Up For Grabs Now

The team may be a gaggle of lithe young whipper-snappers but Arsenal’s fans are fast turning into Dad’s Army. Every weekend there’s a small explosion of some kind (even if that explosion is “only” beating Wigan 1-0). You then have your Corporal Joneses who look a bit jittery and shout “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” to anyone who’ll listen. They’re reacting to the Private Frazers who shake their wizened heads at the first hint of frailty in the team and rasp in strangely Scottish accents “We’re doomed! We’re all doomed!”

I’ll try and sum up the arguments being made and made again as best I can:

Private Frazer: Wenger’s stubborn adherence to this inexpensive youth malarkey has led us into trophyless oblivion. These kids will never be good enough. He must buy lots and lots of expensive players as soon as he can (preferably in central defence and defensive midfield) but he won’t because he’s so stubborn. If he doesn’t we’re going to have a terrible season and he should go in May.

Corporal Jones: Please don’t worry about a thing, cos every little thing is gonna be alright. We’re fifth after a pretty smelly start to the season but we’re still only 8 points off the top (5 if we can beat Liverpool on Sunday) and our record against the big teams shows that we’ve got quality, if not consistency. We’re still in the Champions’ League and Eduardo’s back soon. And stop being so silly about Arsene, would you?

So are you a Jones or a Frazer? I’m a Jones, though quite an anxious one.

I think it’s worth noting that Corporal Jones was also responsible for another phrase often applied to Arsenal: “They don’t like it up ‘em!” Often used in the past to explain the apparently inexplicable defeat of truly great Arsenal sides playing some of the most lavish football ever seen to teams like Bolton, Corporal Jones was originally referring to “the fuzzy-wuzzies” with whom he fought in Sudan. In a confusing twist to my Dad’s Army division of Gooners, I suspect that a fair few Frazers out there secretly (or not so secretly) wish that this team had a few less “fuzzy-wuzzies” and a few more English redcoats in the mould of Parlour or Keown.

Enough of that. If anyone thinks of any further analogies between us Gooners and Dad’s Army do let me know.

It’s going to be a long wait for the Liverpool match on Sunday so expect to see the Frazer-Jones debate going round and round again and again until then. Yawn. It’s a match which I already feel way more confident about than I did for the Boro game on Saturday, simply because I think all the players will be working their balls off for the cause.

Since one of Private Frazer’s favourite things is relentless rumour-mongering and since that’s what always gets online Gooners licking their chops, here are a few doing the rounds at the moment:

Brazilian wunderkind Alexandre Pato has apparently caught the eye of Arsene Wenger who could make a move in January. This is pretty left field firstly as the boy’s a striker which is probably our strongest area right now and secondly because he’s clearly the dog’s danglies and Milan have been bragging about him ever since he arrived so selling him would be very strange indeed. The shred of hope here is that they’re meant to be signing Thiago Silva and so will need to offload one of their non-EU players if they want Thiago to play.

Even then, I reckon there’ll be other, richer, brasher teams who would want him more than we do. The only reason I can see for Arsene really wanting him is so that he can unleash a tongue-twisting extravaganza by signing Alex Pato, then signing Alex from Chelsea and finally entrenching Alex Song’s spot in central midfield. We will then have the world’s first Alex-Axis. Or, if you prefer, our grinding wheels of dominance will turn upon our well-oiled Alex-Axle. This is obviously tempting to a man like Arsene.

But how, you cry, will newly crowned X-Factor Champion Alexandra Burke fit into all this? I’m not sure yet, but she could surely provide useful cover at right-back. Signing her might also cement our place in next season’s Champions’ League, as UEFA president Michel Pratini is keen to give the competition back its edge and is reportedly considering inviting Champions from other walks of life to compete in 2009/10.

More likely would be Juve’s 24-year-old centre back Giorgio Chiellini,who could be involved in swapsies with our scowling number 10, William Gallas. The downside being that by all accounts we’d have to give them about £10million of our lunch money on top of sulky Billy and the upside being that we’d have a big, strong, good centre back in return for an actually not very big and constantly frowning jessie.

Have a Goonerific Monday.

The grumpy rumblings coming from Arsene Wenger in his pre-match yesterday suggest to me that he has his bony professorial finger on the stuttering pulse of the bloated Arsenal Blogmonster and he doesn’t like the kind of guff he’s being subjected to. Yesterday it seemed like he’d had enough and decided to well and truly take the piss out of his haters using the official website.

“First off,” he tells his press secretary (we shall call her “Clive” for argument’s sake) ”Let’s have an article headlined “Why Bendtner Will Come Good“, replete with a cryptic explanation based on something to do with the amount of “pressure” the poor boy puts on himself. That’ll get them going for starters!” 

You thought he wasn’t trying at all? You thought he’d been taking motivational classes from Eboue? You couldn’t be more wrong! Nicklas’ current streak of banjo-wielding cow’s arse avoidance is because the poor boy’s trying way too hard. Stifling his own talent through sheer burgeoning effort. Scrapping for every ball, dashing blindly down every alley, constant hustle and bustle – that’s his game. Sure you might not notice it by, for example, watching him play, but that’s not the point here is it?

Not content with the outpouring of wrath this playful article inspires, Arsene scratches his gaunt professorial chin. He has an idea. “Clive!” he cries, leaping from his professorial chair. “Clive! I’ve got it.” He whispers his plan in Clive’s ear. She is visibly shaken.

“You can’t do that Arsene, they’ll go berserk! You know how sensitive they are about your transfer policy at the moment. The other day I read someone who honestly wanted you to buy back Igor Stepanovs just so that he could see photos of the shirt presentation on the Daily Mirror website. He said he’d take a decent shirt presentation ceremony over three points against Boro any day!”

“Oh yes I can do it,” replies Arsene gleefully. “And I will. Advertise a live question and answer session. Do it now. Call it something seedy, something slightly Babestation. How about “Exclusive Arsene Wenger Webchat“? Is that too obvious? A bit much? Oh, go for it then, we might as well go full-frontal on this one! And kick it off with something really tantalising. Something like “What have you always wanted to ask Arsene Wenger?“”

“Right. Now in about 3 hours I want you to put up another article saying “I won’t answer transfer questions“. And put something in about how good our youngsters are and how bright the future’s going to be – they absolutely hate hearing that. Those bastards will have been dead excited readying their lairy demands and idiotic recommendations – I want them to know I’ll be having none of it. They’re always just like [here Arsene affects high-pitched voice] ‘Ooh, Arsene, go and buy us Ronaldinho, yeah? Ooh Arsene, I can’t believe you sold Oleg Luzhniy he’d be perfect for our defence right now. Ooh Arsene, why don’t you sign Stewart Downing?” Well I can’t take any more of it!”

Enough of that, save to say that Arsene’s Friday wind-up went down an absolute treat. Next week you can look forward to headlines like “Wenger – Why Alex Song is an Arsenal Legend already” and “Wenger – why I wouldn’t sign Messi even if he came free with my Gardener’s World subscription”.

Boro today. Not a happy hunting ground of late. Especially galling is that we seem to keep conceding to Jeremie Aliadiere whose only notable quality is that he is supremely well endowed in the vowel department. Count them – 10 last time I checked.

Expect to see sudden recoveries from the likes of Captain Cesc, Sagna, RvP, Ade and Gael and for Djourou to retain his place in central defence. Also expect an afternoon packed with Out Of Position Diaby and Inappropriate Outbursts of Song. And Eboue. Yum, just what we Gooners love to see.

I’ll be making no predictions ahead of this one as there’s really no point. Suffice to say that as an impatient modern supporter I’m just about prepared to accept a repeat of our 7-0 duffing a couple of years ago. And if Eboue can pull off something like this, (intentionally or no) then all the better frankly.

Finally, we have again been linked with a move for the superbly named Sagna/Drogba hybrid Gervinho (an Ivorian forward at Le Mans who can also play on the wing). Real name? Gervais Yao Kouassi. Brazilian lineage? None. The guy has grasped the crucial fact that with a Brazilian sounding name and a lot of hair, you can make yourself instantly attractive to visiting scouts who have one eye on how this is all going to look when it comes down to a shirt presentation ceremony.

Sources close to Wenger report that should Gervinho sign in January, Arsene will insist that he change his name further to “Margervinho” to comply with his strict policy of only playing strikers whose names make reference to The Simpsons, though this will disappoint a section of fans who had been looking forward to having a player called Gervais, for obvious reasons.

Oh, and it’s Sp*rs-United later on, that most perplexing of fixtures for Gooners. Who do you want to lose more? Both of them, really. I’m hoping for a fractious draw, as many suspensions as possible and, if we’re really lucky, points deductions all round.

So the Eboo-ers have vanished into the night, nowhere to be seen or heard anywhere across the Arsenal blogosphere. Instead, there is a spectrum of opinion which ranges from regret to total embarrassment to real anger that an Arsenal player playing badly should be ridiculed by his own supporters during a game.

No-one will defend Eboue’s performance. It was indefensible. Arseblogger makes the crucial point when he observes that while the rubbishness of his performance was bad enough, what got people really worked up (and this is much less obvious to a TV audience) was that Eboue didn’t seem to care – shrugging and standing hands on hips after disastrously and needlessly throwing away possession yet again. This is bound to get anyone’s goat, and I suppose the best defence for the Ebooers is that if he didn’t care when he was on the pitch then he has no right to care when he is made to leave it.

So a regrettable incident, but one which could have been avoided by Eboue actually appearing to make an effort.

The other defence people are coming up with is that a lot of the booing was actually directed at Arsene Wenger so that’s ok. I’m sorry? It’s not ok to boo a player who doesn’t try, but it is ok to boo the club’s greatest post-war manager? I really struggle to understand how this is justification.

Or else, it was directed at the board, as some kind of bizarrely-timed protest at the lack of transfer activity. Perhaps this was a protest at Wenger’s stubbornness in not immediately signing an over-priced Italian winger we once saw do a trick on YouTube as soon as he saw Eboue was having a stinker? That’s how football works isn’t it?

There’s a great big scapegoating exercise which seems to run through quite a lot of fans’ minds when they don’t like a performance. Blame it on Eboue. Blame it on Song. In extreme cases blame it on Denilson. It’s a very easy way to deal with disappointment, to place all the blame on just one or two players, and the great thing is you don’t even need to watch the game properly, but it never really works as a way of explaining poor performance and other players who make big mistakes or underperform - like Toure, Clichy, Van Persie – their mistakes are always quickly forgotten to allow more time for yelling at whichever player you’ve decided to hate. Of course, football doesn’t work like this.

Song in particular continues to be singled out as the scapegoat. “He’s to blame for yesterday! If it wasn’t for Song we would have won… hold on… we did win? Right. Well I blame Song for the fact that the league chose not to magically turn our 3 points into 14. That was all his fault!”

BREAKING NEWS: Song actually played quite well yesterday. (NB this doesn’t mean I think he is better than Vieira or something).

One blogger yet to wake up and smell the 3 points is Le Grove. What a surprise! Ah, Le Grumble, that helpful support group for the bitter, the insane and the unloved in the Arsenal community. If they’re not complaining about the lack of a mid-season DVD celebrating Arsenal’s autumnal achievements, then they’re pining for the signing of Stewart Downing (as in today’s blubbing, semi-literate instalment). They must be the only group of fans who celebrate a victory by effectively calling for the club’s manager to be sacked. Literally, the only fans anywhere in the world who would see this as reasonable. Astonishing.

Next up it’s Porto away, and a great chance for the boss to try out that Eboue-Song strike partnership we’ve all been crying out for. Only joking! But it could happen, seriously… “I believe if you’re a good player then you can play in any position”…

So we scraped the 3 points in the end. My 3-points-sandwich isn’t going to come with extra cheese and they’re definitely not going to toast it for me, but it’s good enough for now.

Early reaction: I thought Song had one of his better games and that overall the Djourou-Kolo partnership looked pretty solid (though they looked a bit shaky in the final 10 minutes). In fact the whole team was so shaky for the final 10 that at one point I thought one of them might grab the bull by the horns and actually score for Wigan.

The guy who looked most likely to do this was Eboue, who appears to have entirely forgotten the most basic ideas on which the sport of football is based. Fine, he was playing on the left of midfield. Not his natural position, by any means, but you get to wondering whether this guy has a natural position or whether he might just be very bad indeed at football.

The key incident came when Kolo ran towards him with the ball and ushered him forward. Instead Eboue ran backwards, tackled Toure and fed a good pass to a Wigan player who looked grateful for this surprise gift and alarmed at the lack of Kolo or any Arsenal midfielders blocking his path to goal. He gave the ball away a couple of other times and kept finding himself on the wrong side of opponents or making very weak challenges in important positions.

As I say, it is unfair to judge anyone when they are so far out of position, but this was idiocy, and our fans weren’t having any of it, giving him a healthy dose of vitriol as he headed for the tunnel. (In his place, that renowned midfield general, Mickael Silvestre, incidentally).

Eboue looked seriously pissed off (though admittedly he always looks pissed off when he’s not dancing in carparks) and people are bound to have a go at our fans for attacking him the way they did. I’d be very interested to hear what people think about this issue. You can vote in the Arse-Poll (top right) and let rip in the comments.

Have you ever tried to get to sleep while grinning so much that it hurts your cheeks? That’s what beating BloodMoney FC at their own stinking patch can do to a Gooner, and even this morning you’d think the corners of my mouth were on some mysterious mission to find out what would happen if they finally reached my ears.

As before the United game, I saw the line-ups and immediately compared the midfields. Arsenal’s: Nasri, Cesc, Song, Denilson. Chelsea’s: Mikel, Kalou, Ballack, Deco, Lampard. Like them or (much more probably) loathe them, those last three are right up there when you’re talking about the best midfielders in world football over the last 10 or 15 years – midfield generals for major European nations and superclubs who have won pretty much everything in club football. Song? Denilson? If the hideous pin-striped Chelsea prawn botherers hadn’t been so preoccupied wondering where the soul of their club has gone (it now works in a Russian aluminium factory, if they really want to know) then they might have been quite justified in chanting “Who are ya? Who are ya?” It would have been an unusually sincere enquiry.

One ill-judged (as always) blogger promised we’d lose if Song started and was this morning backtracking faster than he could say “Fair enough, then, Arsene probably does know”. Humiliating times for the haters, but they will never learn.

That said, Song has looked pretty crap in midfield so far this season and I didn’t much fancy his match-up with Ballack and Lampard. Yesterday his passing was crisp and his positioning tight and though he looks by no means a long term solution to the DM problem, he showed he can do a job providing he concentrates hard enough. UpForGrabsNow is clinging to the hope that Santa will execute some kind of complicated reindeer-based manoeuvre which transmogrifies him into a six-foot-four Senegalese called Patrick circa 2004.

Yesterday Van Persie finally looked like turning into the big-game forward you could really hang your title-challenging hat on – sharp, confident and lethal. For the first goal he did that thing where he strikes the ball so purely and so hard that his body can’t really deal with the force and spins right round and falls over as soon as he’s connected. His second was pure class. Good to see that Gallas was the first to congratulate him each time. What a willy.

It strikes me that an Ade-Rob division of labour might work quite well. Ade can muscle in the goals against the shit-kickers and Rob can score the difficult, elegant goals against the big boys. Fine, he can throw in a few ludicrously skilful volleys against smaller teams, but largely he should be allowed to chill out and hone his Boyzone-ish quiff while Ade bangs them in.

So get gloating, Gooners! I refer you to my carefully researched Gooner Gloating Guidebook for expert tips on how to best enjoy Triumphant Mondays such as this one. The names are pretty much interchangeable.

Of course, Monday’s like this would be even more triumphant if we were much tighter to the top of the league. As it is it’s seven points. Seven. Perhaps it would have been an idea to casually beat Villa and City rather than not try and lose pitifully to both of them. Just a thought.

Finally, spare a thought for Roy Keane. Lovely bloke. Humble, gentle, sensible. Bunch of expensively assembled Spurs knock-offs lost 4-1 at home to Bolton? How very sad.