Hoof-and-run
Well the night sleep didn’t make the result any better!
It was still poor to draw 1-1. By poor, I don’t mean Burnley didn’t deserve the point – it’s possible they deserved more (sounds like it from Arseblog). But poor in the sense that the team:
- started as well as I’ve seen us start, peppering their goal, dominating the play, Cesc in scintillating form, getting the goal and setting up others.
- on Sunday had the biggest rocket they’ve ever had and it worked; they were reminded to play as if they’re proud to wear the shirt
- know that if they continue to play with passion and skill, they can beat teams of the stature and strength of Burnley
- knew they needed to win the game in hand if they had any pretensions to win the premiership
So, yes. Poor.
As I said here last night, I hadn’t seen the replay/highlights. Others have and said the
penalty looked definite. On the night right in front of us it didn’t look like a penalty. But at the end of the day, all you can say is that it was given as a penalty by the referee, and he’s
the one who decides, rightly or wrongly. So they scored.
The disallowed Burnley goal was up the other end and I was to busy howling in frustration and anger, along with the other Arsenal fans to notice it had been disallowed at first. It may or may
not have been controversial but I’ve seen managers rant and rave about disallowed goals longer and harder than Owen Coyle, who seemed to accept it fairly well.
Burnley adopted hoof-and-run tactics that we’ve seen work against us so many times this season. In fact it worked better than Liverpools attempt at the same. Our defence is known to be
poor at dealing with high balls in, maybe because we play such a high line, maybe because our keeper is fragile (sorry, but Almunia had yet another shocker yesterday). Whatever the reason, the
mixture of some nice touches with the hoof-and-run undoes us every time. Our only solution is to score more goals than the opposition. It’s all very the commentators calling that good football,
and it clearly works, but I don’t find it entertaining or nice to watch (mainly I suppose because it’s against us, not for us). We’d struggle to play that kind of hoofing it upfield not least
due to Almunia’s inability to keep the ball in play.
Some might call it ‘homely’
Anyway, Wengers claim of poor fixture ‘arrangement’ is not totally unreasonable, but that kind of fixture congestion happens to all of the big teams this time of year, and it’s probably
unavoidable unless some of the not-playing-in-Europe teams had like 3 or 4 weeks off. Deflection tactics I think.
Arsene Wenger likes to defend his players, and never criticises them in public. I admire him for that in many ways, but really, the team should have to take it on the chin in these situations.
And a few harsh words for “the team” (without singling out individuals) wouldn’t go amiss!
So there you go. My initial reactions were fair enough, summarised by “Burnley fought hard and had chances to win, whilst Arsenal played brilliantly in very short
bursts, but didn’t do enough to win.“
I’d also like to add that we had appalling luck, but NOT as an excuse (we should have buried the game early and kept control and there are no excuses for that), but watching the ball bounce
away from our players and bobble the wrong way, stuff like that can make a difference. And watching Nasri and Arshavin juggle the ball between them in the Burnley penalty area would have been
comical if we’d been 3-0 up instead of 1-1. As it was, just frustrating. These things generally have a way of evening out over the course of a season, as do bad decisions. But sometimes they
can come at annoyingly bad times.
Man of the match, still Song. It would probably have been Cesc if he hadn’t gone off though and I have no doubt we will miss him on Saturday.
So that’s it, another day another dropped points. And you can bet Phil Brown will get Hull fired up for the weekend. We could do worse than play some of the big youngsters from the start, Kyle
Bartley and Emmanuel-Jay Thomas to name two. We may need them against more hoof-and-run merchants.
Last word goes to the ground. I’ve seen worse, but not in the Premiership. It’s poor to be honest. And I know, I know, we’re spoilt because the Emirates (or “The Grove” as some like to call it)
is such a lovely stadium, modern, huge, airy, great visibility from everywhere, and really good amenities. On the one hand I feel bad calling this ground poor, on the other hand, it should make
us more proud of the great stadium we have.
The steward just in front of me was very friendly and chatty, but enough about the ground