The Old Trafford Mission

Good morning and welcome to the weekend.
I hope the week has been good so far…who am I kidding, if we’re looking solely from a footballing point of view then it has been pretty crap with two games and not one win (if we take the Hull game in too). Well there’s good news; we play again this weekend. Now this good news could easily be bad news in hindsight if come Sunday evening we aren’t smiling about a famous victory at Old Trafford.
What I’m trying to say is that we play United on Sunday and if the coming week is going to be great (from a football point of view at least) then a win is compulsory.
Per Mertesacker said that the team’s focus is now on the Premier league and that’s as it should be. The reality is that we won’t be facing the MSN trio every weekend, so if we defend as resolutely as we did against them, then I think we’ll do better. The real problem is at the other end, we just aren’t scoring enough goals.
We have a lot of players who can whether you rate them or not; Giroud, Alexis, Walcott, Welbeck, Ramsey even Ӧzil who may not be prolific but can certainly score. These are all players that can score, so not getting goals from them is slightly worrying and maybe that points to what we have to do in the transfer market in the summer but we can’t do anything about the summer until the summer actually comes around, so till then this is what we have.
We play a United who won yesterday, but they have been depleted by injury including to De Gea which is the biggest bright side here, so we have a great opportunity. Now the classic Arsenal thing to do would be to go they huff and puff and then get sucker punched by some odd goal and then lose, but let’s try to not be that Arsenal.
For team news, it seems we’ll be without the Ox which is sad, not because he’s playing like a world beater or anything, but it’s more that he would get better if he played more which he can’t do if he keeps getting injured. Now you could say he got injured because he wasn’t being really smart on the ball, but that’s not cool, so I just hope that it’s not too serious and he’s back running too far with the ball and dribbling down blind alleys as soon as possible.
Leicester have an easy run of games and we’re two games away from potentially one of the most important North London derbies ever, so it’s up to us to keep that game relevant. If we can win our next two games then yes. We can win this, let’s hope our attacking players come into some good form soon.
So fingers crossed for some good.
Till later.