From San Elan : Wobbly now is OK
Don’t forget, very wobbly Liverpool won it in 2005!
Chelsea weren’t exactly firing last year.
Brendan : Arsenal-Chelsea
Hi Myles,
I’ve been holding back the superlatives so far this season, because I’m not prepared to get carried away with the team’s chances, only for them to put in a performance like this when it really counts.
This loss makes the Citeh draw look worse, because Arsenal should have won the Citeh match, and losing to Chelsea makes the fact that we didn’t much worse.
For me, your assessment of selection / substitution mistakes in the game is spot on.
Particularly, I agree that the right substitution would have been Gervinho, whose ponderousness on the ball was astounding – three times I think I saw him stand there doing/thinking goodness knows what with the ball at his feet, with Chelsea players taking it off him as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
That was how the Vermaelen foul was elicited – most Arsenal players were up the field, and dozy Gervinho stood there, possibly in a moment of existentialist ennui, unsure of what to do – and Chelsea players nabbed it off him and left what defence we had at the back exposed.
I don’t read into this game the template for Arsenal’s season.
There are better players to come back, and the team can still improve.
But it’s a bit of a ‘back down to earth’ moment for those who were getting a bit ahead of themselves thinking that there had been such a big change at Arsenal .
Chelsea can afford to buy/keep better players than Arsenal – that is still the main difference between the clubs.
Myles says :
I don’t think the first six league games is a template either.
Arsenal must improve collectively and gradually, week by week.
I think they will do that quite smoothly if they beat West Ham, Norwich and QPR, which they might be able to do, even without a good goalkeeper.
I’ve almost certainly been to Stamford Bridge more often than you in the last 10 years.
The oligarch bought the league and many hate him for that, especially some Gooners I know.
Chelsea’s crowd contains a big core of fiftysomething and sixtysomething geezers who go back to Kerry Dixon, Peter Osgood and even Jimmy Greaves.
Some of these geezers are women who have been supporting Chelsea all their lives. They’re mainly working class people who have supported their club through bad times and good.The club’s demographic hasn’t really changed that much because the stadium is the same, although their core supporters have all got older.
That’s my personal view and it isn’t based on research, just on what I’ve seen and heard and felt when I’ve been to Stamford Bridge as a punter, as a journalist, as a guest.
When I go to Chelsea or Fulham or QPR, it’s still a football experience, as going to Highbury was.
Going to the Emirates is something else.
It’s huge, it’s corporate, it’s a long way from the pitch, it has no atmosphere, it has a deafening PA blasting out at decibel levels which are totalitarian.
At the Sunderland game, a ghastly 0-0 draw that was one of my worst experiences in a football stadium, the PA was twice as loud as it had been at Wembley two weeks earlier when Jan and I saw Mexico beat Senegal 4-2.
In Arsenal’s first home game, I refused to regain my seat until after the second half had started because the PA barrage was so oppressive.
The volume isn’t an accident. Nothing Amerikan corporations do is accidental.
For me, the volume of the Emirates PA contains a coded message : We want your money, not your participation.
Right now, Arsenal is flat because fans don’t know who their heroes are any more.
Wenger, a developmental manager, employs a risky sell-and-replace model which keeps Arsenal third or fourth.
That model now means that the Arsenal team is too often in transition.
What you’re looking at is churn. What you see and don’t see on the pitch is the result of churn.What you will see for the next 10 weeks is the result of deliberate churn.
Churn sells heroes while they’re still worth £10-20 million.
Once the stalwarts were Dixon, Bould, Adams, Parlour, Winterburn and Bergkamp.
Later on the stalwarts were Lehmann, Lauren, Ashley Cole, Vieira, Pires and Henry.
They all played for Arsenal for years and years and were proper heroes.
Now the team has some new stalwarts but no heroes.
And the stalwarts, the reliable core of the team, are guys who have only been there for a couple of years or less: Vermaelen, Arteta and Cazorla.
That’s why it’s wobbly.
Prediction : If Giroud starts regularly and plays well, Podolski will score a lot more goals and become a hero.