The Boss made it clear that the fitness of Bendtner would influence his decision whether or not to spend money on reinforcing our strike force. With the big Dane making a recovery, dreams of Huntelaar, Chamakh

Sweet FA

Back when I was just an Iron Boy and I first started following The Arsenal, I remember how much people would go on about how important the FA Cup was. I remember being allowed to stay up to watch Andy Lineghan’s header against Sheffield Wednesday on our tiny 14″ television (I wasn’t even allowed to watch the celebrations!). A year later, I remember telling my Mum I was too ill to go to school because I wasn’t prepared to put up with all the cussing that came with our shock defeat against lower league Bolton Wanderers. Naturally, she didn’t listen and made me go in and suffer taunts of my so-called friends. I should have shopped her to child services. Evil woman!

My point is, like most, I still, probably wrongly, hold the FA Cup in high esteem and regardless of what I have read and heard from a lot of quarters this week, I was gutted with the Stoke result. I was gutted with the overall performance and even moreso at the way we have sacrificed the prospect of Silverware. I know what people have said about the apocalyptic run of matches coming up and the need to prioritise but I don’t see why for a club of Arsenal’s stature we shouldn’t be trying to win every competition we enter. I don’t think we can afford to take on this whole ‘cup snobbery’ attitude that many people seem to be advocating.

As a selfish fan, I want to see the team I support win things. As I am sure the however many thousand gooners that went up to Stoke last Sunday (from experience, Stoke is an awful part of the world. Just awful!) feel the same. The manager made his decision to field a weakened side and ultimately that was his prerogative but I can’t help but feel disappointed at the feeble way the opportunity was surrendered.

Lessons learned?

All that said, Arsenal completely gifted the match to Stoke on a silver platter with some serious schoolboy defending. The Arsenal defence were so inviting that even Wayne Bridge’s missus would have blushed. What Fabianski was thinking for the first I doubt even he knew. Denilson giving up the chase on Sidebe for the second was scandalous and the lack of marking from Traore and Silvestre for the third was the kind of thing you wouldn’t see in park football. Well, you might but you can bet your bottom dollar that someone would get beat up in the car park afterwards as a result.

On the plus side, the whole attitude to defending seemed to change for the better during the Villa match. I’ve long since bemoaned the ability of the Arsenal backline to concede goals in situations when none should arise – like some sort of goal-conceding magician that makes clean sheets disappear – but there was an impressive level of discipline from a few members of the team that made sure the home side were kept at bay. Granted, they had Emile Heskey in their attack which meant that you could never really consider it a ‘goal scoring opportunity’ whenever he had the ball.

While the result wasn’t fantastic, a clean sheet was one of the few pluses to take from the game and should be an encouragement for the much-discussed set of fixtures coming up. I’m not naïve enough to suggest we won’t concede in the next three games but it’s a huge positive to know than we can defend when we want to.

Left behind

One area of our backline that remains a worry is the left back position. It’s been as blatant as a Tony Blair lie that Traore has struggled when asked to deputise this season and even first choice Gael Clichy has been nowhere near his best for quite some time now. Ashley Young ran him ragged on Wednesday and the young Frenchman is going to have to up his game if he doesn’t want Valencia doing the same on Sunday.

Sol survivor

At the time of writing, the mechanics are not sure whether they will have welded a brand new bionic leg onto The Verminator in time for Sunday. If the Belgian is to sit out, then it would mean Sol Campbell will be back in the side. Many pundits have been dismissive of Campbell and seem to want to see him fail. He hasn’t got many friends in the media and his publicised pursuit of Pompey has only made matters worse. What baffles me is the way it has been built-up as Rooney v Campbell like some kind of WWE steal cage match as if Gallas won’t be the one tasked to mark him. The lazy and prevailing opinion seems to be that Campbell won’t have the pace to deal with ‘Wazza’. Funny, I don’t remember Rooney ever possessing the speed of a gazelle so I wonder how valid this view is.

I’ll tell you how valid it is; not at all!

On the whole, I think Sol has performed as well as can be expected in the two games. Of course an in-from Rooney will be a far tougher test than Emile Heskey. That’s like saying wrestling a grizzly bear is tougher than wrestling a newborn kitten. One would hope Campbell has the big game experience to know how the deal with the pie-eating Granny shagger. I’m not going to into the so-called unfinished business and talk of revenge from 2004 as you can probably read about it in a hundred other places with each report will be just as boring and repetitive the last.

Injuries

Checking into the Arsenal Royal Infirmary this week as mentioned above was Arsenal’s very own Cyborg Thomas Vermaelen who was said to be leaking break fluid from one of his bionic limbs. Conspiracy theorists reckon he’s just taking the week off to activate SkyNet which will become self-aware around 4pm on Sunday when the match is supposedly shown in 3D in selected pubs. Others think he is just upgrading his internal software so he is compatible with the recently announced iPad.

Also, checking in is Eduardo who is now being charged rent such is his frequency there.

Long ball Villa

Apart from Vermaelen’s injury, the Villa game presented very little in the way of talking points that is until everyone decided to jump on a small comment supposedly made by Arsene Wenger. Incidentally, I’m struggling to see where the insult was in saying ‘they played a long-ball game’ but maybe I’m more thick-skinned (or maybe just thick) than those poor fragile little lambs from Aston who have since been up in arms. O’Neill first described it as ‘an appalling insult’ apparently having never had someone say that his mum want so stupid that she took an hour to cook minute rice.

I’m not saying Ms. O’Neill is stupid, I was just referencing what could genuinely be described as an appalling insult. You know, for the sake of perspective?

I challenge anyone to find the insult here:

“They play a very efficient English game, with long balls and it is very physical. They are a good side at counter attacking. When we took the gamble to go forward and they won the ball, they are quick and that is why it was always us managing to create chances and score, or them catching us on the counter attack or playing on Agbonlahor or Heskey with long balls.”

“I wish them to have a good run now because they are quality. They are well-organised and have a strong spirit. They are very strong physically and the four in midfield do not stop running and all these players can score goals, so they have a chance. I think they have a very good chance but you have seven teams for four places.”

Somebody called James Collins referred to Wenger’s comments as ‘stupid’ but after trying to find out who he was, I discovered he was ginger and decided he deserves no more attention beyond this sentence.

Rather than l
et sleeping dogs lie, O’Neill has come out with some of the most incoherent babble you are ever likely to hear anywhere. How he went from a comment about long ball to everything from Barcelona to tackling to Bendtner’s height, I have no idea. If you haven’t had a chance to read this, please do as you will find yourselves more amused than angry but also maybe a little concerned about poor the poor Villa manager’s sanity.

I find it quite ironic that he spent a press conference as build up to a game against Fulham discussing Arsene but then concludes by saying that Le Prof should keep his opinions to himself. The most ironic statement was talking about Wenger getting carried away with his own importance. There’s a certain phrase about the colour of pots and kettles that would be quite apt at this point.

Once more, something has been blown quite ridiculously out of proportion and Martin O’Neill has gone all Kevin Keegan on us with his attention-seeking, over-defensive overreaction. Lord knows how he would have reacted had Wenger said something along the lines of: ‘Villa don’t have the bottle to maintain a serious top four challenge as they proved last season. Also, no-one should respect Martin O’Neill as a manager because his success is only dependant on how much money he has to spend and building a team that could win the Scottish league is as easy as winding up a bespectacled Northern Ireland manager with a chip on his shoulder”.

Soopa Nik is back

The reason why Arsene Wenger didn’t just feet first into the transfer market like some overkeen shopaholic in the January sales and come home with a bag of ill-fitting blouses and grotesque handbags. The Boss made it clear that the fitness of Bendtner would influence his decision whether or not to spend money on reinforcing our strike force. With the big Dane making a recovery, dreams of Huntelaar, Chamakh, Geoff Hurst and Dean Windass making a move to Ashburton Grove have gone up in a cloud of smoke (although with Eduardo’s latest ailment meaning he swaps places with Nik, aren’t we once again a striker down?).

Incidentally, as ML touched spoke about yesterday, Bendtner has already been making big boastful statements about aspiring to be Arsenal’s number one striker. At the risk of appearing lazy, I’ll just regurgitate what I said in the comments about this. Bendtner’s barely hopped off the gurney and he’s already mouthing off. He needs to let his football do the talking before making statements about being Arsenal’s ‘number one’ striker when he’s not even remotely close to being as good as RVP. This is the rod he creates for his own back and the exact reason why some fans are quick to get at him when things don’t go so well. I want him to do well but when starts talking like this I just find myself shaking my head.

Bendtner has shown flashes but ultimately proved nothing noteworthy in his career thus far. When he goes out there and delivers on something close to a consistent basis then he can talk about being ‘number one’ because right now all these verbals just smack of unwarranted arrogance.

The perfect place to start backing up his words however would be with a hat-trick on Sunday against the debt-ridden scroungers from Salford.

COME ON THE GUNNERS!!