Last night, we just didn’t do enough. A 0-0 draw is not the worst result in the world but it is the lost opportunities that frustrated more than anything. We almost totally dominated Milan, and we had the perfect opportunity to finish them off at home before a really tough game at the San Siro … and we failed.

The game was decent, and our midfield was superb, while our defending was even better. The finishing was off for the night, and I don’t just mean Adebayor. Eduardo, Fabregas, Eboue, Walcott all had very decent chances that were wasted, or fluffed to be more accurate. If I remember correctly, every single shot we had was at the same exact spot, almost straight at the keeper. That was very frustrating!

Our last chance of the game pretty much sums up our night. In the 93rd minute, Adebayor ’s header from less than 5 yards away hit the crossbar.

Contrary to what I said in the preview of the game, Milan’s defence proved to be the strongest part of the team yesterday. Nesta and Maldini were brilliant in annoying Adebayor and not giving him enough space. Thats not to say we didn’t create openings, because we did … quite a few. Any other day and we would have scored at least 2, but that wasn’t the case last night.

Pato was ineffective alone against Gallas and Senderos, who came in for the injured Toure. In the second half, Pato gave up on breaking the back two and started drifting right and left and was again faced with Clichy and Sagna who did well defensively and offensively. In midfield Hleb did a brilliant job in containing Pirlo, who’s only contribution as far as I can remember is two wasted long distance free kicks. Flamini and Fabregas handled Kaka perfectly, although Fabregas had a poor game yet again going forward. On the other hand, Eboue had an excellent game going forward, created a few chances with decent crosses and maneuvering his way into the area more than once.

It was a joy watching the Gattuso Flamini contest. Both of them were like machines, moving around everywhere, and surprisingly Gattuso had most passes in Milan and not so surprisingly covered more ground than anyone.

There are two positives we should take from the game -

1. The main positive about the game is that our boys can feel confident in their abilities ahead of the away leg in two weeks time. They know that they totally outplayed a full Milan side and that can only add on their confidence and desire.
2. Milan didn’t score, which is always good as a home team. The away goals could prove decisive in Milan.

We need to forget the game and focus on the upcoming game against Birmingham on Saturday. It is more important than the Milan game and is 1 of the remaining 12 games for the title race.

I will go ahead and say it first, I think Milan will qualify. I think this was the worst team we could meet.

We have a wonderful team and we should be proud of what they have done this year so far. I’ve said it before, our team is the team of the future. As long as we keep the core of the team (Fabregas, Hleb, Flamini, Adebayor, Van Persie, Sagna, Clichy, Senderos, Toure) for the next 2 or 3 years, we should be unstoppable! The average age for the 9 I mentioned is 24.1 years, so in 3 years, they will have enough maturity, experience, and time to gel and will be at their peak of 27 years. We should easily compete for the Champions League as well as every domestic competition with no problems! Until then, this is a ride that we should try to enjoy to the maximum. Any major trophy before then is a bonus.

Milan, on the other hand, have the perfect mix of experience and youth. I know they have had a mixed season at best in the Serie A, but people seem to miss a few facts.

1. Since November, they have lost only 1 game in 18 in the league and Champions League.
2. They have been in 3 of the last 5 Champions League finals and won 2. 03, 05, 07.
3. When they reached the final in 03, they finished 3rd in the league, in 05 they ended 2nd, and last year they were 4th. Liverpool won the Champions League when they were 5th in the league.
4. They added Pato in the January transfer window. The 19 year old scored 4 goals in 6 games since he first joined. He is fit for the game.

The point of the above is that many people seem to write them off for having a bad season domestically and because they are too old. Both things are not true. Domestic form is not related in any way to the Champions League form. In fact, I don’t remember teams winning both the CL and the league except for Porto, which isn’t a magnificent feat considering their league. As for age, they are experienced, not old.

In terms of injuries, Milan have Kaka back, Pato back, Seedorf might play, and Gattuso is back. Their only worry is their keeper, which I’m sure they can live with, and Ronaldo, who could have a career ending injury.

I am not too worried about their defence. Nesta, Maldini, Cafu, Oddo, Kaladze, and Favalli have an average of 34 years old. They are mostly great names, but they are beatable at this stage of their career.

Their midfield is the main killer. If they field Gattuso, Pirlo, Kaka, and Seedorf, then we are playing against the best and most balanced midfield line in the world if you ask me. Kaka is deservedly world player of the year, and he can kill any team with his counter attacks and long distance shooting, he is also the team’s top scorer. Pirlo makes free kicks seem as easy as penalties. He has a magic touch with his passing too. Gattuso is the type of player all defensive midfielders want to emulate, he is the the Italian older Flamini. Seedorf is very much underestimated, his movement off the ball and his short neat passes go unnoticed. They also have Emerson and Gourcuff, who has been linked to us recently.

Up front, Pato, Inzaghi, and Gilardino are always a threat. Inzaghi is the most annoying player in the world for defenders. He is not too quick, not too skilfull, not too pretty to watch, but is ALWAYS at the right place at the right time. He is the all time top scorer in UEFA’s history with 63 goals. Pato is one of the world’s most gifted youngsters, and Milan’s saviour according to most. The start of his career is showing that at 19, he is not intimidated at all and is showing glimpses of greatness already with 4 goals in 6. Gilardino is not bad, he scored 7 so far in the league, but I never saw him as an exceptional striker.

All in all, I think it will be a great game tactically, and Wenger needs to play his cards perfectly to beat out their experienced team. I’m not saying it can’t happen, I just don’t think it is as easy as many people seem to think!

Yes, I’m trying my best to keep a positive spin on things. A 4-0 loss at Old Trafford was very flattering …. to us! If it wasn’t for Lehmann’s performance, we could have seen a 6 or 7-0 easily. We were so dreadful yesterday that we made someone like Darren Fletcher look good! He scored twice, and with a goal from Nani and another from Rooney, our worst showing of the year was over. Our performance was shocking, the only explanation is that Wenger has a master plan, where we try our best to lose and look like shit to give them a false sense of security and over confidence plus the added bonus of more games to play! Like I said, I’m trying my best to keep a positive spin.

From United’s side, its the best I’ve seen them play in many years, while we were at our worst. Nani and Anderson were showing why the cost more than 30 million, and like I said earlier, even Fletcher managed to look like a star. From our side, Hoyte and Traore showed that they still need some more time, and were exposed very easily from the flanks. Gallas was out of it, Gilberto is a lost cause, and even Fabregas was really bad. To make things worse, Eboue got a straight red for a silly challenge. But to me the most disappointing thing was that Adebayor came into the game in the second half as a sub, which meant his 2008 scoring streak is officially over. Still going in the league, but in reality it is over. Saying that Lehmann was our man of the match and we lost 4-0 basically sums up our game.

Seriously though, a 4-0 loss against our main rivals is always bitter, but to be totally honest, it’s not all bad. The FA Cup, for all its historical significance, is less of a priority compared to both the league and the Champions League. This season more than ever, we cannot risk having our think squad stretched to the maximum by competing in all fronts. Many fans think we should go for all silverware regardless, and I would agree usually, but this year is an exception. Our team is very young and very inexperienced, and we are actually competing for the premiership title, which is beyond all expectations. We are only 12 games away from getting there, and for our squad, this is definitely our priority! In a couple of years when our players are in the 25-28 age range, and we have fit players, we should have no problem in competing in all competitions.

In my opinion, even the Champions League this year is not a priority. I don’t think we can beat Milan, and even if we do, I don’t think we can beat Madrid or Barcelona this year. Going to the next round would be a wonderful bonus, and we should be grateful if we do, but not getting there is not the end of the world either. We have to be pragmatic about our season. Our best chance is the league, and we should do everything possible to win it.

We all saw how the 2000/01 season ended in misery. We ALMOST won on all fronts, but ended up as league runner ups, FA Cup runner ups, and Champions League quarter finalists, which was our best showing in Europe at the time. This season we can really focus on the league and make the most out of it.

Yesterday’s game, along with the Spurs beer cup game will hopefully only be blips that are forgotten if we actually go ahead and win the league.

I want to start off first with some transfer news. After his excellent performance in the African Cup of Nations and winning keeper of the tournament for the second time in a row, reports are now linking the Egyptain Esam El-Hadary to us. He is an incredible keeper, and has also been instrumental in Al-Ahly’s great run (see earlier post). He even managed to score a 70 yard goal in the African Champions League! He would have been a perfect signing …. 7 or 8 years ago! Although he still performing at his peak, he is 35, and that peak doesn’t have much more left in my opinion. Unless he costs something like 100,000 and is happy to be our backup keeper, then this makes absolutely no sense.

Yesterday, Milan played Livorno in a game that ended 1-1, and more significantly, ended Ronaldo’s season with what seems to be a very serious knee injury. Apparently even Livorno’s keeper heard his knee pop and he was left in tears as he was stretched off. I’d like to say this is good news, but no serious long term injury is good news. Let’s just say I hope he recovers on March 5th and not a day sooner.

Speaking of Milan, we just replaced them as the 5th highest-earning clubs of 2007. According to Deloitte, the new table has four English teams in the top 10, which was the case last year, but all 4 have risen up the table.

1 (1) Real Madrid £236.2m
2 (4) Manchester United £212.1m
3 (2) Barcelona £195.3m
4 (6) Chelsea £190.5m
5 (9) Arsenal £177.6m
6 (5) Milan £153.0m
7 (8) Bayern Munich £150.3m
8 (10) Liverpool £133.9m
9 (7) Internazionale £131.3m
10 (12) Roma £106.1m

It won’t be long till the top 3 will be taken over by English teams replacing the Spanish duo who have traditionally been top two. One interesting point is that Barcelona has slipped to 3rd from 2nd, which looks bad for them. There is, though, one point that is forgotten here, and that is Barcelona’s sponsorship money. While teams like ManU are making more than £14.1 million a year, Barcelona, on the other hand, are actually donating money through their sponsorship with UNICEF. They are donating a minimum of €1.5 million a year and are spreading the name and message of UNICEF globally.

While English teams are planning a 39th game worldwide to guarantee more income, you have a team like Barcelona using the strength and power of football and its name to try and make a difference in the world. I’m happy we’re climbing up the money tables, but it also saddens me seeing others doing good and keeping the soul and conscience of football alive and not us.

A good win yesterday against Blackburn in what ended up being a pretty comfortable game. Senderos scored the first heading in a corner in the 3rd minute, and Adebayor ended it with a well taken goal in injury time. 2-0, job done, top of the league with a five point lead.

Adebayor’s hot scoring streak continues with his 11th goal in 2008 in only 8 games. He has averaged almost 1.4 goals a game this year!! I can guarantee you there is no better striking rate in Europe in 2008. I think his new song gives him confidence, he has scored in every game since the song was created. His 2nd goal was very well taken, showed how confident the guy has become.

Blackburn didn’t really trouble us, and were very toothless to be honest. Without Savage (who is now Derby’s captain), Dunn, Pederson, Samba, Nelson, Derbyshire, and a couple more, they were very tame. I think there were less fouls in that game than any other previous game against Blackburn, which gave us a chance to play our game and create chances.

Hleb dominated the game and was man of the match by far. Fabregas, Sagna, Flamini, and Adebayor also had good games. The biggest surprise was seeing Gilberto play as well as he did. I thought he was very sharp, missed a few passes but made some nice ones too, and stopped their game once or twice too. Hopefully the international game during the weekend with Brazil helped him a bit at least regain some of his lost confidence or self belief.

In all honesty, before this season started, I didn’t think that we will be able to challenge for a top two spot. I’ve never been convinced with Liverpool, so I firmly believed that our main challenge would be to maintain 3rd place. Throughout the season I have been expecting a downturn in result and still didn’t think we would win the title. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe our squad is good enough. On the contrary, I believe if we keep our players, we should be considered CL contenders every year in a year or two from now. It was just a matter of not having enough players who can cope with the pressure. Not many of our squad can say they have won much silverware in their career, that is the only reason I thought it would take another year or two for this young team to gel together and to mature.

After today’s win, my eyes are finally open to the possibility of winning the title. It is definitely not over yet, but we have good chance if we continue to do well. The winner will be determined mostly by our game away at Old Trafford on April 12th. Manchester United’s schedule looks to be easier than ours, especially with their Liverpool, Arsenal, and Villa games all being at home. We play Chelsea and United away, which are very important games in deciding the title. I think the winner needs to surpass the 90 point barrier considering the upcoming games.

Of our remaining 12 games, we have 5 at home and 7 away. Villa, Boro, Liverpool, Reading, and Everton will be played at home, and we really need maximum points from these to win the title. Away, we play Birmingham, Wigan, Chelsea, Bolton, Man Utd, Derby, and Sunderland. This will be a very close race to the title!

This is an excellent excel file created by Aidan O’Byrne to try and predict the premiership run-in by predicting the results.

Premiership title run-in calculator

(right click and save)

Tonight we play Blackburn at home in an opportunity to extend our lead of the premiership after a great footballing weekend for us so far. Yesterday saw Chelsea held to a mind numbing 0-0 draw at home against Liverpool, and more importantly, Manchester United suffered their first loss at home this season. To make things worse for them, it was a local derby against Manchester City, and it was their first loss to them in Old Trafford in 34 years! This loss also broke their 13 match winning streak, which is their longest in 103 years!

Why am I mentioning this? Why should we care? Because it shows how good we have become. Even with a run of 13 winning games their best in a century, we are still leading the premiership! Arsene Wenger also proved himself a master in psychological warfare in matching Ferguson’s usual mind games when he said only 12 days ago about their one day trip to Saudi for a friendly:

“You can suffer in the next game as you travel, you come back, you need time to adjust and you switch off when you are away to a different country. So the focus could go a little bit and you can suffer.”

He was proven right with their recent performances and this result also must make Wenger’s words resonate somewhere in the back of Ferguson’s mind.

The day just got better later with the African Cup of Nations final ending in a very convincing win for Egypt, who proved to be the best team in the tournament by far. That Aboutrika guy is incredible, a midfielder with 81 goals in 128 games for Al-Ahly, and 10 in 33 for Egypt. He is a god to most Ahly fans and Egyptians fans overall, he was the main reason Al-Ahly went undefeated in 55 games in all competitions, a streak that lasted a year and half where they won everything possible, including the domestic league and cup and the African champions league. Aboutrika is a mix of Pires/Riquelme, not blessed with speed or strength, but incredible vision and reading of the game. His problem is his loyalty to his club, which is a shame since we don’t get to watch him against top competition continuously, and at 29, its hard seeing him go and start a career abroad.

Anyway I got sidetracked there, it was a good game with the only negative being Song’s injury which meant he had to limp off in the early minutes and was subbed. If he was playing, the game would have been different, I can guarantee that! He has been in excellent form for Cameroon like I said in my last post, and has actually been selected in the best African XI from the tournament. And just as a reminder, he is ONLY 20 years old!

Now to the game at hand tonight against Blackburn. We need to make up for the game we drew at Ewood Park earlier in the season, where Lehmann practically ended his career at Arsenal with a mistake from Dunn’s goal. It seems though that he will get a chance to redeem himself today with Almunia being sick. Our injury list is long and still hazy in terms of who might be fit just before the match. Alongside Almunia, at a worst case scenario, we could miss Flamini, Senderos, Rosicky, Djourou, Van Persie, Eboue, Toure, Song, Denilson, and Diaby. Hopefully from now till game time, we’ll have a few names back, hopefully Flamini being one of them.

Blackburn’s squad isn’t having any better luck for this game with their missing players. Players expected to be out through injury or suspension include Nelson, Samba, Dunn, and Pederson. Derbyshire might also miss the game with his girlfriend expecting to give birth anytime. Personally, I am glad that Samba and Pederson are out. Samba is a solid defenders who has proven his strength against us more than once, and Pederson can really whip in some great crosses. This still leaves them with Bentley, who is as good if not better in crossing than Pederson. On the receiving end of the crosses is the very dangerous Santa Cruz, who is very dangerous in the air, and is proving to be one of the buys of the season.

I expect alot of crosses and long shots from Blackburn, which means Gallas needs to be very alert, and it also means that if Toure is not available, Gilberto will more likely replace him instead of Hoyte, purely because of the height advantage. Hoyte has proven himself to be a very capable CB when he had to play in that position, and I personally think he plays better as a CB than he does as a RB, but its not a fair judgment since he only played there a couple of times.

First things first. Apologies for not updating the site for such a long time. I had my reasons, and hopefully its back to business as usual from now on.

Now to football. I will not go over the games I missed because they have been discussed at every other blog already and its too late to go into details about them. In summary, we lost to spurs in the beer cup, we beat Newcastle twice 3-0 in the FA Cup and the league, and finally a 3-1 win at Man City capped up the week. Adebayor has been on fire, scoring 6 goals in the last 4, and 12 in his last 8 games! Adebayor has scored in every game he’s played in 2008.

We are extremely lucky that Togo didn’t for the African Cup of Nations this year! Losing Adebayor would have been a total disaster, especially with his current form. The tournament has been exceptional in terms of quality and goals. So many goals, this is actually the most goals ever in an African Nations cup! 98 goals scored so far, thats an average of more than 3.1 goals a game!

Yesterday’s 3rd place game was typical of the tournament. Ghana beat Ivory Coast 4-2, and the best thing about the game was that Gerard Gili, Ivory Coast’s coach, rested both Kolo and Eboue for the game, but played Drogba and Kalou the full 90 mins! I would like to think that Gili was doing his fellow Frenchman Arsene a favour, but I have a feeling it was a result of the shocking display by our pair in their embarrassing 4-1 loss to Egypt. Kolo in particular had a total nightmare of a game, and I’m glad he got that bad game out of his system in an international game and not an Arsenal one.

Song on the other hand has been magnificent for the Cameroon. He is one of the main reasons Cameroon have reached the final. In fact, he has played every minute except for the 1st half of the first game against Egypt, which ended 3-0. When he came on for the second half, Cameroon were significantly better, and his solid performance continued for the rest of the tournament. He will prove to be the perfect answer to everyone’s doubts about selling Diarra and Gilberto leaving.

We have been able to cope surprisingly well with the loss of Kolo, Eboue, and Song. Senderos has stepped in for Kolo and has proved how solid he is with almost faultless performances. Hopefully the knock he got from the England game is minor, but it seems like he is a doubt for our next game, which means Toure will have to be rushed in as soon as he arrives. Thanks again Gili for keeping him rested for our game!

In other international games, Fabregas was great for Spain as they beat Gallas’ France. Bendtner scored for Denmark for the third time in a row. Walcott scored for U21s. Lehmann kept a clean sheet, and there’s more about our players international games on the Arsenal.com website.

On a final note, you may have noticed the small award banner on the right side. Many thanks to Jammathon from third-gen, who started this initiative, and I am the lucky recipient of the first New Blog award! I feel like I betrayed that trust in not posting for so long, but hopefully I’m back to business from now on!