Morning all… First of all, apologies for the sporadic articles at different times… The International break renders me a little more useless than average.
This break has seen a few ups and a few downs… we’ve lost Djourou for six months… which is now 5 months, 3 weeks and 2 days and counting… come on Djourou… the worry now of course, is that if Vermaelen or Gallas get injured, we’ll end up fielding either Senderos or Silvestre. Whilst both aren’t my favourite players, I’d probably prefer Senderos over Silvestre simply because of Silvestre lack of pace as well as his United connections. I’m hoping Senderos has matured as a player since I last saw him – and I don’t think he was that bad before, I just think he wasn’t sharp enough and always seemed to make a mistake when it was the wrong time… (when is the right time to make a mistake? probably when you’re 5-0 up with a minute to go?)…
The good news from the International break is that Tomas Rosicky is back and he played against San Marino yesterday which means he should be in line for a place in the squad on Saturday, albeit maybe just on the bench…
“I’m happy above all that Tomas could play, that he was ready for the game. I had a deal with Wenger to keep Tomas on the pitch no longer than an hour.”
But an hour is an hour and a good hour. We saw a good set of cameo appearances from the Czech midfielder pre-season and it would be awesome to have him on the bench against Man City this weekend.
New, be it good or bad, of course is that Eduardo started for Croatia against England – it was a shame to see the fans boo him – and not boo Rooney at all – in fact, no one should ever boo anyone, but what can you do? Every time Eduardo had the ball he was booed, and I think that treatment was bang out of order. The craziest thing of all of this, is that Eduardo was the one person whom I don’t think dived, whilst Rooney dove twice after – once against us to win a penalty and then again against Slovenia to win a penalty. Make me sick when this obvious bias and obvious different treatment happens.
Arsene commented on the Eduardo treatment and had this to say:
‘You want everybody to be treated fairly, and I do not believe he is treated fairly. There was a good opportunity to take a media campaign against many players, which you did not do. You cannot give him the feeling that he has been treated fairly. You will never get that from him. ’I do not want to fight with the whole Premier League because of that. I just think we want to fight against diving. I did not hide after the game. I said he made more of it, yes, but considering Eduardo’s case it is not a clear case. ”We have proof that he has been touched. You will find a lot of players who will make a little bit more of it. There is a fine line between being shrewd and everyone supports you and saying it is a dive. If you can construct this case, then okay, let’s do it. But how do you define intent? I saw one last night in Serbia.”
One of the worries I had about this whole saga is how it would his game, but Arsene doesn’t think it will.
”I do not believe it will affect his game. He is a player who has gone through much more difficult things than that. On the one side, a good way to deal with that is that he is in good health. This is a minor event compared to what he has gone through before.”
More bad news breaking as I write is that Andrei Arshavin has had a re-occurence of his groin injury. He played 90 minutes for Russia yesterday (who beat Wales 3-1), but he has a groin injury. Arsene doesn’t think he should have played and he is now out of the next three games for us. It’s a big blow and at the moment, there is no cohesion between the clubs and countries.
“He should not have played and is injured. You can say a lot but it does not do a lot.”
Why on earth did Arshavin play injured for his country and then misses two weeks at his club? It’s absurd… something needs to be done about this.
With Arshavin out, either Theo Walcott or Rosicky may be thrown straight into the deep end…
Man City preview tomorrow, no doubt… til then…
