Gosh - its taken me ages to get round to this. 4 days ago seems like quite a while especially having watched Stoke heap on the misery for Sp*rs and Newcastle grow a pair of balls, whilst Manchester City take a further step towards expensive mediocirty since.
To be fair to Sp*rs, they’re reaping what they’ve spent seasons sowing. You just can’t change your manager and entire 1st team every season and expect anything else other than total collapse. Its a lesson worth heading that money doesn’t buy success. After some convincing performances last season, none less than when they beat Arsenal in the Carling Cup and eventually won the tournement, they decided to sell two of their best players and invest in other expensive players. They also sold most of their utility players to one club and suddenly its looking grim. All joking aside, maybe they actually will get relagated this season? Does the myth still persist that tottenham are a big club? To go from your best start in 15 years, sack the manager and then achieve your worst start ever - someone somewhere must be cursing their 20:20 hindsight.
Manchester City also look to be experiencing a few teething problems. Robinhio looks like he’s suddenly realised he signed for the wrong side of the city, Shaun Wright Phillips suddenly looks worse than Eboue (!) and Stephen Ireland plays football for exactly 3 minutes and 42 seconds in every 90 he spends on the pitch.
Newcastle finally grew some balls and showed some fight last night, which was about the best thing about an otherwise dull end to end (in the wrong sense of the phrase - the keepers played catch with each other for most of the match). They actually don’t look a bad team, especially having played 80 minutes with ten men. They looked far hungrier than City and maybe, just maybe, the tide will turn for them after the Eastenders inspired drama of the past few weeks. One things for certain, its defenitately not been boring at the ‘Toon, which ironically is what the Geordie bastards wanted (in addition to a failed manager who walked out on five jobs and has never won anything in top flight football).
Anyway it makes me wonder because Arsenal fans still seem to be demanding the cheque book comes out in January. I don’t think they realise that spending money in January won’t stop the hurt of losing to Fulham or Hull. In fact, new players in Janurary will take time to settle in and the team will be unbalanced again.
Either way Arsenal showed some real defensive frailty on Saturday. Lee Dixon spent 10 minutes taking us apart and pointing out our weaknesses on national TV for all of our upcoming opponents to learn (:)) and he was pretty much spot on. The one thing he didn’t seem to pick up on was Song in the right back postion. He kept getting drawn into the middle (his natural postion) and didn’t have the discipline to stay wide or the tactical knowledge in covering threats. Once Eboue moved to right back in the second half the majority of Evertons dominance down that side disapeared. I never thought I’d say this more than once in the same month but Eboue played very well in the second half.
Arsenal also did somthing a bit out of character. We scored a pretty scrappy goal, a goal from outside the area and a clinical finish from a winger. 3 virtual unkowns! How many times have I sat in front of the TV or in the ground screaming for a shot from anybody facing the goal? Seems like Nasri might be the new Ray Parlour (jk) and be partial to a shot every now and then. Cesc had a few distance shots saved or deflected as well, and it adds an important dimension to the game - we can’t walk it in every time and the goals need to come from all over the final third. Just think back to Giovanni for Hull - they never looked like scoring in a million years…. and then they won.
Silvestre looked ok at the back but he was never a shining star for united, more a dependable and I expect thats exactly why we snapped him up. A couple of murmings suggest he was at fault for the goal, but to be fair to the lad he was covering an incoming defender as well as trying to block a potential shot. Toure was nowhere and Song left the wing exposed so you can’t blame him.
Adebayor continues to look like a pretender and hopefully when Bendtner is back from injury we’ll see him given a chance, or the terrific Vela alongside RVP.
A win is a win, and a reason to be positive especially as it showed some character to battle back from one goal down to overcome a stubborn Everton team themselves searching for some good results.
The acid test comes in the next couple of weeks - we desperately need to hammer another nail into Spu*s and Man U will be the biggest test so far.
I’m probably in the minority, in fact judging by the mediareaction to Saturdays bore-fest I definately am, but in my opinion Ashley Cole deserved every boo he received after helping Kazahkstan to a nice little consolation goal.
Forget the fact that the nasty little shit cheated on his wife in the very public eye. Forget the fact that he nearly crashed his car after being offered only £55k a week. His nochelence and total inability on the ball deserved mockery and I’m not surprised a frustrated element of the 89 thousand people at Wembley decided he was wasting their hard earned cash.
At best it was a ludicrous lapse of concentration, at worst it was negligence. Consider it an appraisal if you will - I face the sack if I make mistakes in the world of business, a comedian faces the hecklers if he doesn’t get the laughs in and a singer will be singing to no-one if they can’t hold the notes. So why should Cashley Hole be immune to his audience showing displeasure with his performance.
He clearly got a kick up the arse because he concentrated more after than and even went on to improve his play and silence the boo-ers. Which is exactly what he needed to do - notice the crowd didn’t turn it into a vendetta and he was applauded off the pitch?
Calling people ignorant for expressing their displeasure after paying £50 to see a mediocre performance is wrong. Ignorance is missing a drugs test to buy bedsheets Rio. Ignorance is racial discrimination or the sort of vile taunts Sol Campbell received by the Sp*rs fans. There is no room in football for that. But fans shoulb be allowed to express their emotions (without being offensive) and simply booing someone who’s playing like a headless chicken is fine.
Its not often you can geek out on Science Photography and admire something beautiful at the same time…. but then I stumbled across Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging competition. All of the images are stunning and beautiful in their own way, but this image seemed all the more remarkable because its not using any photographical trick like infrared or “epi-illumination”.
Instead its using something called Brainbow. The picture shows the brain stem of a transgenic mouse that has been modified to express 4 different fluorescent proteins randomly in different neurons. Much like pixels make many different colors possible on your screen, the different random combinations of green, red, cyan and orange fluorescent proteins make it possible to color individual neurons in nearly 100 different hues. You never know from the beginning which color every individual neuron is going to get, but with a choice of nearly 100 different possibilities chances are you’re going to observe every individual neuron glow in a different hue, making it possible to chart complex neuronal pathways.
The use of fluorescent proteins is an important technique to visualize for instance where different genes are being expressed. The gene that encodes the fluorescent protein, first found in jellyfish, can be introduced next to the gene of interest in the transgenic animal. Then both genes are going to be expressed at the same time and you can get a marker of what organ or what part of the brain your gene of interest is being expressed. It’s simply going to glow in the dark.
So a while ago I geeked out, and posted about how amazing Pixeljunk Eden is. I mentioned a couple of things - the Zero Wasted Pollen trophy I was close to (and have now nailed down, hurrah!) and youtube support.
I recently dropped back to Eden after playing Metal Gear Online solidly for months and getting 100% of the Burnout Paradise trophies. I completed gardens 8 and 9 and decided to play around with the youtube support - something I’ve been meaning to do since I posted… and here it is:
You’ll probably notice straight away that the menu screen is actually a garden of sorts itself. As you complete more gardens and collect more spectra, so your main garden grows, enabling you to reach even more gardens… a clever way of limiting progress and access to levels before you complete earlier stages.
Then I spend a couple of minutes killing prowlers, snaffling pollen, opening seeds and climbing to the first spectra on the level.
Eden is a great game, although I was a bit disappointed to find only myself and one other person from my friends list has it!
Well, you know what? Luck is definately not on our side. A legitimate goal ruled out, a scorcher from 25yds and the like, its just not “fair”.
But we earned a point today when the chips were down, and perhaps Arsey will learn that 4-1-4-1 is not a great formation for the boys. I actually commented on this very blog that I’d like to see us try it, and still think against Chelski or ManUre it would be beneficial to shore up the defence, though against Sunderland I fully agree it was a regressive formation. You don’t need to pack the midfield or batten down the hatches against a team with 1 striker and a defensive back 9.
Nasri didn’t look sharp to me against Porto, certainly not like he did at the beginning of the season, so I can only assume Arsey thought he’d rest him and return him to the team gently? I mean, you’d have thought Arsenal would cope without him against Sunderland. But for a team with such attacking talent, you’ve got to wonder why we aren’t scoring for fun. I put the ball at Adebayors feet.
Radio 5 Live commentators even picked up on Adebayor being a useless moody shit, and if the general populace start thinking it us Arsenal fans must be right. All the time “neutrals” tell me how good he is and I have to put them straight.
The good news is I turned the radio off in absolute disgust after we conceded and found out when I checked for a match report just now that we equalised!!
Looking on the bright side, this is a point earned away from home against a negative team - its not championship winning form just yet, but how many times last season even would we have not managed the equaliser? Its not like we battered the goal, so I suspect we should be thankful.
29 goals scored now, 6 conceded (4 from set pieces) - and that is championship winning form, so lets hope we find a lucky penny or two.
There isn’t much to say about Arsene Wenger and his tenure at Arsenal that hasn’t already been said. He’s overseen an unbeaten domestic season, helped mastermind the move from Highbury to Asburton Grove and delivered awesome double winning seasons.
He’s also the second foreign manager in history to be inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame. He’s even had an asteroid named after him.
Wengers impact can also be measured by the great players he has brought to the club such as Henry, Fabregas and Viera and those he has helped rejuvinate under a strict diet and training regime (Adams, Bergkamp etc).
Arsenal managed to go ten games without conceding in the champions league of 2005-06 - with a defence that cost just £5m to assemble and along with clever deals like selling want-aways David Bentley (the scroat), Cashley Hole and Nicola Anelka and astounding purchases (Fabregas, £500k), Wengers even turned the big money game on its head.
Arsene hasn’t just changed the club, he’s grabbed it, reshaped it and given it new life and will continue to do so as long as he stays with us. Here’s to the next 12 years.
I seem to keep writing about the negatives when Arsenal win big - but something just doesn’t sit well at the moment and I can’t put my finger on it. It might be Adebayor. He scored twice last night, but one was from the spot and he spurned at least two glorious opportunities. It might also be our central defence. I firmly believe that we have the best two fullbacks in the game, but our central defence looks awful at times. Sure, Gallas stepped up to the plate twice, read the game well and snuffed out the attack with some good defending. Toure did well at times too. But we had to clear off the line and panic as the ball crashed into the bar and over in the first half.
In short we were lucky not to be 2-0 down and then wasteful not to win 8-0 at the end. The trouble is that’s exactly what happened against Hull, except they scored their chances and we didn’t create as many chances to waste.
Despite my negative start above there were some overwhelming positives. In the first half in particular Fabregas shone. He had more space for the first time in weeks and his distribution was fantastic. Nasri made a quiet return but played well and looked relatively sharp. Sagna/Clichy both look the business and Vela was unlucky not to score although I had hoped he’d be a bit more clinical.
In terms of our Champions League progress we now have a healthy 4pts after two games - Fernebache and Kiev drew last night which puts us in a good position. If we can win our remaining two home games we should be through regardless of other results, but really it would be good to get as many points as possible for the psychological edge it will give us in the remaining rounds.
On a side note - Porto are (I think) three times consecutive champions of Portugal. And they collapsed in the second half totally. They don’t look like champions of League 1, let alone their own country.
What a shocker! Or is it? Hull are showing themselves to be a surprise package so far this season - they already feature in the top half of the table and so far look to have everything they will need to stay up. Ok, so they took a little luck out of Saturday, and they caught Arsenal off the boil, but they played well and made the most of their chances. The same cannot be said of Arsenal.
Positivies to take from the game include our domination, and, er…. Walcotts speed. However, Walcott was a little redundent in the final 5th of the pitch, nearly everything he started petered out too soon. RVP and Ade were off colour, and as I’ve said a hundred times - that hat-trick against Blackburn suddenly looks a bit useless - if he’d have kept two of them back for Saturday things would have been different.
Another positive was Cesc’s performance - it wasn’t vintage but at least he showed himself a couple of times and helped fashion the goal.
But - Arsenal need to sort out the striker thing really. RVP spent most of his time in or around the center circle. I’m not the only one who thought he was playing too deep - we need someone like Vela up front so Walcotts runs can actually lead to a cross - too often he has to hold up and wait for support. At times I thought we had a 6 man midfield with Ade and RVP playing so deep. Adebayor looked summararily unimpressed all day and didn’t even have a shot on goal (unless I missed it). RVP looked far more hungry but ended up too deep in an attempt to just get the ball. With Vela and Bendtner on the bench (having scored 5 between them midweek) you’d think no front player would be safe from the drop. Adebayor is a waste of space at times and would do him good to be substitued for Bendtner or Vela. Edaurdo is still making his comeback to training and hopefully will return soon to.
However, Hull were lucky. They had two real chances and took them both. An excellent shot and an excellent corner lead to a lead that really neither team deserved. Gallas again was done from a set piece, just like Fulham - there is simply no excuse for our captain and central defender to get done like that at the near post… and just look at Adeybayor below. Bothered much?
If Arsenal had played a striker up front to capitalise on some of the work done by Walcott (and yes, even Eboue) rather than two sulky playmaker types and if they practiced set pieces more often I think this would be our year.
Firstly, I recently won an award of sorts - Best Commenter on the World Of Arsenal blog. Most of my comments end up longer than I intend and so usually end up forming the basis of my own blog posts here. The blog is well written and insightful - anyone Arsenal orientated should add it to their bookmarks.
Onto Bolton - Arsenal. I must admit I was worried before the match that midweek exertions in Russia would leave us a bit jaded, and after Bolton took the lead (and to be fair continued to threaten throughout the match) I thought my fears had materialised. However, the spirit of Arsenal’s reply allayed my worst fears for this season - we were strong and resolute. However - Adebayor missed another golden opportunity, so he remains a doubt in my mind.
I wasn’t surprised by the two changes Arsenal made, though the commentators seemed shocked! Seriously where do they get these “pundits” from? Two changes wouldn’t normally be considered a major weakening as suggested, especially when you consider we changed a 19 year old boy for a player with 110 first team appearances and Champions League final experience who’s still only 24, the other change being RVP replaced by Nik Bendtner - Bendtner scored 4 in his previous six starts (5 in 7 now!) so again not really much of a weakening gesture. Chelsea call it squad rotation, but I suspect the mainstream media are still labouring under the misapprehension that Arsenal have a tiny squad. Its not that bad fellas!
Anyway, Song played well again and could make the defensive midfield position his own if he keeps it up, although Cesc still doesn’t look like he’s anywhere near top speed. Gallas and Toure seemed a little steadier at the back (goal aside) and the match got me thinking - I’ve previously made a big deal out of the two most recent trips to the grim north (i live here, its OK) and we’ve won both and scored 7 goals. Now, Arsenal are nowhere near their best. Our two main strikers don’t have their sights in and have been wasteful, our midfield heart was constantly mis-passing (I don’t care how highly the papers rated his performance) and our defence still look a bit nervous. Can you imagine how we’ll fare when it all goes “right”?
Almunia played well and is actually beginning to look nothing like the 30 year old almost-was that arrived at Arsenal, Song/Denilson are both making strides this season, Walcott is beggining to look the real deal with some confidence - hell even Eboue has stopped being a dick and messing up our attacking play with stray eyes closed passes, and has been rewarded with a richly deserved first league goal.
I’m actually looking forward to playing Man United in November now - and there’s still 6 weeks to get up to speed.
Forget the fact that the nasty little shit 
There isn’t much to say about Arsene Wenger and his tenure at Arsenal that hasn’t already been said. He’s overseen an unbeaten domestic season, helped mastermind the move from Highbury to Asburton Grove and delivered awesome double winning seasons. 
In terms of our Champions League progress we now have a healthy 4pts after two games - Fernebache and Kiev drew last night which puts us in a good position. If we can win our remaining two home games we should be through regardless of other results, but really it would be good to get as many points as possible for the psychological edge it will give us in the remaining rounds.
