You see cigarettes, booze, drugs, junk food will all kill you at some point so they are hugely regulated, what is not regulated but sure has the effect to instantly knock your heart dead is stuff like Arsenal’s first 60mins performance against West Ham. How many times as Arsenal fans have we had to go through games like that, go to a ground where we expect to just turn up, get the 3 points that belong to us and catch a quick train ride back home and then we concede a freak goal, start to create many chances , do the ooooohhhhsss, ahhhhhhsss, swear loudly and then in a rush to score we concede another like we almost did against West Ham.
Two goals down and it would have been a different encounter. Good thing Carlton Cole was just toothless and could not take the opportunities that fell to him to extend West Ham’s lead. It wasn’t all West Ham in the first half though, we should have buried at least a few chances ourselves with Ozil and Ramsey doing some real hard work to put Giroud through but Giroud continued to prove why he is not considered a world class finisher by many Arsenal fans.
We have our wings back which is very important, we wrote a few weeks ago about our lack of wing play in this piece, Arsenal cant form Voltron, we have no wings’ and it was evident yesterday once Poldi got on the pitch we were able to stretch the West Ham defence more and produce more chances which lead to goals. Our game has been very direct without Theo and Poldi on the pitch, no one is willing to hug the line and play from there, an attribute Poldi showed to create the wonderful second goal for Walcott before getting a goal himself. Don’t they feel like new signings? And the Ox is yet to return to give us another splendid option.
……substitutions
They were enforced on us by Ramsey’s injury and the effect on the pitch was immediately evident. Would the manager have made it if Ramsey was not injured? He didn’t think it necessary against Chelsea, certainly he would have yesterday but Wenger needs to decisive with his decisions his actions or inactions has a massive effect on what happens during a game. Wenger is very patient but sometimes the game requires you to be ruthless to take anything from it.
……Santi Cazorla
In our game review we highlighted the importance of Santi Carzorla to this team last year, he was absolutely perfect playing from the middle, Santi has an amazing mind and the beauty of his game is how he can quickly take advantage of spaces that defenders create once he holds the ball, playing on the left really does curtail his efficiency as he has a limited amount of runners to get the pass to. Would Santi have put in that cross Poldi floated in for Theo’s second? I don’t think so. It’s important we give him more time in the middle especially now we don’t have Ramsey playing due to injury.
….Ramsey injury
Suffered a thigh strain yesterday that will see him miss the Newcastle game and maybe more. The manager says an assessment of the injury will have to be done today to ascertain how long he will take to recover. We can expect an answer to that at the press conference for the Castle game most likely. Ramsey has been an engine in our midfield and he has played a huge number of games this season, over played players have a tendency to get easily injured and maybe Ramsey should have been rested.
Reading the preview of the game from LeGroove he very well highlighted why Wenger should trust his whole squad more rather than a select number of players stating that the last time we made whole sale changes to the squad was against Hull and the effect was positive for everyone. I completely agree with him, to win the games you need a team, to win the league we need a squad and Wenger needs to use it as much as possible to ensure we don’t players burnt out die to over use. Ozil has to be near a strain or something with amount of games he has played.
…….Giroud
Often we hear from people in the game how you can train a midfielder to keep positions and pass better, a defender can be taught how to understand awareness, how to tackle better and better decision making with 1 v 1 situations and wingers can be taught how to cross the ball better. It just takes training and a willingness to achieve it, in training you stay a few extra hours have someone work with you on crosses and you will get better. Yaya Toure wasn’t blessed with free kick taking abilities was he, I never knew him to take them a Barca and he really wasn’t scoring as much as he is now from his early days at City.
However, can you teach a striker to score? Goal scoring is almost instinctive, there are always a million and one ways to put the ball behind a goal keeper and into the net and a players ability to decide that is what makes the difference between a regular striker and a world class one. I really don’t want to over flog this Giroud issue but he really needs to work on his finishing , a few times yesterday all Giroud needed to have done was to stretch out his right leg but he choose his more comfortable left. I don’t think you can learn how to score in training, it has more to do with confidence and intuition, attributes folks like Suarez,Aguero , Ronaldo etc have in abundance. His ability to bring other people like he did for Poldi’s goal is the best part of his game but won’t we all love it if he scored a lot more.
Was a nice game yesterday in the end and hopefully we can keep up that performance against the most inform team in the league now, Newcastle.
Off to work now….sad thing about the holidays been in midweek!
Lets interact on the comments section underneath or on twitter @Canoncrested.
Have a great day friends.
