Arsenal need proper strikers.
That has been obvious for a long time. They need strikers who can score goals and also centrebacks who can stop goals.
Last night in their FA Cup Fifth Round replay at Blackburn they had one centreback and no strikers.
William Gallas was magnificent. Calm, canny, strong, quick, alert, Gallas makes Gooners feel safe. He is better than Cannavaro. He’s up there with Bobby Moore, Franco Baresi and Tony Adams.With Gallas at centreback, the defence looked more organised, more secure.He read the game and snuffed out Matt Derbyshire, who has been making a name for himself lately.
However, with the side Arsenal had out at Ewood Park, they were built to lose. They were programmed to lose. Baptista and Aliadiere were going to miss chances if they got them. They are not good enough to play for Arsenal, not in a million years. They couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo.
In a scrappy match, Blackburn had little composure and no final ball. But Mark Hughes brought on a goalscorer he signed from Porto for £2.5 million. Benni McCarthy has scored 15 against 15 different teams this season and he won the cup tie in the 86th minutes.
McCarthy was on the left flank and he ran onto a 40-yard ball down the wing and reached it level with the corner of the penalty area and swerved inside Senderos, who had been moved to right back when Walcott came on for the injured Eboue.
The South African beat Senderos with alarming ease and Gilberto was too far away to close him down, having been moved to Senderos’s original position. By then Arsenal’s midfield defence was nil, as Denilson and Hleb were pooped.
So McCarthy was able to hit a right-foot missile into the far corner for 1-0. It was a bullet shot that no keeper could have saved. No surprise there. That is what strikers are paid to do : provide explosive moments and win games. One moment of quality from a proper striker put Arsenal out of the FA Cup.
The whole thing was so predictable. In my notebook, I wrote Blackburn v Arsenal at the top of the page and when I saw the Arsenal eleven I wrote,” We won’t score. We’ll lose it 1-0.” Such things are often said by fans and pressmen in the heat of the moment before a ball has been kicked. Yes, anything can happen in a football match, but I wanted to note how I felt before kick-off. The events of a game often blow away my pre-match opinions quite quickly.
Bottom line? The team that has recently scored one goal a game could not score at all in two games against Blackburn. But Mark Hughes, a shrewd manager who will take over from Sir Alex at Old Trafford, was wrong to say that Arsenal didn’t create much in the two games. He said, “We were solid and professional at the Emirates, because I always felt our best chance was to bring them here. Over two games two very good Arsenal teams haven’t created a great deal against us.”
The point was that Arsenal could not finish in the two games. They couldn’t finish because they don’t have proper strikers.
In truth, it wasn’t much of a game.
Traore made some good runs, Gilberto did well until the goal, Denilson struggled, Aliadiere ran his lungs out with no end product, Baptista missed a free header from seven yards, and Brad Friedel made two saves from him, the second on a shot that was hitting the outside of the post
Ljungberg miscontrolled one pass as he ran into the box and then he was fouled outside the box by Brett Emerton. Graham Poll let that go and did not give a penalty as he was fouled again inside the box. Bottom line, Freddie can’t get beyond people any more. He runs into defenders to get free-kicks and throws.
Graham Poll is probably more of a Collina-type ref than an Anders Frisk -type ref, so that worked against Freddie. Collina studied teams, styles, tactics, knew lot of detail about the players. Frisk, who quit refereeing after being abused by Chelsea, just called every decision as he saw it, regardless of who it was or what the match was.
Poll has been refereeing Freddie Ljungberg for seven years and he knows Freddie’s lost his pace and just runs into people and falls over. So he did not give Freddie the benefit of the doubt. He can only give a penalty if he is 100% sure that Emerton fouled Ljungberg inside the box.
As the second half rolled on, and Arsenal were still playing the better football, we knew that one goal would win it. And at times it looked as Arsenal might get a goal.
But Walcott’s arrival for Eboue led to two switches in the Arsenal back four and that cost them the game. When the left-footed Swiss alp was switched to right back, Benni McCarthy beat him and hit a real thunderbolt. Game over.
It didn’t matter that Arsenal had more possession, more fluency, more chances. Arsenal gave everything they had at Ewood Park but it was not enough. After a match that lasted 176 minutes a goal eventually came but it was not Arsenal who scored it. They promise a lot but in the last four games they’ve scored one goal.
The best time to beat Blackburn in the FA Cup was at the Emirates when they had few injuries and no suspensions.
It’s no good blaming the FA, who are clearly incompetent, when Kolo Toure has started a brawl on Sunday’s Carling Cup Final that led to Arsenal losing him and Adebayor for last night’s game and the Reading game. Eboue has been banned for three games for violent conduct.
If Arsenal had been 4-1 down in Cardiff with four minutes to go, I could have understood why Toure did what he did.Then game would have been over. But they were only 2-1 down with four minutes to play when the captain, having been given a free-kick, had a go at Mikel and then had a go at Lampard, wasting his own time and triggering a brawl.
Kolo Toure lost it. He went loopy. The wheels came off and the vehicle crashed. Not once but twice in four days.
And it’s no good saying : We played the football, they scored the goal. I’ve heard that since I was a teenager reporting Stevenage Athletic for the Herts Express & Stevenage Gazette. Then I heard it, off and on, for three years when I was reporting student football for the Manchester University newspaper.
Four games without a win is a dismal run. Three defeats in a row has not happened since October 2002.
History will record that in February 2007, PSV Eindhoven beat Arsenal 1-0 and Chelsea beat Arsenal 2-1 and Blackburn beat Arsenal 1-0 and then they played Reading on Saturday, March 3 and PSV on Wednesday, March 7.
A 0-0 draw against PSV could end Arsenal’s season with ten Premiership games left.
That’s the challenge now. Arsenal can beat PSV and stay in the top eight in Europe. Or they can lose and drop to somewhere between 9th and 16th.
If it’s the latter, will Keith Edelman freeze season-ticket prices ?