Welcome to another Friday and the weekend is upon us.
Here in Nigeria, the harmattan season is kicking in. This is when there are thick fogs surrounding the environs and the mornings and nights are usually quite nippy.
Then there’s the dryness
My word! It could be horrible. People with dry skin absolutely hate this period and I once knew a guy whose lips always scabbed over whenever the harmattan season came along. *shudders*
So for this period your best friend is Vaseline (Oh God! I don’t mean like that! For the skin, THE SKIN!) or oil…
Well in Arsenal news; we play Sunderland tomorrow and we really need to pick up three points. Arsene doesn’t want to write off the squad saying:
“We have gone through a little bit of a bad spell in recent games, but we are two points off the top,”
“The great opportunity for us is that, despite that bad spell, we are very close. That’s why it’s important that we keep our confidence high and our determination high, and start winning again. We want the crowd to be behind the team and help us to do it.”
(All quotes culled from Arsenal.com)
So the manager believes we can still do something and while I am unhappy with the state of things, the manager is right. Regardless of how badly things have gone recently, we are in fact still just two points off the top. The more worrying factor is the injuries that have beleaguered us this season (like every season). Speculation is rife about what the manager may do in January which is all well and good and I do hope we get someone in, but like I’ve said before, our immediate concern is the games we have from now until January comes along.
We play Sunderland and while normally this won’t worry me, it does now. For one, we have all these injuries and of course they are managed by the Walrus from Alice in Wonderland
And we know how we’ve usually fared against him. It’s been getting better though, but you worry with so many injuries and so many brittle players just maybe old Sam might target us and try to send a few more of our guys to the treatment room.
So I worry.
We haven’t been at our sparkling best and now we find that our entire team dynamic might be changed. When you lose Cazorla and Coquelin then you know for sure that our pattern might need to change. Ramsey is lovely, but he’s no Cazorla, he doesn’t bring the same qualities, he brings his own set of values and we’ll have to find a way to integrate that. Then we’ll have Flamini…Dunno what to say on that.
Beyond that, the manager has stated the importance of other players picking up the slack with the most important ones injured and with Sanchez out we look to Oxlade Chamberlain to be the livewire for the team. He can certainly do it…he just has to maybe get out of his head a little bit.
But not all doom and gloom. Koscielny should be back, Gibbs is okay (not that it matters too much, but every bit counts) and Walcott is on the way, so all that is just good news and it’s ‘s one i’m quite pleased to hear. So fingers crossed we can do the job tomorrow.
COYG!!!