Leyton Orient 1-1 Arsenal – 20/02/11 – (FA Cup 5th Round) 21 February, 2011

Well I don’t really want to say I told you so, but I was kind of expecting this kind of a result. Those that read my match preview will know that I talked about the need to deliver a professional, winning performance to put the struggles of Leeds, Huddersfield and Ipswich behind us. Well that didn’t happen and Leyton Orient can famously be added to the list of lower league teams that have got something off Arsenal (yes we beat Huddersfield in the end but it wasn’t straightforward).

Orient are just 5 miles away from us so playing Arsenal I imagine is a bit of a dream cup fixture for them and they will rightly be loving their last minute equaliser. I didn’t stay in the pub to watch the home celebrations but I expect they had a bit of a party. They will all be massively looking forward to the trip to Ashburton Grove too and just as they did yesterday, they will give everything to get a result. However I agree with Alex Song that we will go through with the match at home. We’ve had our shock and we should this time be good enough to see them off comfortably. It’s just the nuisance of another game that’s all, it will be played on Wednesday 2nd March which means we have Stoke this Wednesday, the Carling Cup Final on Sunday, the Orient replay the following Wednesday, back to the league at home to Sunderland that weekend and then we fly to Barcelona. We really could’ve done with the midweek break next week but at least we’re still in the competition.

We made 10 changes to the team that started against Barca and once again it really showed. Only Alex Song kept his place after he was substituted in the second half last Wednesday. It was a chance to rest those tired legs that fought so hard for our 2-1 1st leg win, so much so that we didn’t even bring on a single substitute yesterday with the bench made up of players who had started in the week.

We completely controlled the game but never really made ourselves dangerous enough with it. The goal eventually came when Bendtner’s cross met the head of Rosicky. You’d expect that kind of goal to be the other way around but I was pleased for Tomas to get a goal after a bit of a drought recently. I thought the opener would set us on our way to more but it never happened. There were chances but you can’t say we were as dangerous as we usually are.

An Orient reply always looked likely while it remained 1-0, I thought we just might be able to get away with a win this time but the goal eventually came late on. You can’t have too many complaints with it but Almunia wont be happy with letting it go underneath him like that. Tehoue skipped past the defence in the 88th minute and shot powerfully but it was right down Almunia’s sight and he was lucky that the Spainiard didn’t do better. Manuel didn’t do himself much good to try and earn that first team place back I’m afraid, he was decent against Huddersfield I thought but that one mistake late on yesterday will cost him any good reviews this time around.

The main positive from yesterday was that Ignasi ‘Iggy’ Miquel came through his debut with a good performance. I have to admit I was a little bit worried about our reserve captain making the step up yesterday, I haven’t heard the greatest things about him from his recent reserve games but he did well when it mattered. I suspect he’ll get another chance a week on Wednesday in the replay. You can watch his post-match interview here.

Arshavin had another similar performance to what he’s been producing of late. He’s looking much more lively than he did a couple of months ago and it’s great to see he’s doing it consistently at the moment. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about his strike partners; Bendtner struggled a bit, he’s trying which is good but a lot of things weren’t coming off for him and it looked a little bit to me that his self confidence was getting the better of him possibly. He needs games but it’s hard when you have in-form colleagues; namely Nasri, van Persie and Walcott. I was interested to see how Chamakh did and I thought he had an awful game, he might even be our most out of form player at the moment. He could hardly string a pass together yesterday and Orient had him played out of the game. He had a great chance to score sliding onto a low cross but he couldn’t get enough on it. Again, he needs games but I don’t see him getting loads any time soon unfortunately. In midfield Denilson had another poor display, he really hasn’t won over many fans this season and yesterday was another example of why. I can’t see why Arsene keeps putting him in at defensive midfield when he’s so shy to a tackle, get back or any other quality a defensive midfielder would have. He really needs to sort his game out otherwise he’ll soon be at the bottom of the list fighting for just three midfield place.

So we’ll pick this one up again next week then. We’ve got a second chance to right some wrongs and hopefully this time we can get through to the next round with ease where we will be making the trip to Old Trafford. What a juicy fixture. Next up it’s Stoke on Wednesday night so I’ll preview that one in the next couple of days, until then.