Not a lot in the way of Arsenal news today, there is no midweek game to bring us teams new on, or do match previews and reviews, so it will be a slower week. This is a good thing though as our players can get a rest and hopefully give more time for injured players to get back. We have a trip to Swansea this weekend and then thankfully another weeks rest before Man Utd visit the Emirates.
The Arsenal news which has happened though involves the man pictured above, Coquelin. Unfortunately he was injured against Leeds, but in good news, he has signed a new long term contract. This is absolutely brilliant news as earlier in the seasons he did voice his discontent at not starting enough football matches. He has shown great promise this season and i actually rate him higher than Frimpong in the defensive position role. It will be interesting to see what happens there next season as i cannot imagine Song, Frimpong (after having first team football at Wolves) and Coquelin being content. One of those 3 will miss out on a large amount of games, which i am sure they will not be happy with. We need to keep all three content as this season has shown how we need every player available.
This is especially the case with the 25 man squad ruling. I am not an expert on this but from all the working out and reading other blogs, it appears we have reached our quota of non home grown players. This makes it slightly awkward to where Henry will fit into the squad. I would imagine that Almunia is dropped at we go the remainder of the season with Szczesny and Fabianski as the main two with the 3rd choice of Martinez who was promoted to the reserves this season, as he would need to take up a place in the non home grown list. Its players like Almunia and Squillaci that we really have to get off our books, so that we can bring players of a higher quality in. Arsenal have so many players who eat away at the wage bill and do not pull their weight. We got rid of a few last summer but need to really get rid of the rest soon. I would much rather Martinez and Miquel/Bartley in the squad than Almunia and Squillaci.
Szczensy went and got in trouble yesterday on twitter for saying Ramsey looked like a rapist in a photo. It was clearly a joke between two friends and he didn't mean anything bad by it but unfortunately it was played out over the social network and as soon as you do that, you are going to get yourself in trouble. He could write that and delete it within a couple of minutes, but someone somewhere will retweet it and suddenly everyone has it and its in the palm of a journalist. He has apologised and the lesson has hopefully been learnt, we can all move on.
Its Spurs game in hand tonight which they have had all season due to the London riots back in August. Lets hope Everton can do a job on them and defend well like they usually do against the top clubs and nick a goal somewhere along the way. We could really do with them not winning tonight's game as that would leave them 9 points ahead. They have also had some luck with Kompany's red card not being rescinded, not very surprising (do red cards ever get rescinded?). Either way, it means he will miss 4 games including the Spurs game which is on the same weekend as us playing Man Utd; a big weekend. Its a shame as i count him as one of the top 3 defenders in the country.
Last but not least, i would like to congratulate Mancini for coming out and saying that Liverpool have handled the Suarez situation awfully. The situation was simple, you get Suarez to come out and say something along the lines of "I am sorry for what i have done, i have used a racist term which is not considered racist in my country, but i realise it is not acceptable here...i accept my ban and i apologise to Evra for causing offence". Simple...done, nothing more. What you do not do, is send your players out with t-shirts supporting him and defending what he did, because then you get idiotic fans thinking its alright to be racist which happened against Oldham. There is absolutely nothing i like about Liverpool football club.
Not the most Arsenal related post, but that's how it goes sometimes.
No comments:
Post a Comment