Spluttering frustration

Draws are almost as bad as defeats from a points perspective and it felt like a defeat at the Riverside today for me. Boro worked very hard for their point, but really we need to be going away to sides like them and taking all three points. The rested players were welcomed back into the side meaning that only Almunia, Djourou, Denilson, Song and Diaby kept their places.

Boro started with a full head of steam, but a recurring theme was that despite huffing and puffing frenetically at times they rarely looked like opening our defence up. The best early chance fell to RVP, unfortunately his chocolate foot was found wanting. Our only goal of the game when slack Boro defending left Ade free to head low into the net from our first corner. We then looked a side full of confidence, the second goal appeared on the cards, but alas it was not to be. Diaby shot low and hard after the ball broke for him at a corner.

A Clichy clearance took a wicked deflection and landed perfectly for Tuncay, he took a touch and then gambled by volleying a cross at full pace across the penalty box, the Gods were not with us and it found Aliadiere's head which deflected the ball past Almunia who had no chance at all. It was a great goal, but one has to say that on another day Tuncay's cross would have simply cannoned into touch. The goal shook us and gave Boro hope, it really was the pivotal moment of the game. Having said that RVP missed a great opportunity when Ade squared it to him with just the keeper to beat, unfortunately the ball was just a little bit too too far behind him and the opening was missed.

The second half was a frustrating affair, there were several recurring themes that have been seen at other games this season. Boro huffed but never really broke us down, they had one reasonable effort when Downing broke clear to force a good save from Almunia at his near post. The best chance of the half again fell to RVP, but he scuffed the ball just wide after a lovely little move. However there were just too many sloppy errors, we did not have the sharpness to take advantage of the class advantage. Bendtner typified that lack of ruthlessness in front of goal when he shot near post from a tight angle, another classic demonstration of where not to shoot, it had to go across the goal.

On the positive the defence looks so much more solid with young Johan Djourou at the back, he really is cementing himself in there for the long term. The problem with out side today was mainly in the midfield. Song did ok but was sloppy on occasions with his distribution, he did break up the play well and was strong in the tackle and in the air. Fabregas tried hard but there was little space for him in the middle of the park and he did let himself down at times with some loose touches. Denilson worked hard, but he's never going to give us much in the way of width, likewise Diaby.

Adebayor had a good game, he held the ball up well, and looked direct when he had the chance. RVP is still a bit of en enigma, he has seven goals so far this season but he really should have had at least double that, again today he spurned several great openings.

So it wasn't awful but it wasn't good enough, just a bit middle of the road if we're honest, bit it wouldn't have taken much to turn it into a victory. We created enough to have won the game, even though it was not a vintage performance, we simply have got to be better at taking our chances when they come along. It is a team game, we win and lose together, certainly no one deserves a scapegoating for today's performance. Football is easy to talk, you just need to score more than the opposition, unfortunately that's also what the opposition are thinking.

Big win in the match that counted

Arsenal's youngsters won and lost on a night that saw a weakened senior side fall limply in Porto and a youth cup side win a massive away tie in Birmingham. To start with the positive our youth cup side managed a late winner courtesy of Jay Emmanuel-Thomas which helped defeat a strong Villa side 3-2, however I'm not going to ignore the other game that took place in Portugal.

Firstly to set the scene, Porto are a very strong side, champions of Portugal and undefeated in eleven games at home to English sides in recent years in Europe, this was never going to be an easy game for a severely weakened Arsenal side. Despite what the media say, tonight's line up saw Fabregas, Sagna, Toure, Adebayor, Clichy and RVP all rested, it was closer to our reserve side than our first strength eleven.

Having said that the performance was poor, no one really escaped with much credit other than Manuel Almunia who didn't put a foot wrong, while Gibbs and Wilshere looked tidy as substitutes. It didn't help that Arsene opted for a 4-5-1 formation that so often fails us, leaving the lone striker Bendtner horribly isolated up front. The ball was given away cheaply time and time again by one and all, we just never found our flow, while Porto killed us on the break time and time again.

In the end it doesn't matter much that we finish second, there really isn't a great deal of difference between the winners and the runners up of the groups. The game will have been a great experience for many of our younger players, while we have learnt a bit more about some of our slightly more peripheral players. Diaby appears an enigma, highly talented but frustratingly inconsistent. There's a lot of talent in our young players but they need to realise the level of performance that is required to succeed at the champions league level, this experience will have done them no harm at all. The Boro away game is the one that matters, I just can't get myself too worked up by this defeat, in context it was hardly a surprise. I just wonder if the normal crowd of doom merchants will see it the same way? I doubt it, watch the vitriol fly and the scapegoats burn.

A campaign of misinformation

It's funny how those who know they are in the wrong will change their story time and time again because there is no logic to their argument, well we've seen this in classical fashion with the bizarre justifications for the booing of Emmanuel Eboue. I know it's all getting rather boring, but this story is running and running in the media and it's getting twisted to resemble nothing close to the reality of the situation. Even tonight I've heard football pundits saying that the Arsenal fans were right to make a stand against diving by booing Eboue, this campaign of misinformation should not continue.

Firstly it is pretty clear that a rather large majority of Gooners feel that the booing was bang out of line, so any talk of this being some kind of majority of opinion is well wide of the mark, it was very un-Arsenal like as Goodplaya puts it. Next the idea that Eboue was booed for his performance is at best only partially true, he was abused by our so called 'supporters' even while he warmed up on saturday, this abuse certainly continued and reached a crescendo later on, so this talk of him being abused for his performance is a manipulation of the facts. Likewise the reasoning that our poor performances have been down to Eboue is not born out by the facts, he was one of our better players against Fulham, didn't play against Stoke, City and Villa, while he by no means stood out as our worst player against Hull.

I've not doubt he's not the answer to our left midfield gap, however he's a very decent back up right back and he has put in a few decent performances in the centre of the park this season, he's a very useful squad player. He has also stopped the theatrics in which he indulged on a regular basis. Anyway that's enough of Eboue, because this isn't about Eboue, it's not about fans making a stand against cheating. It also wasn't a protest against Arsene Wenger, if anyone wants to make a protest then may I suggest they start booing Arsene at our next home game and I hope the people sitting near them tell them where to stick that one. As Alan Hansen writes so eloquently, when has booing ever helped a player, this pathetic behaviour can be amazingly counterproductive and destructive for individuals and for teams.

Eboue was a scapegoat, he was an easy target for the lazy cretins who can't be bothered to engage their solitary neurones on more than a monthly basis, Denilson and Song have been scapegoated to a lesser degree at other times this season. Eboue has been abused at other games this season, for example the Hull game, he wasn't playing that badly and he certainly wasn't diving, but this didn't stop some of our lovely supporters venting their spleens. For example after one game in which Song completed 55 of 58 passes and which we won against very high quality opposition, one expert blogger thought that he would lay into the young man and criticise how many times he gave the ball away. This sums up the level of cretinism we are dealing with here.

As society becomes more materialistic and litigious, people are more and more aware of what they do not have, rather than being appreciative of what they do have. The sad thing is that these people will only realise what they had when it is gone. Like the morons that were calling for Fergie to be sacked a couple of years back, these supporters have lost touch with reality and see success not as a possibility but as a divine right to which they are more entitled than anyone else.

Arseblogger spoke of the Eboue abuse : "This wasn't an orchestrated campaign, it was a spontaneous reaction". No doubt it wasn't orchestrated, however this does not make it ok, far from it, it was a deeply embarrassing moment for many a proper Arsenal fan. Many angry mobs have done some very nasty things in a spontaneous fashion, this doesn't make it ok. The booing of Emmanuel Eboue was a disgrace, he didn't deserve the treatment he got on Saturday and he hasn't deserved the abuse he's received at many other games this season. I know it's controversial and unpopular to say so but some of our fans are idiots of the highest order, it's only a small minority but it's a minority that's getting bigger and that's ruining games for the majority of us who want to support our team. If anyone starts abusing an Arsenal player at any Arsenal game in the future then I suggest you turn to them and tell them to f*ck off and support Tottenham instead.

Toys out of prams

There's been a lot of reaction to yesterday's events and rightly so, however this is no isolated incident, I have read and written a lot about this topic already this season, it appears that there is a lot more whinging and moaning going on within our own supporters than we've seen before, and it seems rather out of perspective with facts, so what is going on?

Well firstly we're fourth in the league, eight points off the leaders, we've lost some games unexpectedly but then again we've beaten Manu and Chelsea already too, we're still going strong in the Champions league and had a decent run with the youth in the joke cup. On top of this the club is in a very strong financial position in times when many clubs are on the rocks. In perspective things could certainly be going a lot worse, certainly it only takes a short memory to remember the days when we were struggling near the bottom of the table with the likes of Helder and Kiwomya in the side, if one goes back a bit further than this then one can easily get to some very very barren times when today's position would be taken without so much as a nanosecond's thought.

I'm sure if some of our rather demanding fans were Manu fans, then they would have been booing and abusing their own players while the score remained at nil nil at home to a poor Sunderland side, however their real fans kept supporting the cause and were grateful for the three points at the end of the game. In fact some have even called yesterday's 1-0 performance against Wigan as 'shit' and claimed that playing with Song was like playing with ten men, I struggle to find words to describe this kind of lunacy, maybe some people's inadequacies make them want to take it out on other people? Who knows. This is a Wigan side that was extremely unlucky not to take one, and maybe three points from Anfield recently. Some of the attempted justification of this kind of childlike behaviour does not cut the mustard.

In some people's eyes when we play well and lose, it's all about the result, but when we don't hit top form and win, it's all about the performance, it's almost as if they want to moan and whinge, they have an unquenchable thirst for the unrealistic, no team wins every week playing well, just look at Liverpool this season, they've been average at best but have ground out the wins, some people are demanding a Utopia that just doesn't exist.

In earlier games I've seen some utterly mindless criticism of our own players from our own supporters even when they're playing well, I just cannot understand what is going through these people's cranial vaults, it certainly isn't the firing of neurones. It's very popular for this brigade to scapegoat one or two individuals despite the fact that it is a team game and that the scapegoats are sometimes amongst our better players. It's easy to see what you want to see, so if you make up your mind that a certain player is useless then it's easy to fit the facts to your own prejudice, this is lazy and dangerous thinking.

Manuel Almunia, Emmanuel Eboue, William Gallas, Alexandre Song and Denilson seem to be some people's favourite targets. In fact this season the bigger and more established names such as Cesc, RVP, Walcott, Clichy and Toure have all had their fair share of stinkers as well. Ironically Almunia has been outstanding despite what some might say, while Song and Denilson have put in some good solid performances of late. It's easy to label Eboue as a lazy waste of space, but yourself in his shoes, would it not get you down to be abused by your own supporters even when you're playing well? We're in danger of alienating more players than just Eboue if this kind of behaviour from our fans continues, also it's hardly going to attract in future signings if they see that our support is as fickle as they come. I also wonder if we could have picked up a few more points if all our supporters got behind the team a bit more, rather than hurling abuse at a few convenient scapegoats.

One thing we should remember is that we're primarily Arsenal 'supporters'. There's an ugly streak in society these days that is now manifesting itself more than ever in football, in the week that Liverpool supporters booed their side off as they went top of the league with a draw we have seen some Arsenal fans abuse one of their own like never before. This ugly streak is the group of people who see everything as their 'right', they are people who will never enjoy life because they are never able to see what they have got, they always focus their attention on what they have not. Life is not about the end product of living, for we all end up as rotten corpses in the turf, it us about enjoying the majesty of the process, it's about appreciating what you've got. I think some of us have become too spoilt. I just wonder how much of an effect the abuse dished out to Eboue yesterday will have on keeping other players at the club, players like Cesc, it certainly can't be doing much good.

Ashamed of fellow 'supporters'

I think some people have hit a new low. For once I agreed with Shearer and Hansen on MOTD last night, it is certainly counter productive to boo one's own players. Some 'supporters' are very little people, they seem to want to whinge and moan whatever the circumstances, nothing is ever good enough for them, it is their human right to see arsenal win by a cricket score otherwise they will throw all their toys out their little pram. This is not only arrogant and naive, but it's also deeply disrespectful to our premiership opponents. Other sensible Gooners have deconstructed the behaviour of our resident Arsenal morons very neatly, see Arsenal-mania, the Gooner Forum, the Online Gooner, Arsenal Vision and Gunnerblog for more. Once again those who condone this kind of pathetic behaviour will reveal themselves as the small men that we know them to be.


It's no surprise that this kind of 'supporter' shows no respect to certain Arsenal players or even the manager at times. Emmanuel Eboue is a decent footballer, he's definitely a good right back, maybe he's only an average midfielder at best, and I know he's had his attitude problems over recent seasons, however there's never been a lack of effort on his part. Before yesterday's game he had been out injured for several weeks, he came on early in the game for the injured Nasri, yet again out of position, and had a awful game, who's to know what was going on inside his head in the second half, the boos certainly didn't help. What he did not deserve is the abuse he got from certain 'supporters', when I watch the video I feel ashamed, I wonder if these morons could explain themselves?

Three points but delusion lives on

Some people seem to live in a fantasy land in which the top four clubs should win every week, dominate their games from start to finish and never look like conceding a goal while playing at their imperious best week in week out. This is fantasy, the reality of the premiership means that there are actually a lot of rather handy sides residing in the bottom half of the table who are no walk over. In just the last few weeks we've seen West Ham draw at Anfield, Newcastle draw at Stamford Bridge and Fulham take a point at Villa. It's a great cliche that there are no easy games in the premiership, but it's bloody well true.

Some supporters should take note, we won the game today, we created a lot more good opportunities that the opposition and we won three points. It doesn't appear that this is enough for some. Wigan came to make a game of it and played with two up front, they were always going to create chances with this attacking line up. We were not at our best I know, however we were certainly not that bad, we created several clear cut chances from which we should have done better in the finishing department. Wigan had a couple of decent chances from crosses in the second half, one forcing a good Almunia save and the other wasted by Heskey, however they never really opened us up, most of their other chances were half chances at best because our defence looked solid enough to shut them out.

Djourou and Toure did well at the back, especially the young Swiss who really adds a bit of size and strength that our defence has so obviously needed this season. The midfield did ok, even if it was a bit unspectacular at times, losing Nasri to an injury in the first half didn't help our flow. Despite never reaching fifth gear we created a lot, RVP had several great openings, Ade hit the post in the first half, as did Denilson in the second. Eboue did not play well, but the morons who routinely abuse him at games need their vacuous heads examining, if they really think that their brainless criticism will help the team then they are even more stupid than they appear.

I don't live in cloud cuckoo land, I know this Arsenal side is not strong enough for the league title this year, however I will continue to get frustrated when I notice that so many people are so unable to appreciate what we have, while they are so keen to criticise the team and manager at the drop of a hat. We got the victory we needed today, it would just make it a lot easier for the players if every supporter got behind the team, there's no doubt that the feeling of the crowd can be sensed by the players and the lack of support of certain fans is definitely of no help to our team. Some victories are brilliant performances, others are more of a grind, others just lucky, but as supporters we should most definitely not become such over expectant wankers that we criticise the less flamboyant victories. Some people do not deserve to be called supporters.

Dust settles on the Carling Cup

The Carling Cup campaign is over for another season. Its a shame, because the kids' performances against Sheffield Utd and Wigan have been some of the highlights of the season.

However, its also much ado about nothing. Progress in the Carling Cup is nice, for what its worth, but it really isn't worth getting that excited about.

It seems to have been assumed before the game that the kids would breeze past an in-form Burnley side, who are sitting 4th in the Championship and have seen off Fulham and Chelsea in the last two rounds of the Carling Cup, which is no mean feat.

This was the first time the kids have been drawn away in this competition and a cold December night in Burnley is a long way from from home for messrs Vela and Merida. The team Wenger picked was relatively weak, at least defensively, compared to the excellent partnership at the back that Djourou and Song formed against Wigan (both of whom are now in the first xi). Paul Rogers was given a starting debut at the back with Silvestre, and he is a player I have quite liked in the couple of games I have seen him in. But this was a tough night and he was switched at half time for Lansbury. The back four in the second half was quite difficult to figure out, but Hoyte seemed to move into the middle, with Lansbury at right back.

Its hardly a surprise that a couple of mistakes were made at the back, and I don't think conceding two goals away from home at Burnley is any great surprise.

However, what was disappointing was the way we attacked the Burnley goal. Vela did ok, but was clearly gagging to score a wonder goal, and Bendtner was just poor. He looked slow, indecisive and wasteful. I lost count of the number of times I shouted at him to get stuck in.

Bendtner is a real mixed bag. His left foot finish against Kiev was top drawer. A real belter under pressure to win the game. He often seems to score goals when he comes on as substitute - he knows he has 20 minutes to make an impression, plays on the shoulder of the last defender and goes straight for goal when he gets a sniff of a chance.

When he starts games, he plays deeper and deeper, trying to link up the play - but he is simply not very good at it. If we could ever get to the situation where Ade, RVP and Eduardo are all fit, then Bendtner is not going to be seeing a lot of first xi action. However, for now at least, lets not be too hard on him and remember how shite the 3rd and 4th strikers are at clubs like Liverpool and Chelsea.

So, lets put the Carling Cup to bed for another year. However, if the first xi can come close to repeating what the kids did to Wigan, then this saturday will be a formality. Unfortunately, that is exactly why I am worried that Nasri & Co won't bother to turn up and get stuck in.....