It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold.  If temperature is a guide to the revenge due then Blackburn are going to get roasted.

Our game at Ewood was a seriously depressing affair and one of the low points of this (and any) season. To concede 4 goals from 3 Blackburn shots and to lose from being 2 up after 20 mins was desperate for fans just recovering from the MU mauling. They were the worst of times.

Today we hope to continue our long unbeaten run since the last defeat (thanks RL), and I see no reason whatsoever to think A Change is Going to Come. Can we do it ? Yes We Can. In fact, I Had a Dream we would win in style (stop these American pre-Superbowl quotes immediately BR before you lose your audience)

With better luck we would have left the Reebock with 3 points , being only the woodwork away from a comfortable win; We were able to get good Yardage but the Completion Rate wan’t good enough. Walcott, who came in for much criticism, piled up lots of Rushing Yards but was unable to Convert his Air Yards. The use of Ramsey as the Ball Carrier was not working as Bolton’s Defensive Ends kept Blocking him.resulting in too many Incomplete Passes and Interceptions This could be put down to our Offensive line having problems escaping their markers. Despite the negativity, it was highly encouraging to see our Defensive Line cope so well now our Full Back has Returned, and is able to help in Defensive Co-ordination. (Enough BR!!)

What do Blackburn bring?  Well, a poor defence whose last away clean sheet was last season at the Emirates. The Yak is suspended, Samba is out of favour and will not be picked. Steve Kean has been given the vote of Confidence by the Venky’s. Rovers were extraordinarily unlucky to lose to Newcastle mid-week having 30 shots on goal with no result. Blackburn are 18th in the PL, closer in points to us than we are to MU.

Mr. Wenger has stated he will rotate today, by that I believe he will rest O-C and perhaps Ramsey. Though Van Persie needs some R & R he is unlikely to get it as Park is clearly not to be trusted ; if we are frustrated, imagine how Park must feel – excited beyond belief at his signing and then left bereft on the bench, which must be hugely dispiriting given his hero status in Korea.

My Team:

Rosicky remains one of my favorite Arsenal player, it is tragic his injuries have resulted in our not seeing his best form, but every time he plays he gives his all and deserves more pitch time. Whether AW would drop Ramsey who appears to be an automatic starter is a moot point, but if it were my call, the Welshman would get a rest.

Today’s Gooner: I used to walk my dog (Eddie RIP) in Highgate Woods. As often happens when dog walking one makes friends with fellow walkers. Usually we have no idea of each others names and refer to each other as “Rufus’s Dad” or “Snowy’s Mum” etc. I became friendly with a big man walking his Staffordshire, he always wore a hat low over his brow and I thought nothing of it. We often talked football and one day he said he played regularly for Arsenal Celebrities. Curiosity got the better of me and I asked him his name, to which he replied Tony Hadley, the lead singer of Spandau Ballet. Being a top class bullshitter I managed to extricate myself from an embarrassing situation by telling him he looked much older and fatter on television.

AW’s next Transfer Target.

Tony will almost certainly be at The Emirates today cheering on his team. Top bloke, big Gooner, fine singer. dodgy pooch.

See you all the The Line of Scrimmage …..

Go Giants

COYRRG

Written by Big Raddy

Down to 7th in the Premier League

We’ve fired a blank against the worst defence in the league.

And our great hope Wilshire is injured again.

Is this the lowest we have been as Arsenal fans in the last 7 years?

No, is the answer. The lowest was 6 months ago when we had just lost arguably our 2 best players in their prime, had been stuffed 8-2 at Old Trafford, and we’re struggling to stay in the Champions League. We were a shell of our former selves. Lacking confidence, energy and most importantly, world class players.

But haven’t things changed for the better since then? The fact we are pretty pissed off with the result yesterday goes some way to show that things have improved. Just 6 months ago we would’ve expected a terrible, toothless performance against Bolton. We would’ve gone into the game feeling sorry for ourselves, praying that the home side take it easy on us.

I’m not saying things are rosey, I’m not saying that we will finish top 4, and I’m not saying we should all be happy.

But the fact is we got through those harder times in August, and if we stick together, we can get through these hard times now.

There’s no match report or ratings on yesterday’s game. Just a rallying cry from a fellow blogger asking you to keep your heads, keep together, and most importantly, keep the faith.

At least until the end of the season!

Slimgingergooner

Still warm and cuddly after Sunday but a midweek trip to a freezing Lancashire is not what was wanted, particularly to a Lancashire team who are in the process of turning their season around.

The recent beatings of both Liverpool teams is evidence of Bolton’s turnaround. Add in the Cup win over Swansea and we can see tonight’s game will be a challenge. Coyle is always heralded as the “coming” man and a manager who can make a team punch above it’s weight. If he keeps Bolton up he will have done a superb job. Kevin Davies always enjoys playing us and like many I hate to see him on the pitch (though I like him very much when playing anyone else!). We lost 1-2 at the Reebock last season, Bolton scoring in the 90th minute after Chesney had saved a Davies penalty.

After the brouhaha of the Cahill affair in summer (if it was true), relations between our two clubs have improved to the extent that we have loaned out Ryo to gain the same education received by Wilshire. Let us hope for the same results.

Arsenal’s form is difficult to assess, we have played superbly in patches over the last 2 games yet have conceded 4 times with the defence looking naive. I thought the overall performance on Sunday was very good with Ramsey running the show but two silly goals were conceded, and it could easily have been worse when AV missed an open goal header from a corner – Fabianski could and should have assisted his defence.

We will not see Fabianski tonight but we will see a return from two players who have been terribly missed: Arteta and Sagna. In a very short time, Arteta has become an integral part of the team, the loss of the Spaniard has been a major factor in our poor run (though he did play in the loss to Fulham).

A Vital Cog

Sagna has been a huge miss. It was no surprise that Theo played better having Coquelin play behind him instead of JD, and with Sagna he will improve further. Losing the best right back in the PL was always going to have an effect, missing Bacary’s defensive ability, particularly in the air has been immensely damaging to our season – perhaps more than any other player. It will be wonderful to see his lung busting runs in support of the attack.

TV is a fine back up LB, (though he was found wanting a couple of times on Sunday),  we are finally close to having a first choice defence and midfield (bar Jack & Santos).

I expect Ivory Coast to get to the Final of the ACN; as such we will not be seeing the return of Gervinho until the end of Feb, so who plays on the left? Oxlade-Chamberlain was very good in patches on Sunday but 3 games in 10 days is a lot to ask of the lad. I expect to see Arshavin or Benayoun start – though it would be interesting to see Park – with O-C coming on at 60+ mins if needed. Another TH cameo goal would be good.

My Team:

With Chamakh returning next week it beggars the question  ……………. Why was Park signed? It is highly unlikely  our scouts just took a punt on him – it is not the Arsenal way. French football is not so different from ours, so the acclimatization must surely have taken place  …. so why? Play the lad, I say, he cannot be worse than the Moroccan.

Which brings us to the inventor from Bolton – being the centre of the cotton industry which brought such wealth to Victorian England, it is no surprise that Bolton was home to Samuel Crompton, inventor of the Spinning Mule, but there has been an embarrassing lack of facial hair in recent weeks and for that reason we are going slightly off subject and  I bring you one of Bolton’s finest –  an Industrialist – William Lever, later to become Viscount Leverholme who founded the company Unilever.

Starting with Sunlight soap, he went on to manufacture both Lux and Lifebouy. Through a mixture of business acumen and worker’s exploitation (he used slave labour in Africa) Lever Bros became one of the biggest businesses in the UK and is now the 18th largest company quoted on the FTSE, employing 160,000+ people. However, both Crompton and Lever were clean shaven….

So here is a bloke who once visited Bolton …..

Bolton’s Winter Home Kit

If you are lucky enough to be going – Dress up Warm.

COYRRG

Written by Big Raddy

One of the least edifying spectacles in modern football is that of managers attempting to deflect criticism for a defeat by making spurious attacks on the opponents who beat them.

I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of this phenomenon, having watched our own otherwise distinguished coach, a certain Mr Arsène Wenger, pull the very same trick on numerous occasions.

But even Arsène’s excuses (which have ranged from the opposition being too tackly to having the wrong sort of leaves on the line) have seldom been as crass as those trotted out by the Ginger Whinger following our last couple of meetings with his team.

Remember when we played Villa at their place back in December? We won 2-1 and the Villans’ thuggish fullback, Alan Hutton, was sent off. According to Alex McLeish he was “conned” by van Persie.

How was he conned? Well, the first of the ex-Spud’s two yellow cards came after he squared up to our captain after fouling him. The booking was totally correct. Being fouled by an opponent does not constitute “conning” him, nor does standing your ground when he shoves his snarling, bestial face into yours.

The second booking could have been a straight red. In fact a better manager than McLeish would have spotted that his pit bull had lost his head and would have pulled him off. But I guess it’s too much to expect one pit bull to find fault with the slavering aggression of another.

Now we move forward in time to last Sunday.

Of course McLeish must have been gutted at throwing away a 2-0 lead in the FA Cup – but why not take the defeat like a man?

It’s not as if Arsenal did not deserve to win. We had been the better team in the first half despite conceding two goals. And in the second half we stepped up a gear and completely dominated.

But instead of praising his own team for making a game of it and complimenting Arsenal on a hard fought win, the Taggart look-alike made not one, not two, but THREE ridiculous claims of injustice.

Claim Number One: Theo’s ingenious goal (Arsenal’s second) was handball.

According to McPitbull, the spectacular score in which Walcott played an out-of-this-world one-two off the hapless Hutton to put us level in the match should have been disallowed. Quite apart from the fact that, from every angle I have seen, the ball appeared to strike Theo on the chest or ribs, Hutton blasted the ball at him from about a yard away. Theo’s reactions would have had to be faster than Concorde to have avoided the ball.

Claim Number Two: Darren Bent’s foul for our second penalty was “harsh”.

Sorry Alex. Bent’s was a typical forward’s challenge. He almost certainly did catch Koscielny before the ball, but even if (as has been claimed) he got a tiny touch on the ball first, he had overcommitted himself and failed to move the ball any significant distance, so Kozzer would have been able to continue with the move if he hadn’t been brought down. Penalty, any day of the week.

Claim Number Three: Robin van Persie should be punished by the FA for an “elbow” on Carlos Cuellar.

The trouble is GrumpyGingerJock, the replays show that Robin was watching the ball all the way and that his arm movement was entirely for balance and body readjustment. Maybe there was a shade of trying to hold off the inevitable clattering challenge that Robin must have known was coming, but he can hardly have expected Cuellar’s head to be lunging in at waist level. Robin was on the ground and Cuellar’s head was at midriff height. It really was a case of head to elbow and not the other way round, as the FA seem to have recognised when confirming yesterday that they would not be taking any action against our Captain. Perhaps they should consider censuring McWhinger instead.

So, three spurious claims.

The last of them was a particularly vindictive one, aimed at trying to harm a great player in a way that can bring no benefit to Aston Villa.

The actions of a man?

Or the actions of a frothing latex puppet with a giant hand shoved up his jacksey?

I think we all know the answer: Alex McLeish, you are, indeed, a Muppet. And you probably use Preparation H.

The serious point in all this is that the sort of garbage that McMuppet comes out with gives fuel to the more sensational elements in the media who prefer nothing more than to focus on a “scandal” rather than on a great game of football.

And where Arsenal is concerned, they will latch onto anything negative if it means they don’t have to write about how well our team did to pull themselves round from a 0-2 deficit to force their way into the Fifth Round of the Cup.

Stirring fight backs don’t fit their preconceived agenda of Arsenal as a team in terminal decline. It’s just one more reason why we owe it to the world to win something this year.

RockyLives

Do you ever expect to win the league again while Wenger is manager at Arsenal?

I was listening to Talk Sport the other evening (I know, I know) when suddenly they posed that question and it struck me like a bolt of lightning. I don’t usually take too much notice of the anti-Arsenal rhetoric that Adrian Durham spews out. I realised recently that they only ever allow phone calls on their show from the kind of Arsenal supporter whose sole aim is to slag off the club and Wenger in particular; some may say what has taken you so long to work that out, to which I would say, fair comment.

The answer to the question came to me after a flash of the deepest soul searching I have been forced to make in the recent past and I realise that, in fact, I don’t expect to win the league again while Wenger is at the helm. And yet, even after questioning how and why I ever became a fully paid up, card carrying Wengerite in the first place I remain just that. Why, are you mad, I hear 99% of those Arsenal supporters who are likely to frequent Le Grove say?

Man City have made this question far easier to answer recently. It is much clearer for Arsenal supporters to see that their spending power restricts our ability to buy the best players who come onto the market, it is now generally understood that Arsenal cannot compete with their financial muscle.

The frustrating thing is that people like me have been trying to point out that we have been handcuffed in the transfer market for years, ever since Abramovich arrived in fact and things are not getting better. We are no longer just being financially dwarfed by Man City and Chelsea,  we are now about to have the free run we have previously enjoyed in the French transfer market squeezed by the arrival of more Middle Eastern financial heavy weights to Paris St Germain. For years we have had first choice of pretty much all the top talent that appeared in the French league — that is about to change.

So if it is finally realised that no matter who is at the helm of Arsenal that they would still be financially restricted by the lack of ability to work in the transfer market then why would you want to change what we already have?

Go through all the managers in the EPL and ask who you would prefer, there is no one, that being the case we would have to take a chance on a young up and coming European, in the same way as Chelsea have been forced to and even with a vast transfer chest available to AVB look how that is working out.

We have a manager who wants to be with us, is proud of the club, is determined to do the best he can and has the kind of experience that most other managers only dream of achieving in their life times.

Coming back to PSG, it was never reported in the papers but is there anyone who really thinks that the new owners didn’t offer that job with twice the wage (yes, twice the wage Herb) to Wenger, of course they did and yet where is he?

As Arsenal supporters we are slowly and painfully coming to terms with where we fit in the new financial football world order, realising that gone are the days when Wenger could attract and pay the best players on the world stage, gone are the days when we shared financial dominance in the EPL and the cold realisation that we have no divine right to win the league stares us in the face and yet even though, as I have said above, I do not expect to win the league again while Wenger is manager, it is financialy impossible for him to do so, I still believe that he is the best man for the job.

In Wenger I still trust

Do you?

Written by LB