Up For Grabs Now

Nicklas Bendtner, eh? one week he’s lashing the ball confidently into the Dynamo Kyiv net and exposing his chilly Viking torso to the winter night, the next he’s tapping the ball pitifully into the expansive midriff of Burnley’s gargantuan goalkeeper Brian Jensen. The next one after that he’s doing the pitiful tapping thing again. And the one after that. What happened to confident lashing, Nicklas?

Wenger’s post-match assessment of all this miss-ery was unusually unsympathetic to Nicklas and his striking chums:

We had plenty of chances but when you do not score, you really have to ask yourself why. You can praise their keeper but also question our strikers. We had six one-on-ones with their keeper and did not score with any of them. In front of goal, you have to be much more clinical than we were. We just did not have the right focus in front of goal. We lost a game we should never have lost.

Which sounds about as close as you’ll get with Arsene to him placing the blame at the whiffy adolescent feet of Nicklas Bendtner, or at least putting a big mental question mark over those “berry”-coloured boots.

I think that question mark has been sitting in the minds of most Goons for most of the time that Bendtner’s been in the first team squad. He’s a player that has frustrated us Goons for a long time now – scoring important goals with apparent ease one day, then looking absolutely useless (and in extreme cases such as the Liverpool tie last season, worse than useless) for the next three or four games.

Bendtnerphiles take a long view. He’s still only 20 years old and has scored 14 goals in 28 starts. That’s good going for any striker, especially at his age. Sure, they say, he shouldn’t be in the first team every week and he’s still very raw but he’s going to be an important player in the future.

Bendtnerphobes (in my experience outnumbering the philes about 25 to 1 – it’s always easier to criticise) point out that his goals record needs to include his 34 substitute appearances, in which he is often at his most infuriating. They object that he looks silly and apparently lacks basic footballing ability at crucial moments.

From these two camps, only the more extreme Bendtnerphobes will claim that he the lad hasn’t got talent. Similarly, there is broad agreement that he does look a bit silly.

Finally there’s Bendtner himself, and it is his own view which counts. You see, Nicklas has been Denmark’s main striker for about 2 years now, and in his eyes that makes him a fairly major European footballer. Everyone else might point out that that’s a bit like being Norwich City’s main striker, but not so Nicklas, whose agent-father has muttered about interest from the likes of Milan and Juventus whenever it looked like Nicklas might be spending the season in a tracksuit.

So on the one hand he’s a thrusting Gunnerling with bags of potential and on the other he thinks he’s a bit good. He should probably watch last night’s tape and see how that stands up.

Anyway, I’d be interested to know your thoughts on Naughty Nicklas.

The good thing about crashing out of the Carling Cup is that it means we’ll almost definitely win this weekend, in contrast to past weekends where our kids had flattened their Premiership opposition only for our main men to feel so bad about it that they allowed themselves to be flattened in turn (Hull etc). None of that on Saturday, thanks.

And don’t forget UpForGrabsNow’s SUPER SAGNA COMPETITION. Pen the top new Gooner chant and you could get your hairy mits on a photograph of His Majesty The Right Back signed by none other than His Majesty The Right Back himself. SAGNATASTIC! Just post them on the comments section and we’ll announce the winner at the end of the week.

So. After the furious chaos of the last week it almost feels like we’re into something of a fallow patch with all things Arsenal before the big game at Stanford Bridge tomorrow.

I say big game but I suppose in some ways it’s not really. It’s a big game in so far as if we win, we’ll be a few fewer points behind and there’ll be a raft more ‘Don’t write off Arsenal’ stories in the media but any other result and we’re in the same position as we are today. I guess a good performance might help, but the problem is consistency, not whether the can team can rouse themselves for Chelea.

Still, Nasri, Adebayor and Sagna are all back and it will be nice to see them, particularly with stories like this floating around to make all Gooners want to believe in Santa and the inferiorities of the Italian game.

I wonder what our formation will be. You’ve got to think with Chelsea’s midfield, and a fit Adebayor, the boss’ll be tempted to go with five across the middle, and hope that we can snuff them out and hit them on the break, perhaps with a characteristic Adebayor hanging header. That would be fine for me. You certainly wouldn’t think we’ll be aiming to dominate them man for man.

There’ll probably be a bit more as they get into the psychological warfare – I’m expecting some people to say some stuff about Gallas through the day, none of it very interesting. The barometer of opinion seems to be swinging back in his favour, though a lot will rest on how he can perform tomorrow.

There are also a lot of people saying they’d settle for a draw tomorrow. Psychologically perhaps, but mathematically no. A draw tomorrow does nothing for me, like Harriet Harman eating ryvita in clown shoes.

Laters, grabbees.