Blunt Guns

I feel like I might as well cut and paste various snippets from this season’s blog entries to write today’s offering.

I’d snip a bit about letting in late goals, I’d locate a paragraph pertaining to our profligacy, another few words from somewhere about our pretty passing and I’d top it all off with a sentence involving the words “cow’s arse” and “banjo”.

As if conceding late in the FA Cup and Champions League wasn’t bad enough, the lads went and did it even later yesterday, but we’ve really got nobody to blame but ourselves. I read somewhere that the game had been “dull” but I didn’t think it was that bad. The most frustrating thing was that, after about 20 minutes, it was pretty clear to me that we’d struggle to score. That’s a depressing place to be with 70 minutes of a game left.

To be fair, we had several presentable chances. The best ones fell to our hapless frontmen, neither of whom did their chances of staying beyond May any good at all. Having stuck my neck out and said Baptista was on balance worth a deal, I’m currently wheeling the old neck back in so far I look like a tortoise. He did next to nothing yesterday. Aliadière was actually the brighter of the two, but he just can’t score for toffee, nor as it turns out, could he score against toffees.

Put simply, we have a desperate lack of firepower. Fortunately for us, we’re in a good position to take third of fourth. It’s a good job: where are the goals coming from?

“We have plenty of goalscorers at the club, though they are not available at the moment,” said Wenger. How pointed is that! Ouch! Let’s hope the Bapman and Ali Oh Dear were in earshot.

“And we’re jaded physically,” he added. “We lost plenty of opportunities today because our final ball wasn’t good enough and we didn’t create enough, but we’ve lost recently in the last minute against Blackburn Rovers, PSV Eindhoven and now here. That means we miss maturity to deal with that.”

Jim

Arsenal since about 1979. Thick, thin and all that.