the question, when oh when will our MIT finally shed his fucking training wheels…asking for a friend
I think yesterday’s loss will be seen as the harbinger of Arteta’s departure from the club. It has to, right? Still no Director of Football, but the Kroenkes need to get Lewis and Garlick working on a new duo for the summer. We have to be nearing the stage where the cost-benefit analysis is being dusted off.
Marc – your political arguments yesterday were alarmingly weak. You usually do a little better in our exchanges. Too much Night Nurse in your morning cup of Horlicks? Maybe you’re finding the havoc being wrought across the world a little too distasteful and it’s giving you buyer’s regret…who knows? Your footballing analysis from yesterday, par contre, was as sound as ever.
Absolutely comical listening to the supporters on the radio wanting the cunt out after the game .
I think the cunts deserve each other now.
Potter who has inherited a pack of shit, wins at Arsenal again but loses to everyone else.
Watching Merino lumber around in the sunshine , brought back memories of Lee Chapman days.
Get Frank in and get this cunt out.
https://youtu.be/HXiZHXkG-ac?si=v175j10HAuHZptnM
Arteta’s rant about being, ‘really really angry’ or some such juvenile bollocks, put me in mind of this precious little lady from the execrable ‘Just William ‘ series…
For precious read precocious, although either will do.
Art – Lee Chapman. Ouch! John Hawley. Ray Hankin.