Crystal Palace vs Arsenal : The Kings Visit

Resident Blogger : SimonSEEZ

Good Morning Goooooonneers!!!

In Andrews Voice from Arsecast, ‘I hope you are well’ cos I am. They might have the Palace but we sure are the Kings and we visit Palace today on the back of a champions league defeat against Dortmund our first defeat in about 12 games and if someone gave me a scrabble sack and asked me to pick a tile with the name of the club in the league for us to play after losing to Dortmund, I would definitely conjure all the spirits in the world to make sure when I bring the tile out it has Crystal Palace on it.

We still lead the league table and one would expect us to continue that lead today and lots have been written about the quality of opposition we are playing in the coming weeks and picking complete points from this is essential. Palace have lost five of their last six and also lost their manager during the week and sometimes this is a good thing or a bad thing. If the players had issues with the manager now he is out they would have a good reason to come together and win a game and that would just make our job a little difficult, just a little as we should beat Palace in any shape or form they appear and also keep a clean sheet as we haven’t achieved that since we beat Spurs.

Arsenal

Wenger has a lot to ponder about his team this weekend with an eye on the Capital One game, the life of a top league coach has to be difficult as last week Wenger was playing Norwich with an eye on Dortmund too. The club hasn’t won a cup in a long time and some fans would love him to rest players for this one and play a full strength team on Tuesday against Chelsea but should that come at the expense of our league position?

In any case, we really would need to rest players for this game as even the manager admitted that some fatigue was the reason the players looked somewhat lethargic against Dortmund. Vermaelen, Monreal and Jenkinson can do a job in defence and we can still be fine, Flamini did not play at midweek so he is well rested for this with a view to collecting his yellow card so he misses the Carling cup game and is available for both Liverpool and Man United and also Santi can start in the middle ahead of Ozil with Rosicky and Gnarby on either side of the wings. That is almost like a whole new team out there, sadly we can’t afford to rest Giroud.

Player to Watch: Santi Cazorla

He seems to be coming back to form, showed his abilities when he joined the Dortmund game

Palace

Speaking of resting players, imagine we still had Chamakh in our squad and we had to lose Giroud for some reason and bring Chamakh in now that has to be one of the worst things to do in footballing history.  Listening to Arsecast this weekend and James from GoonerBlog said ‘The Moroccan has managed just one shot all season, to be fair to Chamakh he scored with his one shot and that’s an amazing 100% record maybe he intends to lead the league with the highest accuracy – ONE SHOT, ONE GOAL 100% PRECISION’  can’t really argue with that can we?

To be fair we owe Holloway as he did us a huge favour getting Chamakh off our plate and I wasn’t surprised Wenger felt a huge sense of sympathy towards his departure. Ironically Sunderland and Palace have signed the highest number of players last window and they both are at the wrong end of the league table, there seems to be a trend here, QPR last season did same too.

Can Palace pull themselves together to get something from this game? I don’t think so and surely don’t hope so too. Wish them better luck with their remaining games. Maybe they should get Zaha back on loan as Moyes doesn’t seem to like him a lot.

Prediction: Palace 0 – Arsenal 3

Should be a good weekend and it’s an early kick off so we get to win our game and watch all our rivals lose afterwards. Have a great weekend Gooners!!

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