Who will Arsene pick on Sunday? Arsenal v Liege report and player ratings
ARSENAL 2 STANDARD LIEGE 0
FROM GOODPLAYA AT THE EMIRATES
ANOTHER year, another qualification not just for the Champions League group stages, but from the Champions League group stages.
It’s something like a decade now since we failed to do that and it’s fair to say most of us take it for granted. Liverpool’s woes and those of many other so called giants in the past ten years tell us it isn’t necessarily.
So, what to say of this one? Well for a start I haven’t seen TV replays of the contentious incidents, so apologies if I call them wrong. The second thing is to say the night probably won’t live that long in the memory.
I think the mood of the Standard fans summed it up rather nicely: boisterous in the first half (apparently they’d been boozing on the Holloway Road en masse since 10 am!), they were largely quiet once Denilson added our second.
Both the goals came from errors, but in both cases Nasri and Denilson exploited them well. We missed five chances in ten seconds, they hit the bar very neatly and should have had a penalty and that was the first half.
The second half was nothingy, where they seemed to consider success to be either injuring one of our players or trying to get our captain sent-off. They succeeded on the former right at the end, with Kieran Gibbs now laid out again after breaking a bone in his (other) foot. Twats.
Team wise Eboue came in for Sagna as is usual on these home European nights. Denilson partnering Song and Cesc works OK but I’m just not too sure what exactly it is the Brazilian brings to the midfield other than an extra body truth be told.
Up front I personally thought Vela’s audition was not an awful one by any means.
All eyes turned to Chelsea round about the time Denilson’s goal went in but anyone professing to know what team we can expect to see is probably bluffing at this stage. The good news is Arshavin and Gallas, after crashing into each other, are apparently OK.
But that doesn’t answer questions such as:
- will we go with the same trio in midfield as last night?
- why wasn’t Ramsey even on the bench? Injured? Dropped? Rested for Sunday?
- will he go for Rosicky or Nasri as the third midfielder? The former made a subs appearance in that role, the latter often floated into it.
- does Theo start? He loses the ball more, but is a unique outlet.
- who gets the nod up front?
My hunch is Eduardo, Arshavin, Song, Cesc, Rosicky and either Walcott or Denilson, with Rosicky’s position dependent on which of the latter two start.
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