OVER!
IT’S OVER!
INTERLULL IS OVER!
I’m so thrilled. Real football returns to us this weekend, but I must remark about this particular interlull. This has to be the greatest interlull ever in terms of Arsenal. We have all our players back (or at least they’ll start trickling in over the next two days), we have no injuries, our rivals are suffering injuries and most importantly
Goals!
It’s been an amazing interlull in terms of goals for Arsenal players. Aaron Ramsey and Alexis Sanchez scored for their respective nations yesterday (and of course almost immediately we see reports linking him [Sanchez] to Real Madrid, LOL) and they both generally played well. In other words, every Arsenal player we wanted to get a goal did
Ramsey scored, Alexis scored (Thrice!), Walcott scored, Giroud scored, The Ox scored, Ozil assisted, even Santi scored– twice! So all in all it’s been a very good interlull (I can’t believe I just said so)
Ramsey in particular would be really buoyed by that goal as he’s been in bad goal scoring form (he hasn’t scored all season) and he missed a pretty decent chance against United last time out, so scoring during international duty would have done him a world of good. One can only hope that this helps him kickstart his season. As a team we aren’t doing too badly but it won’t hurt to have more and more people contribute goals. We play Watford next and with all our players having a good time with their national teams it can only be a good thing for us.
The Ox is another person I was really happy for as he’s been a bit off the pace in recent times. He has a lot of indifferent games and has been a liability defensively recently either making errors leading to goals or just not putting in a shift at all, but a goal during international duty would also have helped. It may not be the same as putting in a shift defensively, but in my mind, his lack of defensive motivation has more to do with lack of confidence than any sort of laziness.
We all know the Ox doesn’t lack self application, he is a hard worker and a down to earth lad, but after making a bunch of mistakes, maybe he feels a little scared when it comes to defending, scared that maybe he could lead to an opposition goal. So if his confidence in front of goal increases, it will go some way in increasing his overall confidence which would also bleed into his defensive performance. Imagine if he was already having a storming game and he was robbed of the ball, odds are he’s hare after the opposition player to win the ball back, the heat of the moment and the confidence will make sure of it. In his mind, he will see that his application had given the team the ascendency and he’ll do anything to make sure we don’t lose that advantage which includes putting in a shift defensively.
So yeah, it’s good that he scored
Giroud and Santi would also have gotten a lot of confidence from scoring and while both of Giroud’s goals were somewhat fortuitous, they went in and that’s all that matters and he’ll be better for him and maybe Santi would have figured out how to find the net from his two goals over the break. So we’ll see won’t we?
We can only hope that there’s no bad news between now and Saturday and hopefully we can continue our good form.
Till then.
