Chelsea 2-0 Arsenal – 07/02/10 – (Premier League) 8 February, 2010

In yesterday’s preview I spoke about our chances of losing and how the winners would go on to be strong title favorites. Well it happened and we’re now the clear outsiders in this title race. We’re 9 points off the top and it’s going to have to take another big turnaround to get back in this. Yesterday I ended the blog by saying:

“Lose, well I just hope I’m not sat here tomorrow talking once again about missed chances, defensive lapses and poor displays.”

I’d like to assess that now, I think missed chances are unfortunately once again a talking point. Arshavin should’ve put us level at 1-1 when Fabregas lifted the ball over the defence to his feet. His shot came straight off the leg of Cech which was extremely unlucky, it would’ve been a great goal and changed the game. We had chances in the second half too, Nasri found himself one-on-one but hesitated and lost the chance and Fabregas almost bent in a low free kick – had either of them gone in it could’ve been a different story.

Defensive lapses? Well as a team I think we defended much better than against United. Yes, we were caught out on the break which was something we were meant to put a stop to but I think yesterday’s defensive errors were more down to individual problems. For the first, Clichy was on the back post, as he should be but then decided to walk across goal into the box to have a natter about something leaving his corner completely open for Drogba to put it in.

For the second, Chelsea broke on us but we still had men with the ball. Clichy had his man but for reasons unknown to me he left him and started to drift infield. Not to mark anyone, just came infield for no reason. The only thing I can think of is if he thought he was back on his own and was doing his best to cover all angles but he had two or three men back with him! When Clichy realised he got over to Drogba as fast as he could but he made it easy for the African to side step him and made it 2-0. I could moan about Almunia’s lack of effort to get the save in but we should’ve stopped the ball long ago.

However that last part I mentioned, ‘poor displays‘ I think we righted that wrong at least. We had something like 70% possession and most of the game was played in Chelsea’s half. We played well and a lot of people said afterwards we were the better team. However we lacked Chelsea’s cutting edge, their extra bit of quality and their rock solid defence. Yeah we played well but playing well isn’t always enough. Sometimes it helps if you actually have a striker on the pitch too…

We kept going and going which was to be expected but never found that first goal. We really should’ve converted those chances we had but to be fair they were pretty much all the chances we had. We pressured and pressured had loads of corners and worked the ball well but not much ever came of it. We were sending in a lot of crosses from wide which baffled me when our best headers of the ball in the middle were Walcott and Fabregas (who I should mention nearly scored a header with about 10 minutes to go). Also Cech was claiming almost every ball in the air, it was easy for him defending against seven dwarfs.

Wenger said before the game that you would be able to see our ‘mental strength’ that he keeps going on about and I guess he was right. However I find myself a bit pissed off with the Arsenal manager today. In the week he said something about ‘in England everyone thinks every problem is resolved by signings’. Well if your problem is not having one single fit striker then I’m sorry but the solution to that is bringing in a striker. It’s simple. At the beginning of the window he said we would be active and we would be looking to bring someone in quickly but we were left waiting all month.

He can go on about money and about how we have enough strikers in our squad but when do we ever have a fully fit squad? It’s frustrating that Wenger has this mentality of ‘we’ll be better next year’ and ‘give the current team a chance’ when they are quite clearly problems that can be solved straight away. We were so, so close to a (pre-mature?) title challenge this year but he just chose to stick with what we’ve got. He took a gamble and he lost.

It’s a shame because we’re getting so close but ending up so far.

So just one point out of a possible nine in this decisive run of four games. We’ve lost two our two main title rivals and I don’t think you can really argue that we’re the third best team in the league. Man United were just better than us last weekend and the same was true at Chelsea yesterday. This young team still needs time but one day we will get there.

Next up it’s Liverpool and for the first time in months we find ourselves looking down on the table. Liverpool have crawled back up the league and a win at our place Wednesday night would bring them within two points of us. We cannot let that happen. Yesterday was a must-not-lose but we lost, Wednesday we really cannot afford to lose. All the talk today on the official site is that we will keep going right until then end with this title challenge, well then we better win some games, starting against Liverpool in a couple of days time.
Build up to that in the next couple of days. Until then.