Quote of the day

Mark Schwarzer has made it clear that he would like to go to Arsenal so we are trying to look at other options. I’m always interested in quality players and Shay Given is a quality player. Make of that what you will. But I have said that if we can’t get anyone else in, Schwarzer will have to stay. — Mark Hughes on the Schwarzer transfer saga

Man of the match

If you’re going to play in England and have the fortune of carrying an English provenance you’re going to come in for some heavy and unwarranted criticism in your time. The schadenfreude surrounding Wayne Rooney’s inability to score a goal for club or country over the last few months had reached the point where I swear that the National Health Service was about to forced every hospital in England to carry one of those LED clocks that counts the hours, minutes, and seconds from when some last event or to which some even takes place. In this case, it would click upward and read “Since Wayne Rooney Last Scored (in Football, not with his lovely wife).”

Rooney’s illustrative of another fact in football and that is that no matter how hard you work for the team (Heskey) no matter how unselfish you play up front (van Persie) strikers are expected to score goals and if they don’t people get all apoplectic about the fact. Rooney hadn’t scored a goal in (insert number of hours) and this was a national emergency thus, the clocks were called in to shore up the mental health of Great Britain.

There are some people though who will seize upon this cultural phenomenon and exploit it for their own pig-eyed purposes. In comes our villain, one Alan Hansen: twirling his mustache, Alan Hansen tried to tie Theo to the tracks of stupidity and claimed that Theo has no footballing brain because in a masterful hat-trick performance he missed a few passes. It was a preposterous accusation and was decried by all commentators who do have both a footballing brain and a regular brain.

For his part, though, Theo refused to play the damsel in distress and simply sloughed off Hansen’s crudely fastened ropes and played the pivotal part in what everyone has to admit was a great win over a difficult opponent. Opening Arsenal’s account with a bold lash, which symbolically blasted through Hansen’s ropes when it ripped the netting in the Blackburn goal, Theo went on to simply be scintillating for all 90 minutes.

Hansen no doubt will have said that Theo should have scored 100 goals or some such non-sense but as we all have seen over the first three games of the season — in which Theo has already drawn or surpassed his historical Premier League season long goals tally — our young Newbury Henry is well on his way to being the striker that Wenger envisioned when he first moved him to the Siberia of the right wing. An instinctive and an intelligent performance from young Henry, erm, I mean Walcott easily earns him man of the match for me.

How do you undo that hoodoo that they do?

Blackburn are a bunch of ball wiping, goal kicking, Samba as Center Forward playing, dirty, diving, cheating… losers.

That’s right, they lost and they lost at home. Moreover, they lost to their old foe, the team that they feel like they have some “hoo doo” over, the team that their boss Sam Allardyce feels like he can match wits against because up until the last few years he’s had a pretty good record.

Arsene Wenger’s not a stupid man and so the idea that Sam Allardyce is his equal is laughable. Sam plays the percentages game. If he gets enough balls in the box and they land somewhere near Christopher Samba’s giant head and Samba is allowed to use his opponent’s shoulders as a lift and Samba doesn’t have two left heads and Samba gets his shot on target.. well then, the sky’s the limit. They could get one, maybe even TWO whole goals. If they do get a goal, then they switch tactics and use rotational fouling to break up play. Until they get the ball back and start playing percentages all over again.

It’s anti-football because basically every play is a Hail Mary. Could you imagine if the Detroit Lions decided that after every kickoff they would throw a Hail Mary on first down? Come to think of it, I think the Detroit Lions might have more success if they threw Hail Mary’s on every play. Why not? Like Blackburn, what do they have to lose?

But who cares what tactic they used? We dealt with it. Long throws into the box, long bombs from Paul Robinson, physical play, everything they threw at us we dealt with and it was a joy to watch.

That said, a couple of players in particular did very well taking on the physical challenges and dishing back out.

Judging from the stats (9/11 tackles, 6/9 clearances, and 4 interceptions) Blackburn targeted Koscielny from the off and I have to say that he did pretty well. I’d bet if you asked him, this was a giant physical step up from Ligue 1, and you can bet that he’ll be asking to see the weight room schedule to check for opening times in the morrow.

Diaby also had a good game physically winning 8/11 tackles, though when Wenger matched him man for man against Samba he only managed 1/5 clearances. You have to think that just matching someone on Samba is a huge step forward. Offensively, Diaby was our best passer completing an astonishing 91% of his 58 passes yesterday.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Manuel Almunia who put in what many thought was a man of the match performance yesterday. He was very good, I will grant you that and I particularly liked that he punched away a couple of long balls with authority. Also, there were at least two times that the Blackburn attacker “magically” found himself underneath the ball as Almunia came for the high claim. It was shades of last year when Fabianski found himself in the same position and brought the ball down on Samba’s head only to concede the goal. Almunia, though, had “safe hands” and when he brought the ball down it didn’t pop out on Samba’s head.  Almunia did well and if he can just keep his head for a season, could very easily be another Eboue type figure. Of course, that is, unless Arsenal buy Mark Schwarzer which it seems like we are trying to do.

The bad

Why is it that referees can’t be consistent?

I will concede that I am biased but what I can’t understand is when there are two similar situations and the referee calls the play one way for one team and the other for the opposite. For example, yesterday, Gamst was down in our box, Arsenal were all the way on the other end of the field, Theo has the ball and is about to skin the Blackburn fullback (for the umpteenth time) and ref blows play dead. Fine, fair enough, even though it’s a bit odd because Gamst is nowhere near the play, we are fully in attack, and there is no indication of a head injury.

So, why is it that when van Persie was brought down and Blackburn have the ball and they are passing the ball around in the area where van Persie is clearly in trouble, that Chris Foy waits until we win the ball back to stop play?

Just call it the same way each time and everyone will be happy.

The ugly

Ironically, Blackburn’s only goal came from open play and it was a comedy of errors. I don’t need to tell you that Koscielny is a slight figure and that he was easily nudged off the ball by El Hadji Diouf. I also don’t need to tell you that Clichy has been found out time and again defensively. Any time a team scores against Arsenal, there are going to be recriminations and finger pointing, but why is it that it seems like a large number of really, really stupid mistakes are committed when Clichy is in defense? I mean, they scored in a 3 on 4 situation there and all Clichy had to do was mark the other Diouf and make the goal difficult. Instead he stopped dead — why? No one knows.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a very good win from the Arsenal perspective. Yes, we lost van Persie but we all know that losing van Persie is just a matter of how and when. 10 days is the initial prognosis and now that we have Chamakh it’s not that big a blow. The first half was bit nervy but as I pointed out in the liveblog yesterday, Arsenal completely dominated the second and deserved the three points. Sam Allardyce is the patron saint of “Arsenal don’t like it up ‘em” and hopefully, this win will finally put that old warhorse to rest.

Anyway, now we head into the international break and our players are scattered far and wide. We have until Tuesday to seal a deal with a keeper, if we are indeed after a keeper any more, since Wenger did say that the transfer window is closed for Arsenal. And that will be our week. A week of waiting for news that so and so comes back from their national team healthy or hurt. A week of rest for some and a week of gaining match fitness for others. But a week in which the Arsenal players can look back and be proud of shaking off the ropes of their critics and look forward to playing against another old villain in Bolton and the start of our Champions League campaign.