Goodplaya on Friday: Almunia’s chest, empty seats, first team dress, Gilbert and injury time
Opening thought: Some chest infection Manuel Almunia must have: it’s TEN days that he will have been supposedly out with one when he misses Fulham.
No doubt it’s pure coincidence then that Arsene Wenger was enquiring about the likes of Robert Green on deadline day and that the Spaniard has hardly started the season in the best of form.
After his impressive debut on Tuesday, Szczesny is my bet to oust Mannone.
World exclusive: Alex Song wore a weird grey blazer and hat, there was no sign of Gallas, Rosicky was in a tie-dye t-shirt and Nasri appeared to be texting at one point during the game. Left to right in this photo: Eboue, Eduardo, Rosicky, Vermaelen, Arshavin, Nasri
Arsene’s signings
Such has been the rejoicing over Thomas Vermaelen’s form, you’d have thought Arsene Wenger had never bought a decent player before.
Admittedly, he tends to strike gold more often at the other end of the pitch.
Amidst all the fuss over the amount of injury time in last week’s Manchester derby, it went forgotten we were afforded a very generous five minutes at OT. It’s also worth saying that it’s no surprise the average figures show that when the big teams are losing at home more time is added on than when they are winning. Why? Because the big teams go for a second, third or fourth to kill the game whereas the small teams tend to waste time and try to hold out for 1-0. And wasted time equals more injury time.
Without actually being sold to another club and then being bought back, can any player beat the three and a half years Kerrea Gilbert went between appearances for us?
But for all the gripes over the lack of signings since we moved to the Emirates, when he has spent any significant sum of money, it’s hard to find too much wrong with his choices. By my reckoning the following fall into that criteria: Tomas Rosicky, William Gallas, Denilson, Diarra, Eduardo, Sagna, Nasri, Ramsey, Silvestre, Arshavin and Vermaelen.
Now, we spent nothing on Silvestre and he has never been a first team regular. And you can take issue with Denilson if you want. And as for Diarra, the problem was not that he wasn’t a good player.
But it’s hard to look at the rest and have too many gripes. And certainly not at the likes of Vermaelen, Arshavin, Eduardo and Sagna.
On a light note, we rarely hear “what a waste of money” shouted in our direction.
On a more serious one, it’s a reminder that while our manager may be infuriatingly reluctant to get his chequebook out at times, when he does, it’s still to very good effect.
How empty is the Emirates?
One Arsenal site likes to claims that a few thousand season ticket holders don’t turn up for league games.
The first thing to say is that while that was theoretically plausible towards the end of last season, I don’t see how thousands of Arsenal fans could possibly have renewed their tickets in the summer but given up on the team after just one home game.
Arsene’s gripe about persistent fouling does have a little merit. As a team you can commit loads of little fouls that break up the play with no one player collectively doing enough to warrant a booking. Why not scrap the fine for five yellow cards and instead say a player is picked at random to miss a game and do the same if a team commits more than a certain number of fouls in a game too?
If anyone has the time, please work out what percentage of post match FA disrepute charges relate to matches that are either televised or first on Match of the Day? What are the odds we find the FA disciplinary process is massively media driven?
The second thing to say is that assuming Arsenal aren’t telling outright lies about attendances (as opposed to just gently massaging them to include tickets sold rather than bums on seats), on Tuesday we got an idea of what the Emirates looks like with 3,500 empty seats, plus the empties in Club Level where Carling Cup games are included in their package.
Despite seemingly pretty large swathes of empty seating (including a whole block in the West Brom end), there were just those 3,500 untaken.
My hunch is that because the seats are so big and red, every empty one stands out like a sore thumb.
For one thing, from the 6th row I can spot a single empty seat way back in the upper tier on the opposite side of the ground. At the far more cramped Highbury, that was never possible.
The fixture Arsene calls Fulahahahaham
Goodplaya responds
Mitch says:
Goodplaya says
I think it was forced on Wenger to an extent by Vela not being fit. On paper too, Traore is not inexperienced.
Family enclosure man says:
Goodplaya says
I don’t for a second think Almunia is as good a keeper as Cech, but it is true that it’s easy to only see the worse in our one and gloss over the mistakes of others.
Nice idea. Thanks for sharing, bro.
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