We must beat Stoke in a week to forget 31 October, 2008

I’ll start off by apologizing for not keeping the site up to date recently, I’ve had such a long week including a long and expensive day trip up to London for Wednesday night’s game. We all know what happened though, there’s not much point in me going over it all again in depth.

I will say this though. We threw it away, it was ours to win and there is no one to blame except Arsenal for throwing it away. There was no leadership on that pitch, we needed someone to take the game by the scruff of the neck once we went 4-2 up and say, ‘Look, we’re going to take the ball down, play our own game, not fuck about, concentrate, play the game at our own pace and win this one out.’ However we didn’t have anyone on the pitch to do that. You look towards players like Cesc Fabregas to take tht role, but he was fucking knackered, with Denilson alongside him he had to play defensive midfield, attacking midfield & no.10. Emmanuel Adebayor thinks he’s a player of authority but he was fucking useless the other night, he couldn’t keep the ball to save his life. And the one person who’s job it technically is to take this role is no good at it; William Gallas is no Arsenal captain. He should’ve played out those final few minutes as if they were the most important of his career, but I saw no leadership from him, which would inevitably ruin his career…

He’s been dropped/injured/whatever you want to call it for tomorrow’s game verses Stoke, also Eboue could miss out. Now Gallas’ injury could be legitimate, but i doubt it. This is a perfect chance to drop Gallas and teach him a lesson.

Arseblog reports today that there were some harsh words said after the Spurs game and The Mirror reckon Gallas has ruled himself out after this.

There could be some squad rotation for tomorrow’s game. I can see Adebayor, Denilson, Gallas and Silvestre all missing out. There will be players hungry to come in and some of those from Wednesday night need to realize that there are others who will happily take their place.

This game at Stoke has come at a perfect time. They will be difficult to beat and it will take some spirit, which is exactly what we need to show right now.

There are so many possible options for the team tomorrow. There is the team that I, a pissed off fan would make or there’s the managers team. Here’s what I think Wenger will do:

Almunia (c)
Sagna – Toure – Silvestre – Clichy
Diaby – Fabregas – Denilson – Nasri
Bendtner – van Persie

Here’s what I would do if it were up to me:

Almunia
Sagna – Toure – Djourou – Clichy
Walcott – Fabregas (c) – Diaby – Nasri
Bendtner – van Persie

I’m tempted to start Vela in my team, and I’m also worried how tired Walcott is after Wednesday, but with Eboue possibly out then I don’t know who else we have. Almunia made mistakes on Wednesday but he also made some alright saves and we haven’t got anyone else ready for 1st team football.

From being quite happy with the squad last week I’m not feeling so great now. I’m just not happy with the spirt we have. I thought we were doing alright until Tottenham showed us up. Maybe we were tired, I don’t know. But something has to be done and this team has got to pull together.

The title race is probably mentally over for us, so we have to find something to fight for. I bet moral isn’t great at the moment to a win tomorrow is vital.

It’s weird, if we’d have held out those last few minutes against Spurs this match report would be a very up-beat one. But we didn’t, at that is the problem.

I don’t think the players will be down in the dumps. I think they will be really up for this one and keen to prove a point. Stoke should be worried, we will be angry.

I’m really interested to see how we play tomorrow. The players will know the fans are upset with them and they will know we will be looking for a reaction. It’s a traditional Saturday 3.00pm kick off so it’s not on TV in the UK. I was meant to be going but I can’t afford the trip so I’m going to have to pick it up on the internet.

Hopefully a match report to follow on Sunday. Thanks for reading.

COME ON ARSENAL!