Injury no.1 and no.2 & ‘Invincibles’ talk 20 November, 2007

I said the other day that we wouldn’t have to wait to long until we could expect an injury or two; and we now have a player that has started pretty much every game out. Mathieu Flamini, who earnt his full-France debut a few days ago coming on in the final minutes against Morocco, has now picked up a knock. The French coach didn’t reveal what the injury was but did hint that it wasn’t major.

It looks like now we will have both Flamini and Fabregas out for Saturday’s visit of Steve Bruce’s Wigan side. This could give opportunities to Gilberto and Diarra, but not Diaby. Apparently he’s picked up a problem away on international duty too. Luckily the news at the moment doesn’t sound too bad on theses players and at least they’ve both come in central midfield where we have surplus quality.

At the start of the season we were being written off by all the papers and the general feeling about the Henry-less Arsenal is that we’d lose out on our Champions League spot to Tottenham and fall into decline. However we’ve started the season rather well in case you haven’t noticed and we’ve held our position at top spot in the table since September with a game in hand.

It seems losing the character of Henry has in a way raised spirits at the club as the players have come together as a family and got stuck into this campaign. They’ve taken no notice of their age or lack of experience and hit back at their critics this summer. There’s a long piece here from a number of journalists talking about how Arsenal have transformed into the next generation of ‘The Invicibles’.

This re-branding of our young team can be quite distracting but I really don’t mind the ‘I’ word at the moment. It doesn’t seem to be distracting the players and I’m guessing their either taking nothing of it or just seeing it as a nice compliment. This table shows that at this point in the season in the 2003/04 unbeaten season we had won 9, drawn 3, scored 25 and conceded 10. This current season we’ve got a slightly better record scoring two more goals. However, in 2003 at this point we’d lost twice in Europe and were struggling in the League Cup; this year we’re unbeaten in all competitions and looking fantastic wherever we play.

I wasn’t expecting this year to be our year and I thought the best we could achieve was 3rd. I haven’t changed my mind but dominating the Premier League is great! I’m trying not to get carried away though to try and stop me being disappointed when/if we don’t win the league. I’m just taking it game by game just as the team are and it’s just a bonus being at the top. If we’re still top come the end of January then I might start dreaming of silverware.

The only other bit of news is from Justin Hoyte who says his intentions are to stay put. He’s been linked with a move in January but he says he wants to fight at Arsenal. He’s got Sagna, Eboue and Diarra as competition so I don’t think he’ll ever break into the team but he’s useful to have in reserve. To be honest, we’ll cope whether he stays or goes.

Thanks for reading.