So we go into a weekend with no Arsenal football, its true! I’m sure the Snipster will be scouring the Archives to bring us some classic Arsenal footage to keep our spirits high and our never ending thirst for Arsenal, temporarily quenched. Keep an eye in the Facebook page for that.
The weekend break will give the team some well needed time to regroup and look at fixing the mistakes we have been making recently, for future matches. I don’t know if it is just me but It sometimes seems like every one who commentates on Arsenal follows ‘buzz words‘ in a sort of flavour of the week type way. At the beginning of the season it was ‘zonal marking’, everyone was talking about how it didn’t work and how we were conceding goals because of the system not the players in it. Now however, the flavour of the week is “individual error”. Arsenal makes more individual errors than a stage-frightened dyslexic in a spelling bee. And its the players not the system anymore. What will be the next thing? ‘Too many Incorrect leg movements?’ ‘Poor boot to ball contact power ratio?’. Maybe the stadium is haunted?!?!?! If it is, you heard it here first folks!!
The reality of saying we make too many individual errors is that we are not very good, surely? Saying “if we cut out the individual errors” is like saying “if we convert all of our chances” or “If we retain 100% possession we cant lose”. The players don’t intend to make the errors, they are playing to their collective best. I'm sure the manager and the team are doing their all in training to prepare effectively.
There is a guy who sits a row or two behind me in the stadium (I’m sure there are loads of these guys in the stadium, everyone probably has one). But every time Arsenal have a: corner, free kick, throw in, shot on goal, free kick against, corner against.... run, pass, dribble etc etc.. you get the picture. This guy shouts “Wenger don’t you practice this in training”. He is extremely annoying!
I can see where he is coming from some times though. Our free kicks from the left are a disgrace. I think Jack is doing a good job from the right but Theo?? When did he become the dead ball maestro? Oh yeah, he didn’t!! But this will probably be from the training ground. Theo will have been taking free / corner kick training and then let lose on the corner flag in real matches.
A while back I watched Derren Brown on the telly, he flipped a coin ten times and got ten heads in a row, it was amazing. He went on to explain how he did it, and was down to ‘random’. He flipped the coin thousands of times and eventually due to random there was a string of ten heads in a row. So perhaps it is worth keeping Theo taking the corners, because eventually, due to random, he will deliver a decent corner. Seeing as we have had to endure so many of the rubbish corners from him, perhaps we should let him continue for another match or two. Maybe he will deliver a string of excellent corners against Bayern? Perhaps the match winning one? And will become our corner kicker for ever and ever living off the past glory of the infamous “Bayern corner King”.
Going back to the guy in the stand who shouts about us not practicing this stuff in training sessions. If we look rubbish at: taking corners, taking free kicks, defending corners, defending, defending, closing down in midfield, having a shot, breaking quickly, passing forwards, zonal marking, individual errors, staying un-injured. etc etc.. then there must be an awful lot to work on in training. Is 10 days long enough? Can you change a team that much?
I’m sure Nacho will have been taking extra English classes to improve his communication with those around him. And TV will have been taking extra ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ classes as he looks to increase his awareness of what risks their are around him.
Other than that who knows what they will be doing to prepare for the Allianz arena on Wednesday...
This weekend there are some FA Cup fixtures, there are also a few premiership matches. Of interest to us, there is a match between Liverpool and smurs. I didn’t think smurs were super amazeballs or anything when we played them. I think we gifted them two goals. Apart from the Humanzee they look like an average team, like a smurs team. L’pool looked quite dangerous against us earlier in the year and I think with the chipmunk upfront they might cause smurs some problems. Tom Daley will be on hand to mark the diving competition between the Humanzee and the chipmunk. I don't care who wins the diving competition, as long as both of them jump off of very high diving boards onto a cold hard pitch... landing on their necks.
We need smurs to drop points, even if a liverpool win would put them 2 points behind us I think thats the result we have to hope for.
Any way, I have been blathering on for too long. No hangover and too much coffee has affected me strangely. I realise I have not continued with the player analysis but I promise Snipster will do it tomorrow.
Snipster also mentioned doing a “We’re on our way” PodCast today. Keep an eye out for that, it just might happen... who knows?
Pumpkiii
* There is no proof that the stadium is in any way haunted.
NO GHOSTS WERE IN ANY WAY; HARMED, SPOOKED OR EXERCISED IN THE MAKING OF THIS BLOG
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