Fulham today, and unfortunately it’s another no-show from me. I try not to let life intrude too much in football but somehow or other I appear to possess small children and they throw a spanner in the works. This season my attendance has been as inconsistent as I can remember. I go to one then just when you think I’ll go to another, I can’t. Then I go to two in a row and you think I’ve hit a modicum of form – only to miss the next one. Much in the way dogs look like their owners, I appear to have inherited by osmosis some kind of dodgy home form.
Fortunately, after today, I can see a clean run over the horizon and I anticipate a surge in attendance between now and May. I’m hoping the same form will be mirrored by the Arsenal.
So anyway, it’s Fulham and given our home ricketts, there’s no such thing as a ‘home banker’ anymore. Fulham may be sniffing around the West Ham end of the table but they are the masters of draws and any team managed by Mark Hughes deserves to be taken seriously. So what if they have only scored one goal in five games at the Emirates – we consistently give goals away at home. We cannot afford a slow start and we cannot afford complacency. Repeat ad infinitum.
The really good news is that we have bags of options, particularly attacking. Shoehorning van Persie and Chamakh into the same team is a glorious headache, and then there’s another glorious headache, Nicklas Bendtner. But we do have great options and the fact we are not ripping our hair out at the loss of Fabregas says it all. Wilshere slots into the side so seamlessly. Remarkably, even, given he is just 18.
Talking of fitting van Persie and Chamakh into the same side, Wenger had this to say:
“We can play Chamakh and Van Persie together. We can play Chamakh up front and Van Persie behind. What is interesting is that we can play all kinds of formations with the two. I am pleased because Van Persie is getting stronger every day.”
We’ve played with just one striker for so long – and we’re not the only ones. But I’d love to tinker with it to accommodate more raw attacking power from the start, particularly at home.
Today is dedicated to Arsenal’s charity of the season, Centrepoint. For more about what that entails today, click here, and for more about the charity, click here.
Time to put the November home hoodoo to bed with three points. Let’s keep the pressure on.
RVP and Chamakh is an interesting conundrum, hopefully one which is there for rest of the season.
But unless someone has taught RVP to tackle since the Blackburn game it won’t be long til we see him on Colin Lewins table again.
His contributions in the Wigan game were pure quality just when I had made my mind up that he should depart in January he puts in a display that shows what he is capable of. It was against Wigans back four who aren’t the most robust, will the likes of Terry and Vidic let him get away with it?
van Persie is class. Flawed by his creaking body but sheer class. Remember that volley at Charlton? Every time you mentally prepare to write him off as too injury prone to rely on, just remember that… I hope you’re not right about him getting kicked up in the air.
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