What went against the team was perhaps the bench-strength. Arsenal had Arshavin, Rosicky, Benayoun, Frimpong, Miquel, Chamakh and Almunia. On papers it is a strong bench, but we don’t play football on papers. Chamakh and Arshavin are going through the worst form of their lives. Arshavin had two glorious opportunities to score or to set a teammate, but ended up squandering both. Chamakh, apart from his hold-up play, is..well..useless at the moment. That’s where Arsenal lost the game. We didn’t have an impact player to come in and change the game for us. That we don’t have a single fit full-back is a different matter.

With Gervinho and Chamakh going to play in the Africa Cup of Nations in January, Arsenal must buy quality replacements. We are not only short in defence, we also need strikers to support the excellent Van Persie.

On Wednesday we play Villa, followed by a game against Wolverhampton at home. Must win games for us if we are to keep pace with the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs.

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Against Blackburn on Saturday, the defence capitulated once again and Arsenal, from a commanding position, ended up losing 4-3.  The Gunners had an excellent start and dominated proceedings and deservedly went ahead through Gervinho.  Arteta, Ramsey and Song dominated the midfield, allowing  Gervinho, Van Persie and Arshavin to do what they do best.  Arsenal went ahead in the 10th minute and it looked like they had the game well under their control.

In the 25th minute, however, a clever pass from Junior Hoillet between Mertesacker and Koscielny allowed Yakubu to sneak in and flick the ball past Wojciech Szczesny into the net.  At that point it looked like a mere ‘footballing accident’ as Arsenal still dominated and Arteta duly restored their advantage with a superb finish. The score remained 2-1 in Arsenal’s favour at halftime.

Blackburn again equalised in the 50th minute when Alex Song scored an own goal from a freekick. Buoyed by it, Blackburn pressed Arsenal up the pitch, bombarded the area with aerial balls and Arsenal cracked.

Panic set in amongst the players and 2-2 soon turned to 3-2 and then 4-2, with Koscielny scoring another own goal.  Chamakh managed to pull one back late in the 85th minute but it was too little too late.  Arsenal now lie in the 17th position with just 4 points from 5 games and a goal difference of -8, their worst start in 58 years.

At this point of time the manager has to do some serious thinking about what is going wrong with this team.  Why is i that Arsenal always have defensive problems? Some years back the fans complained that the likes of Senderos should be replaced and better defenders brought in.

Arsenal fans saw the likes of Toure, Gallas, Senderos and that Machester United reject go,Koscielny, Vermaelen and now Mertesacker come in…but the defence still leak goal. Why?

None of these are bad players mind you. Djourou, Mertesacker and Vermaelen are regulars with their national teams and have enough experience. Then why do they look so disorganised when playing for Arsenal? Is it because Arsenal lack a proper defensive coach to impart his knowledge?

Arsenal do recognise where the problem lies and to be fair to them they are trying to rectify it. It’s just sad that their little experiment with zonal marking backfired badly against Blackburn.  Common sense dictates that while defending a corner, the tallest player should mark their tallest player.

Against Blackburn with this new system, Metesacker got drawn towards the front post, leaving the others to mark Christopher Samba.  Arsenal were lucky to concede just 4 goals because Samba came pretty close to scoring from corners on a couple of occasions.

Arsene Wenger is under tremendous pressure and it will take a Herculean effort to rescue the season. He must take it one step at a time, the first step is to sort out the defence.

Image Source: Arsenal.com

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Sure we were without Thomas Vermaelen, Bacary Sagna, Gervinho, Alex Song, Jack Wilshere  and Kieran Gibbs. Sure we played a young team, but so did United. In fact,the average age of the United side was younger.  In Van Persie, Walcott, Arshavin and Rosicky, we had experienced players in the park. Djourou and Laurent Koscienly in central defence are an experienced pair too.  But our defenders looked shaky, lacked confidence and there was hardly any communication between them or with the keeper. United had both their first-choice central defenders (Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic) injured, yet the likes of Jonny Evans, Chris Smalling, Phil Jones and Patrice Evra marshalled their lines superbly.

Why can’t our defenders do that? Why is it that whenever there is a long ball to our final third we panic? Why is it that whenever a player takes on one of our defenders and runs at him with the ball, our defender invariably gets the man and not the ball in dangerous positions.  Perhaps something is very wrong with the way we coach our defenders.

We sold our two best players recently after wasting the entire summer.  Eventually Wenger and Ivan Gazidis had to give in and sell both Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri. But we wasted so much time in the affair that we now do not have their replacements and the transfer window shuts at 11pm GMT on August 31.  Wenger will have you believe that more than 20 people are burning the midnight oil trying to get the deals done. He will also tell you that Arsenal want ‘super quality’ players to improve the side.  And that is what is frustrating.  We all saw the quality of Juan Mata the other day and Arsenal did make enquiries about him. But Wenger decided he wasn’t ready to pay what Valencia wanted for him. This, after he knew all along that he must let Nasri go and that he was set to receive GBP 70 million from the sale of players this summer.  No one but Wenger and Gazidis are to be blamed for the situation we find ourselves in now, where the transfer window closes in two days and we are severely short of personnel.  As things stand right now, he must rely on reserve players to fill in those positions and going by the way United mauled us today, we are in big big trouble.

Today’s humiliation is a lesson for Wenger. He’ll do well to learn now or else he must go.  His youth policy, although successful in producing quality players, so far has failed its ultimate goal — win trophies. His grand scheme was to hold on to the young players, have them play together for years and forge an unbeatable fighting unit.  But for me that plan was never going to materialise because we somehow weren’t able to hold on to our players. He let Flamini go just when he and Cesc were developing perhaps the best midfield partnership in England. He persisted with Denilson, didn’t give enough chances to Bendtner, bought Chamakh to warm the bench. The list is endless.

Wenger needs to spend and spend big now.  The competition has become tougher now. It’s no longer the threat of United and Chelsea now. Manchester City look very dangerous, Liverpool have come back strongly and even the Spurs have improved a lot. If the situation continues, Arsenal could very well see themselves pushed down to fifth or sixth in the league.  The ball now is in Wenger’s court and it will be interesting to see if today’s humiliation has any positive effect on him. One surely hope it does….for Arsenal’s sake.

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What was never in doubt was his commitment to the club and the cause. He was our captain and he gave his all on the pitch. So it was quite surprising and in fact very disgusting to read some of the comments left on various internet forums by some ‘fans’..abusing him and questioning his loyalty.

In his first interview after becoming a Barcelona player, Cesc said that he was unhappy with the fact that he had been unable to explain himself to the club’s fans.

He said: “I have time to talk about it and I’m sure I’ll do an interview especially for them. I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything in the last two and a half months, Arsenal wouldn’t allow me to talk to anyone, even if I wanted to I couldn’t. I’m disappointed and upset about it because I have had a great relationship with the fans over the years. It took time to build this and I’m disappointed I could lose some of them. All I have are words of gratitude. I’ll never forget what they have done for me, I gave absolutely everything to the club and I think they know that but it was the right time to come back here. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything to them in the last few months but I couldn’t. I was very, very sad to leave, I spent one third of my life there, eight years, so I’m very sad but life goes on.”

That shows his loyalty to the club and his feelings for the fans. I don’t care what the plastic fans think of him, but for me the lasting image of Cesc will the captain who suffered a hairline fracture yet played on against Barca. He never gave up and I shall always have respect for the man.

Now that he has finally gone, it will be interesting to see how the team and Arsenal as a club react. There are rumours that a deal with Manchester City is close to be completed, leaving us bereft of two of the best creative players.

When we lost Thierry Henry in 2007, everybody said that we wouldn’t make it to the top 4. But we came back strong and lead the pack for majority of the season before losing steam post February. What was interesting was the way we reacted to Henry’s departure. We fought as a unit and were nearly there.

We didn’t splash out cash to replace Henry with another world-class striker. Perhaps we couldn’t afford one or perhaps we had someone in Fabregas who could create chance after chance after chance. Things are different now. We have been without any silverware for quite sometime now and the pressure has increased on the club and the manager.

Earlier, Arsene Wenger was successful in shouldering the criticism alone, referring it as a youth project and how the strategy was to have the young guys play together, keeping them together and reaping the benefits later. That project, sadly, has failed. It has been an epic failure.

We had perhaps the best midfield partnership in the entire Premier League in Fabregas and Flamini that showed its immense potential in just one season. Why we let the Frenchman run down his contract and leave on a free is still a mystery. All the while Arsene said that he “expected Flamini to stay.”

And the same thing has happened again in case of Nasri. Wenger can’t protect his players from facing the flak any more. He did that successfully previously, but not any longer. It was no surprise that some fans chanted against Nasri, who wasn’t even in the stadium, at the season opener against Newcastle. The fans questioned his loyalty and called him greedy.

I for one don’t support these fans. In fact, I believe if they have some gripes, it should be against Wenger and not Nasri. He is young, talented, ambitious and wants to win trophies. If he believes Arsenal is not the team with whom he can realise his dreams then I see nothing wrong with that. Many ‘experts’ would have you believe that Nasri showed flashes of his brilliance for just one half of the last season and the rest of the time he was lacklustre or nothing out of the ordinary. I respectfully disagree because he took over the creative mantle of the team when Cesc was out with injury and he kept us in the title race. A certain Andrei Arshavin was having a nightmare of a season.

My point is, a footballer has a very short career. A manager can remain in the game for decades; a footballer has to win down his career in his thirties. If Nasri decides to leave to win trophies, then I see no problem with that. Because we haven’t been able to sustain our challenge — we lose our steam every season before the end of February.

I lay the blame squarely on Wenger. I blame him for turning us into a feeder club. I blame him for not buying players and I blame him for waiting to buy players of ‘Super quality’ when the others buy quality players and keep on lifting trophies.

Is Wenger going to change his philosophy? If not change, is he going to be flexible enough to accommodate players who are not dirt cheap and come from clubs we haven’t heard about before? Are the Arsenal players mature enough to handle the loss of two of our best players and play to their full potential? Are there players in the reserves who will take this opportunity and step up the plate?

I honestly don’t know. It would be interesting to step back and observe from a neutral point of view because Arsenal definitely are in crossroads at this point of time. Whether they go up or go down will depend as much on the manager as the players. But as an Arsenal fan I just hope and pray that we do well and finally win some silverware.

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The major noteworthy point was the apparent lack of creativity in this Arsenal side.  We struggled last season without the injured Cesc Fabregas. Although Samir Nasri admirably took over the creative responsibility, both players are different, in that Cesc is more of a long passer while Nasri is a better dribbler and short passer.  There were a few occasions when we missed both of them and that’s when we struggled really badly.  And the same happened today.

None of the two were included in the squad (although Nasri did play for France in the recent international friendly) that travelled up north. Arsenal are set to lose both the players, with Cesc expected to join his boyhood club Barcelona and Nasri on the verge of joining Manchester City shortly.  Without these two, we lacked ideas.  Having seen his performances in the pre-season, I had hoped for a better performance from Gervinho, but perhaps it is unfair to expect too much too soon from him.

With Gervinho, Van Persie and Arshavin upfront, the creative responsibility was thrust on the young shoulders of Aaron Ramsey, with Song and Rosicky in support.  Ramsey is a confident player, very assured on the ball, the captain of the Wales national team.  But he is no Fabregas, at least not yet.

Arsenal as usual dominated possession from the whistle.  Gibbs and Arshavin combined well to feed Gervinho inside the box, but debut nerves meant fluffed his shot. Perhaps trying to impress his manager and the travelling fans, the Ivory Coast international was full of enterprise and created an opening for Van Persie in the 18th minute which the Dutchman put inches wide of the post.

There were a couple of more chances which were wasted.  In the 76th minute Gervinho was felled inside the area. Joey Barton took issue with winger and after a brief clashed the Arsenal player was shown the red card.  This time, however, Arsenal managed to keep a clean sheet in the final few minutes and emerged with a single point.

But if this is how they play and they don’t improve, Arsenal are going to take a beating at the hands of Liverpool and Manchester United in the next two games.
From today’s evidence, Arsenal need a creative midfielder capable of unlocking the opposition’s defence with pinpoint passes. Ramsey and Wilshere are good players but they need to develop further under the tutelage of a more experienced player.  Should Arsene decide to sell Cesc and Nasri in the next few days, he should invest the money immediately to purchase a replacement or two. Otherwise this is going to be a long painful season.

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Yes, Barcelona have started their summer shenanigans about Cesc Fabregas. There are also reports of Samir Nasri and Gael Clichy trying to force a move out. But can we actually afford to lose them? Here is my take on who we should let go.

Tomas Rosicky: Rosicky, who when he first arrived in 2006, was known as the ‘Little Mozart.’  Sadly, Arsenal fans have seen little of the Mozart who has the knack of picking up injuries now and then.  He is 30-year-old, which usually means a little lack of speed but tonnes of experience and a certain calmness on the field. While the first two points are correct in case of the Czech, he is certainly not a calm character. For me, he lacks composure and is one of the first players to hit the panic button, which costs the team. Check the build-up to Newcastle’s fourth goal in the game that ended 4-4.

Emmanuel Eboue: Eboue was supposed to be our right-back. He is not because we have the excellent Bacary Sagna. Eboue doesn’t play as the right-winger because Theo Walcott and/or Samir Nasri play in that position. Eboue is not defensively sound. He dives and he tries to con the referee.  He brings nothing on the pitch that improves the team.

Gael Clichy: I believe Arsenal should look to sell Clichy. But definitely not to a Premier League side. Not because he will come back to bite us, but because it will be sad to see him play for another team in the league. Clichy is undoubtedly the ‘fastest’ left-back in the business. But that is all he is — fast. He overlaps Andrei Arshavin on the left flank, yes. But the quality of his crosses, the end product, is almost always poor.  Both of our full-backs run a lot. However, compare the result of Sagna’s deliveries to Clichy’s and you will know what I mean.

Denilson: The former captain of the Brazil under-17 national team was brought to Arsenal as a player of ‘exceptional talent’ in 2006. He did impress initially when he was under the tutelage of Gilberto Silva and had to fight for his place against the likes of Mathieu Flamini. But the standard of his performance went down ever since he got more playing time. Probably a case of complacency creeping in.  The right time is now to show him the door.

Why Arsene, Why?

Manuel Almunia: Can be exceptional on his day. He single-handedly kept us in the game in the first-leg quarter-final against Barcelona at the Emirates in 2009-10. But those moments were rare for the Spaniard. Seems to lack confidence, doesn’t have a commanding presence like David Seaman or Jens Lehmann had.  With the likes of Wojciech Szczesny and Lukasz Fabianski ahead of him, there is no chance he will ever be the number one again.

Nicklas Bendtner: I admire Bendtner’s confidence and belief in himself. Although he has not delivered consistently, he never fails to try. With Robin van Persie and Marouane Chamakh ahead of him, he is unlikely to get regular starts.  Although it is no fault of his, the Dane is surplus to our requirements.

Sebastien Squillaci: Why did we buy him in the first place?

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“It’s difficult because Chelsea defend well and attack on the break but I think we were very unfortunate to be 2-0 down at half-time. Then after the referee cancelled the goal nobody understands still why. What is he doing? I have watched it five times nobody touches Cech, he lets the ball down and we score, he cancels the goal. Then of course coming back I think that was a big turning point in the game today. I felt in the first 20 minutes with a better first touch and a bit more belief we could score,” he added.

The Frenchman added that his side were not out of the title chase yet. “I believe we are, we have nothing to be ashamed of with our performance today. I believe that it all went Chelsea’s way today and I was not especially impressed with what went on, on the pitch and they took their chances very well and they have, in Drogba an exceptional player. But it is down to us to come back into it. From what I have seen today of Chelsea they can drop points,” he said.

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