We may have changed our policy but the result remained the same.
For the first time in a month, The Arsenal decided to score first and hold on rather than let me reduce my finger nails to their cuticles in a nerve jangling fight to the finish to grab a late winner and gain the three points.
We rocketed out of the launcher and if Rambo’s targeting had been as good his films namesake, we could have been 3-0 up after 15 minutes, home and dry and thinking of Villa.
On the 8th minutes, Thomas Vermaelen rose unchallenged in the box to score the goal that proved to be the match winner again, and we were set, or so we thought. Everton slowly got back in the game and the final 15 minutes was more of a survival than revival job, but as Robin van Persie said we need to be able to win ugly and yesterday we were troll like in our resolve.
We also ‘got away with one’ as there really seemed no reason to give Royston Drenthe’s ‘goal’ offside, although we didn’t get the stonewall penalty ‘conceded’ by Royston, so all things about even there.
At this point in the season, the result is paramount, how we get there is irrelevant.
Arsene Wenger said after the game:
‘You saw a side of us a lot of people don’t know, but it was the only way we were going to get a result. We didn’t panic and we defended well on crosses, which isn’t usually our strong point.’
When asked about Arsenal’s rise from 17th to 3rd, the Frenchman replied:
‘I was always optimistic, because if you look at our results from October, we have had only 1 bad spell and we lost 3 games on the trot due to having no full backs. The attitude of the team was always good, I always felt we could bounce back.’
Now we’re 3rd.
Things change quickly in football, just ask Spurs fans.
But we must keep our focus.
A couple of final thoughts:
1. From reports from mates back in the UK, it is nice to see that MoTD are their usual unbiased selves and focusing on the Spuds woes rather than Arsenal’s achievements.
2. Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
‘MIND WHAT GAP???’
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What penalty? Why make something up out of thin air to justify the fact that Everton had a perfectly good goal disallowed. Dismal reporting.
http://arsenalist.com/video/?id=tBxwWP8mvWk&t=yt
That one. I don’t think anyone is denying that Everton had a perfectly good goal disallowed. Dismal commenting.
I don’t think the offside was blown for Drenthe, but Jelavic, who was definitely offside and was definitely active. The flag was up before he shot. If it hadn’t have been, Chez would have probably tried to save it. The penalty was Stonewall, and actually Everton should have had multiple cards for simulation. Certainly Jelavic with his dive and Cahill with his fake face holding. Add that to the yellow verging on red he got for taking out Kos and they were lucky to have 11 men on the field.