This time Arsenal met a Swansea team whose belief had collapsed.
IT WASN’T REALLY A 3-0 GAME.
Mertesacker got away with a crafty handball. It was deliberate.
If the ref had seen that, he’d have given a penalty. Although, of course, the pen might have been missed.
And even if Swansea had scored that penalty, Arsenal would have won.
Swansea have not been winning because they’ve stopped scoring and we saw why early on when Gomis broke away on his own and Petr Cech stood up and refused to make it easy and eventually faked him out and the chance slipped away.
Immense calmness by a top keeper.
When Gomis had a header at the far post, Cech caught it comfortably.
Half-time score :0-0.
Arsenal needed a well-worked corner to go ahead and it involved a very unusual bit of shirt-pulling. As the ball came over, Giroud pulled Mertsacker’s shirt cleverly to hold him back, found a pocket of space and netted a perfect header that bounced on the line.
Maybe Arsenal do practise set pieces occasionally!
Giroud got a huge wake-up call when he was dropped.
He woke up one day and said, “Bloody hell! I’ve lost my place to Theo – and he’s not even a centre forward!”
When Giroud fouled Fabianski on a free-kick, Koscielny scored and the goal was allowed.
Ozil crossed to the far post from the left and Joel Campbell scored his first goal for Arsenal in 73 minutes.
Swansea 0 Arsenal 3.
My advice to Mertesacker: don’t block another free-kick with your forearm. Refs will be watching that now.
The BFG says Bayern will be angry after losing at Arsenal ; “It will be a different game at their place.”
Bayern are five points clear in the Bundesliga after 11 games. On Friday they played a 0-0 draw at Frankfurt, a scoreline that suggests their minds were on something else.
Guardiola’s Bayern don’t need to beat Arsenal because they already top Group F.
However, this game isn’t about arithmetic.
It’s about pride. Their players are very proud competitors. One of the proudest is their new midfielder Arturo Vidal, who played for Juventus in the final against Barcelona, a contest that was a lot closer than I expected.
Vidal now says, “We’ll show Arsenal the real Bayern on Wednesday.”
My feeling was that we didn’t see the real Lewandowski in the first game.
I mostly gamble on Matchdays 1-3 but rarely bet on Matchday 4 because by then the Groups have almost taken shape and some teams want to do… just enough.
Group H looks already sorted. Zenit have 9 points, Valencia 6. The other two, Lyon and Gent, have one point each.
In other Groups, Juventus have 7 points, so do PSG and Real Madrid in Group A.
Wolfsburg are bossing Group B but it’s unusually tight, like Arsenal’s Group F.
Where, if Olympiakos beat Dinamo Zagreb, Zagreb can’t catch them.
If Arsenal draw in Munich, and Olympiakos win, Arsenal will be 5 points behind the Greeks with two games to play.
All of that is so hypothetical that it’s a realm into which I rarely stray, preferring to focus on 90 minutes of action at a time.