Norwich Post Match

There was nothing positive to take from today's game that I can't even be bothered to talk about it. We have the collective football intelligence, focus and purpose of a 3 year old.

2 points dropped, terrible performance, sagna broken leg, top 4 out of our hands, no cl next season?, rvp will be off..... Only arsenal can fuck it up this much :-(

Are we going to die as well?

One day, yeah.

ironic that if you read the match thread the majority of you were saying we would dominate and win easily, rest VP, get Chamakh on the pitch well, pah!!

I said it wouldnt be easy, and it becomes hard when my works team could score against you...

Well, it was an absolutely cracking game. Really fun if you're not an Arsenal fan. Lots of people slating Gibbs, I don't know. I thought he played really well. Same goes for Song, but I suppose they were both good getting forward. Can't really say they were good defensively when 3 goals are conceded.

eyal.peer wrote:"Only Kenny (62.7%, Jaaskelainen (62.6%) and Robinson (56.3%) have a lower % of shots on target saved than Szczesny (63.3%).
Top 5 save % - Hart (77.5%), De Gea (76.4%), Stockdale (75.9%), Mignolet (73.2%), Friedel (73.2%). PL Average 68.8%"

via Orbinho

I suspect a large part of that is due to the goals we saw today. Two of them he didn't have much chance with (the first he really fucked up for). He's young but a lot of the shots that come his way are high percentage shots, difficult saves to make.

Assan Touray wrote:
on the first half…
We have to analyse the reasons why we were not sharp enough in the first half. There is no obvious reason because we prepared normally as we always do, but maybe subconsciously [we thought] we would win it. Norwich played well, you have to give them credit.

That is really unacceptable. Not from the players, not from the coaching staff, not from the manager. You may have prepared as always do, but this was a must-win game - really, really must win. To somehow not have 11 players on the pitch understand that, to not have every single win chomping on the bit, closing down every player, flying into every tacking, is a failing that comes from higher up, from the coach and his staff. Really shocking.

Alex Hadjicharalampous wrote:Missing out on the CL might not be that bad really. We just won't be playing in a competition we never seem capable of winning, or be able to attract the world class players we never sign even when we had CL football.

Yep, true. Except RVP is clearly on his way out without CL football. Who knows, we may be able to hold on to him another year, if we refuse to sell. Will he want to play for us? Will he wander around and spend most of his time on the bench with half-injuries like Cesc did in his final year? I suspect you'll hear a lot of rumors linking us to Vertonghen, M'Vila, and anyone else; rumors leaked by the club, to convince angry fans that Arsenal are trying hard to sign world class players, so that season ticket renewals don't fall too sharply.

Then again, I still think the odds are in our favor, with regards to qualifying for the CL. But we've not made it easy. If we'd won this game we'd be in our comfort zone. Now it's not in our hands:
a) We MUST beat West Brom
b) Spurs and/or Newcastle MUST lose/draw
c) In the event of us finishing 4th (which is only likely if one of Spurs/Newcastle drop points), Chelsea MUST lose the CL final.

Looking at each of those, they're all better than 50% in our favor individually I'd say. We're better than West Brom (heh), Newcastle play Man City so are likely to drop points meaning 4th is still likely, and Chelsea are playing an excellent Bayern Munich team at home.

But these last few terrible results have taken a comfortable run in and turned it into a nightmare scenario where our fate is not likely to be known even after the final whistle is blown on the final game of the season.

... but on top of that we gave them a third goal in a situation that was absolutely unbelievable.

The 3rd goal angers me the most. We had 10 minutes where we could control the tempo, hold the ball and let the minutes trickle down. (Just play the way we do in large part of the games without scoring!)

The moment Song tried that horrible 'incisive' pass from our own half, I had a bad feeling. And then BANG! Felt like giving one tight slap to Song.

For all our defence and offence tattics yesterday you could sit and debate the whole game for days on end and probably still not come up with a reasonable explanation on what went wrong.....

I spent the whole game screaming at my tv...the first game in probably 3 seasons where i have got so pissed off with what i was seeing...everything had me in a rage even the goals had a part in a 'not so simple and deserved a shout'

Then comes today...

Waking and totally realising that apart from getting some kind of Devine intervention we can kiss 3rd place and 4th goodbye....I mean they are gone...tataa!!

Yes you could argue that we still hold it...but Thursday night's are looming,
And for all the comments of well it won't be so bad or its still europe...

It will be an absolute disaster all round if we don't make it....

Oh and just to sum it all up....


Sagna has a broken leg....

Beautifully done.

Surely if we fail to qualify for the CL, it would convince the club even more strongly of the need to keep RvP, even if we gain nothing from his sale.

Certainly, from the point of view of fans, do we really give a shit about the money from RvP's sale that wouldn't be spent on an acceptable replacement? Far more important that he play well next year and get us back into the CL, or more importantly a big improvement in the league to get us closer to the leading clubs.

It's the club's fault that we now think it's totally normal for a player to sign a contract but be sold a year from the end. The players now think it's normal too. He's our player. The money can't give us what RvP would give us next year. It would be a disgrace not to keep him. If he really does want to leave afterwards then fair enough, he was true to the terms of his contract.

Just a little sidenote though, it would be nice for him to remember that the manager/club never considered selling him even though he spent more than 2 years in total on the sidelines injured. I suppose that's unrealistic in today's world.

Goodplaya's post on the game.

A part of me wonders if that equaliser was a blessing in disguise

ARSENAL 3 NORWICH CITY 3
FROM GOODPLAYA AT THE EMIRATES

AND so after a dramatic 90 minutes at the Emirates we stare into the supposed abyss that is failure to qualify for next year’s Champions League.

Why then is there a little part of me that just wonders if just maybe that Norwich equaliser could be a blessing in disguise? A part of me that wonders that if Spurs and Newcastle do yet screw it up, it will only allow the bleeding obvious to be swept under the carpet for yet another year on the premise that we’ve cleared some utterly artificial bar.

Of course I want Arsenal to do well and of course I want to see us playing Champions League football. But I also want those running the club to get the kind of jolt that will make them realise significant change is required. Let’s be frank here, things are stale with us, we’re going nowhere very fast. It is mundane watching Arsenal and while maybe an acceptance of the mundane is a fact of life, surely that is not meant to apply to going to watch Arsenal, which should offer an escape from such humdrum.

I think it goes beyond any debate about the intricacies of our current predicament. Yes, we appear to defend appallingly for a defence (mostly) made up of individually talented defenders. Yes, we are unbelievably over reliant on RVP. Yes, we have asked too much of Ramsey to play a full season and yes, our transfer business at the start of the year was a shambles.

But you know the funny thing is that when you look at the team out there yesterday, there is no one for the rational fan to actively dislike in the way one did when faced by the sight of a lazy Bendtner, Denilson or Eboue. Some of our fans frankly are just angry people and always have to get on someone’s back and yesterday Ramsey was the easy target but you couldn’t accuse the guy of not trying, it just wasn’t coming off for him.

Most of us realised that even if Man United continued winning titles year after year after year, our good run was probably not going to last as long. And you know what, that is fine. That is not my complaint. My complaint is that we are at the stage where it is hard to see exactly where we are heading and that at a certain point you say that we’re going to shake things up.

And you know what, while some of you agree with me and some don’t, it does seem that most of the disagreement is over when, rather than if.

But that’s quite enough big picture stuff. What of the actual game? Nice goal from Yossi – a decent squad signing all in all. Dreadful from Szczesny for their equaliser – he really hadn’t settled. I thought Gibbs was poor for the second. I don’t know why he’s gone at it with his right foot when the left looked infinitely better positioned to block.

And we were frankly very poor in that first half. And it was to our credit that we recovered because Norwich looked like they were going to be tough to breakdown. Just before the equaliser you could see them beginning to tire. We also benefited from having two strikers on the pitch and while it was welcome to see Chamakh on the pitch with 20 minutes to go, you think back to all the occasions where he has been more a final throw of the dice with 10 minutes left and realise that our striking situation has been fairly dysfunctional all season.

Then we took the lead but if I tell you that even the brother of Goodplaya, who usually gets infuriated when I announce one of our leads as vulnerable, that even he thought we were going to concede, that should tell you how predictable it was. The problem to my mind appeared to be a lack of ball keepers on the pitch: no Arteta, no Wilshere, no Cesc and no Nasri and we just couldn’t hold onto it when we needed to.

Even then we could have won it and perhaps should have won it. I’ve heard (though not seen replays) of earlier dubious decisions but watching the RVP penalty not given at the end was quite unbelievable. A blatant push and denial of a goal and really I don’t see how the referee or linesman had any excuse for missing it. As far as Gervinho being offside goes, I readily accept the point, though given the cross deflected, what makes that incident any different to the Louis Saha goal for Everton allowed at the Emirates last year when the fact a through ball had deflected off Koscielny appeared to make him onside in the minds of the officials? The incidents were frankly one and the same and so like in many other parts of football’s rule back, clarity is needed.

This unlike the cesc or nasri sale is being blown out of proportion....

It honstly makes me laugh.....will he be sold...I will sum it up in one word...




No.

If we don't qualify you can bet for sure it will be an absolute nightmare...

I watched the extended highlights last night and it was even worse the 2nd time around. The defending and goalkeeping was a disgrace, it was even worse watching it again. From midfield to defence to keeper, awful. The jogging back, the misplaced passes in dangerous areas, the positional awareness of pub players, the lack of any real structure, you name it. Norwich are a good team but they are not Barcelona, their end of season aim (according to a Norwich staff member I watched the last 15mins with) is to finish above Swansea. Ours is to finish in the Champions League! Yet who could have told the difference.

But it was also gut-wrenching to see the chances we missed at the end. As if we needed any more examples of RVP's importance to us. He missed chances you would expect him to gobble up but he still managed two good goals but we just don't have any one else we can rely on to score a crucial goal. Vermaelen is the 2nd most likely.

Wish I didn't watch the highlights, tbh.


As for RVP, a top 3 finish and I would have been confident of him staying on. Maybe not extending the contract immediately but he would have been here next season. Now, not as confident. He has a family very settled here and that could be crucial as he won't make any rash, money-motivated decisions, but then again, moving to Chelsea or up to Manchester won't really be a huge change. We need to make some serious signings before the Euros. We need to prove that with CL football or not we are moving forward because it will get a lot harder after the Euros if RVP hasn't signed and we are not in the Champions League.

Not that CL should be the be-all and end-all, but the teams around us will get stronger and without CL we will be playing catch up, both on and off the pitch, even if for only 1 season. However, as others have said you have to wonder whether it is the kick in the balls the club needs to stop treating top 4 as a goddamn trophy. And maybe we can go and win the Europa League which would be a whole lot better than losing in the last 16/quarter finals of the Champions League.

Arsenal, this weekend, have reduced me to thinking about the Europa League next season when a few weeks ago we should have been looking at an 8 point lead in 3rd. Thank you, Arsenal.

Can someone find a video that shows all penalty claims we didn't get at home in the PL this season. I tried to find anything on youtube but nothing..

I can see how getting dumped out of the CL slots could benefit us but I can also see it as a huge kick in the bollocks.....

You would have thought loosing players we have recently would have been enough of a punt in the nads.....

John Foxall wrote:Surely if we fail to qualify for the CL, it would convince the club even more strongly of the need to keep RvP, even if we gain nothing from his sale.

Certainly, from the point of view of fans, do we really give a shit about the money from RvP's sale that wouldn't be spent on an acceptable replacement? Far more important that he play well next year and get us back into the CL, or more importantly a big improvement in the league to get us closer to the leading clubs.

It's the club's fault that we now think it's totally normal for a player to sign a contract but be sold a year from the end. The players now think it's normal too. He's our player. The money can't give us what RvP would give us next year. It would be a disgrace not to keep him. If he really does want to leave afterwards then fair enough, he was true to the terms of his contract.

Just a little sidenote though, it would be nice for him to remember that the manager/club never considered selling him even though he spent more than 2 years in total on the sidelines injured. I suppose that's unrealistic in today's world.

Aye. We prob wouldn't get more than 25m for him (MAX) - and that money would all need to go to bring in an inferior replacement, because I'm not sure there's anybody of RVP's quality in the market available for that price or less, not a big name anyway. He must stay either way.

It clearly was a punt in the nads to lose those players at the start of the season.

Yet, it was made out to be a sort of achievement that we came back from such an awful start when it fact it just limited what we could really accomplish in this season. We seem to be happy with so little.

Whatever we're doing it's not good enough. Not enough focus on weaker elements of our game so we're never likely to improve. The players are pawns in an overall system, so unless more of them are willing to take responsibility, it has to come from the manager and coaching staff. This is a groundhog day conversation though so no point going there.

I think the focus needs to be back on performance of the team....

Well whatever happens now it's over to nasri and co to sort out our season....


Time to switch over and watch...

anyone got a link to the newcastle city game?

Give me one min fella I do

AtdheNet.TV

the second link is better