IN an attacking team that wants to pass the ball forward quickly, Cesc Fabregas is invaluable. He is a playmaker who is functional, not fancy.
Fabregas sees a lot and sees it early but he doesn’t play to catch the eye. He plays to start the move, to speed up the move,
Like Bergkamp and Vieira, he is a team player. He can give the attack a lot of momentum. And, like them, he can also slow it down,.
Against Blackburn, when Arsenal won 6-2, Fab4 was fabulous.
When Fab4 is playing two-touch, Arsenal are flying.
But, it’s a two-way thing. If they’re not moving forward quickly, he can’t play one-touch and two-touch.
But if they are flying, he can pass the ball first time. If the team is balanced and fluid and penetrating, Fabregas can make it more fluid and more penetrating
But if he is playing four-touch and nobody is making the right runs, the team gets bogged down. And if the team has Robin van Persie on the left, slowing the attack down, or Freddie on the right, slowing the game down, you don’t see so many exciting moves,
THIS SEASON Gilberto has stepped up to the plate and hit home runs every week.
Seven goals already ! Headers, shots, penalties. Yes, Gilberto is still Mr Nice Guy but we have seen him bollock Eboue for sitting on the ground whingeing after he’s been fouled.
And when Gilberto scored the equaliser against Blackburn, and the other players congratulated him, it looked as if he was saying, “OK, stop that, it’s 1-1 – let’s get on with it !” That’s what a good captain would be saying.
BLACKBURN’S two goals ?
Their first goal after 3 minutes was sheer stupidity by the whole Arsenal team, not just Kolo Toure.
When the ball was slipped into David Bentley’s run, Toure panicked. He was out of position and not concentrating and Bentley’s run exposed his mistake. Toure should have chased Bentley and made him shoot from a narrow angle. The lad had a lot to do to score from that angle. There was an 90% chance that Bentley would have hit the side-netting or the post, or that Lehmann would have saved his shot.
But Toure pushed him, fell on him, and knocked Bentley’s left leg with his knee. He was all over him and that was embarrassing. Toure saw that Bentley was past him, and he knew he couldn’t reach the ball, so he panicked and fouled him and gave away a penalty after three minutes. Kolo should know better than that by now.
It was an obvious penalty and Nonda took it coolly and cleverly and put Arsenal 1-0 down .
The Arsenal formation was 4-4-1-1, with Adebayor roaring around athletically and aggressively, as he had done against Spurs and Chelsea.
The big man was always involved, always running, always battling. His game is an energy game and while you lose the ball more often when you play a high-tempo game, you can win it back if you scrap like Adebayor, hustling defenders into mistakes.Adebayor also competes in the air, so the team can vary the play more than they can when Henry is there. When they play fast pass-and-move, Arsenal they look as if they can beat anybody.
After Nonda’s penalty, Arsenal fought back with goals by Gilberto, Hleb and an Adebayor penalty when RVP was brought down by Lucas Neill, so it was 3-1 at half-time.
Then Bentley supplied a great pass to Emerton and his cross was headed against the underside by sub Matt Derbyshire, and Nonda hooked it in before Djourou could react.
So it was 3-2 and game on.
The most interesting things about the game was the period when it was 3-2 because Arsenal sat back when there was still 20 minutes left to play and Lehmann had to make a blinding save from Morten Gamst Pedersen which would have been 3-3.If Lehmann had not made that save, Blackburn might have won.
Then van Persie fluffed a chance for 4-2 by miskicking with his right foot after Adebayor’s cross found him in the box.
Arsenal scored three goals in the last ten minutes. Van Persie turned Oiijer inside out twice before beating Friedel inside his far post. And then Adebayor broke on the left and slipped the ball into the run of Fabregas, who squared for van Persie to make it 5-2 from near the penalty spot. Then Fabregas waltzed round Savage near the corner flag and shot from a silly angle and the rebound broke for sub Flamini to make it 6-2
Van Persie now has nine goals, Gilberto seven, Flamini four.
Is Arsenal’s back four good enough ?
Since this the season of glad tidings, let’s be polite. Let’s say the Arsenal back four is work-in-progress. Lauren-Toure-Gallas-Clichy might become a good defensive unit if it had half a season together and if Gael Clichy could stop breaking forward too early. Clichy has to be smarter when picking his runs because better teams that Blackburn will destroy Arsenal on his flank.
So Blackburn was a seriously strange game.
It was 3-1 and 6-2 but it was never 4-1, so it was far closer than 6-2 would suggest.
So after 18 games the Premiership season has reached a very interesting stage. A new Arsenal team is evolving but it lacks balance, so it lacks consistency. It has no experienced cover in defence and there is no left-sided midfielder because Pires and Reyes have gone.
Rosicky should be in the middle, joining in the moves, speeding up the play, and firing in shots. Like RVP, Rosicky is wasted on the left.
But the strikers are improving.
Adebayor is more Heskey than Drogba – but Drogba was a rough diamond at 21. And Robin van Persie chalked up two goals and two assists in a 6-2 victory.
TODAY, Arsenal can beat Watford at Vicarage Road without Henry.
And that win today, like the 6-2 win over Blackburn, will be good for Henry. It sends him a message : We play better without you. We can win 6-2 without you. So when you come back, come back with a different head on. Come back on a different basis. Come back and play with us. Don’t expect all of us to play for you. You were dragging the club down and dragging the Wenger down with you, so he dropped you twice, once secretly, to teach you a lesson, as he did with Jens Lehmann.
Thierry Henry had to be dropped.
It was necessary.
It had to be done – and it has worked.