Afternoon gooners,
After a lovely lie in and a fry up to soak up last night’s alcohol I am ready to bless you with my words of wisdom. Well a more accurate statement would be; I am ready to ramble on aimlessly and barely coherently resulting in something vaguely about Arsenal’s match with Fulham today with lots of expletives.
So today we are at home against Fulham, a team who have been notoriously poor travellers to North London in the past. For me that makes absolutely no difference as today will still be a tough test for a team that are in some ways still finding their feet together. A strange thing to say about a team that has won 5 on the bounce but the combination of players have barely played together and it is the incredible character and work rate they have shown which has resulted in this great run. In order to maintain it they mustn’t get complacent by any means and continue to work as hard in every game in order to win.
In recent history our teams have fared well until complacency has kicked in and it has cost us majorly in throwing away the league twice in recent years. To be fair to the manager and a number of the players, they are publically supporting this theory. There have been calls from players and the manager alike to keep the concentration levels high and continue in the same vein as previous matches.
I think today will be tricky for a number of reasons. I feel the boss will feel the need to change the team a little bit in order to keep the players fresh but the problem for him is the team are playing well together. A dilemma indeed and I would imagine that the technology at Arsene’s disposal which helps monitor the players’ fitness will have as much to do with the selection as much as anything else.
The last thing we need is injuries but by the same token we cannot afford not to win. Every game is a must win especially when we are chasing the pack. We can hope others drop points but it is important to maintain our results particularly in games we should be winning.
Make no mistake, this is a game we should be winning and I expect we do but I have a niggling feeling deep down that we are due a blip. I don’t know why but I just feel that after five wins we are almost due a result going the other way. I sincerely hope that the team works their tits off to ensure that is not the case.
There doesn’t seem to be much news on the injury front which is quite a good thing I suppose. It seems that Jack might be nearing a return to training for the end of December and a return for Carl Jenkinson and Kieran Gibbs around the same time.
The team is quite difficult to predict because I am not sure how many players will be rested but I think the boss may just be tempted to play the same team with maybe one or two changes. I think the team may look a little like this: Szczesny, Djourou, Mertesacker, Vermaelan, Santos, Song, Arteta, Ramsey, Walcott, Arshavin and RVP.
Anyway a day or drinking and being a fat lard awaits me so enjoy yours and I shall post a match report and more tomorrow!
GoonerVerse.
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