Happy bacon day!!

Happy bacon day!!

The best way to start the end of the working week is with a bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee. I have started it with a monster hangover too. This is due to me not having work today which is possibly an even better way than the bacon and coffee thing.

On to The Arsenal and we have a game against Sunderland tomorrow. Having played Stoke RFC last weekend and won 1-0 it is important to come back from the bitter north with all three points and get a run of victories under our belts. At the beginning of the season we played Stoke RFC followed by Sunderland and dropped 4 points. We are getting to the end of the season now and the points we have dropped cant be picked up but the ones ahead must be!

This is a match I was going to be traveling up to with the lads but due to a number of things happening we decided to give it a miss. Right now the thought of sitting on a train for four or five hours drinking beer and lucky brandy makes me feel a bit nauseous. I’m sure by the time the match starts tomorrow I will be wishing I was a six pack into a football day out. Tomorrow I’m sure I will be dreaming of stopping in a shop to grab some lucky brandies while walking from the train station to the ground in the frosty northern air.

In reality the reason we probably didn’t go was that we have been to a number of disappointing away matches recently.  Having been to Man-ure and getting thumped and then to Milan and watching us go 4-0 down we decided that we should try and go to more local matches for a little while. The reason being, that the return journey is really quite soul destroying. Having spent a day; traveling, drinking and spending all disposable money for the month. The return journey gives you a long time to stew over the events of the day. So traveling from London to Sunderland which for us would mean going to Newcastle and then traveling south to Sunderland did not resemble a local match at all. Is there further you can travel to a league match? Basically going to Scotland and then taking another train seemed stupid. They are showing the match at The Emirates stadium tomorrow which I think we were getting tickets for. I believe Robert Pires is doing a Q&A prior to the match which would be cool.

I expect the match tomorrow to be a frustrating one. O’Neill always sets his teams up defensively against us and you can’t really blame him for that as it has been relatively effective. However they have a new striker up front who will want to make a positive start to his career there. With news that Thomas Vermaelen has been ruled out with an ankle injury and defender Laurent Koscielny will face a late fitness test as he recovers from a calf problem. Their new man could be facing Squillaci, that would not be good for us! I hope Kos will use his special velociraptor powers of recovery to make the match.

At the back they are, how we describe our 6 a side team, (a useless group of halfwits) an experienced bunch. Hopefully we will be able to unpick their experienced positioning and defending with our pace and skill.

Theo, Rambo and the Coq are available but I understand Gibbs and Gervinho will miss out due to injury and insanity respectively.

They are a team we can beat and should beat. Lets hope we have our half time talk before the match and really come flying out of the blocks rather than the lacklustre first half performances we have seen recently. We have all the talent we need to beat this lot. I think the days of complacency should be well behind us. We have lost to lesser teams this season so we cant go into the match thinking it will be a walk in the park. They will be organised, work hard and make things very hard for us. I imagine anyone that plays football in the north has the added motivation to play well and be bought by a southern team. So lets not get caught napping.

Any way as I predicted yesterday I am going to have 0 - 3 to the Arsenal.

Hopefully @Snipster will be joining me on a podcast tomorrow morning before the match so please check back for that. It will be our first one so Im sure it will be a lot of fun but also might be a complete nonsense - Ha ha ha

Have a good bacon day!

Come on you gunners!!

Pumpkiii

To follow me on twitter @pumpiii