The Great War against The Interlull

The battle lines were drawn. The red glow in the sky, the odd calmness in the air, the slow and the intriguing quivering of Mother Earth signaled the imminent danger. The one-eyed red monsters that made strange sounds were coming closer and closer. General Arsene made his voice clear to his troops… “Nobody and I mean nobody should laugh at the weird looking monsters”. Commander Alexander Rigobert Goliath Song couldn’t control himself, he laughed like crazy until he choked himself and fell below a monster. The monster mistaking the creature as one of its own ignored him.
The Great Monstrous Army of the Interlull called out for the bravest man from the Great Army of General Arsene. Arsene looked at the formidable soldier in Denilson and was about to give his orders when a crow landed on Arsene’s shoulder and whispered to his ears… “Son, I am GOD. Trust me. You need to send a Dutchman and that being the bravest of ‘em all” … the crow turned into a blue Barracon Didier Barracuda with 8 wings and flew away in the North-western direction over the Swiss Alps. Arsene called out for the brave and young Nacer Barazite. The soldier was having his breakfast of corn-flakes, milk, and strawberries and shyly smiled and frowned at Arsene, all at the same time. Arsene took pity. Out came in the open, the greatest fighter of ‘em all. He was called The Legend of Ardiuex Dominex Robin Van Persie. Arsene gave his orders… “Son, Trust me. Go. Fight.” Robin Van Persie started running to face the one-eyed red monsters of the Great Monstrous Army of the Interlull. He slipped on a piece of jai-jai peel and broke his chocolate leg, but he still kept on running until he reached the Great Army of the Interlull. Before he could take out his unassailable steel rapier, he was slapped on the face by one of the monsters, he fell on the ground, spilled out some dutch blood and choked to death before giving out two very confusing words… “Tropheees Tropheees”. The bemused monsters cried out… “Hunh?? Hunh??” and sat down surrendering ‘emselves to mankind.

Ohh, I meant this. Our front-man will be out for quite some time. With some confirmed news, we shall be back again.

Liverpool are interested in Eduardo and they want him to come over at Anfield for one week and do some interesting Croatian painting. Raiffel Benitez has always been a fan of Croatian painting and he had illegally tried contacting Eduardo many times over the last 21 years. He even tried contacting Luka Modric at the Sp*arse Hospital at North London, but he was insulted by one of his hot nurses and thrown out of the hospital.

There is absolutely nothing else going on as far as Arsenal is concerned. So, if you are sleeping, please carry on doing so. If you are awake, please go to sleep. And if you are watching the Great War with the Great monstrous Army of the Interlull, you should consult a psychiatrist right away.

Have a good day and GOD bless you.

~S~

Clichy out, Gibbs in, Kroenke stuff and more!

Hola!

We’ll start today’s blog with some bad news, which is not good, I know, but then, bad news is never good anyways. Erm. Let me get back to the news. Sky Sports latest says Gael Clichy has suffered a stress fracture in his lower back and it means he’ll be out of action for more than a month. I can clearly see, Kieran Gibbs getting ready to jog up and down Highbury Square and get ready for Arsenal’s next fixture, which is good, trust me. Competition for every place in the side is good.
In the same news column, Arsene has confirmed that St Nicko will be out for four weeks ‘at least’. Now, that is not good news for us, I tell you. I know many of you are like… “Hah! So what? We have Van Persie, Dudu and Arshavin” Right. I know. But my point is, we need a tall striker who can win balls from long goal-kicks, free-kicks, corners and who can mark tall morons like Peter Crouch in important matches. For the time being, the only tall guy out there is Abou Diaby. And that is more scary than ‘The Omen’ and ‘The Ring’ put together.

There is an amazing article on our captain at Goal.com. After seeing Cesc score that solo effort against Spurs, even I had this thought in my mind… “So, is he the best in the world now?” We shall wait. We shall see. Ohh, here is the article.

In some non-football news, Stan Kroenke edges towards the takeover threshold. I’ve no clue if that is good or bad news. If you think it is good news, and you have a reason for the same, please mail us to attheemirates@gmail.com

We’ll have more team news ahead of the match against AZ Alkmaar. For the time being, here are some training session snaps. Notice the huge grin on Gibbs’s face. Hehe.

We play Man Shitty on the 2nd of December in the Mickey Mouse Cup at their stupid ground.

I’ll be back with more, tomorrow.

Drink loads of water, adios!

~S~

The Post-Spud Stories…

Hola compañeros! ¿Cómo estás?

It is sad that the fun-n-frolic at The Emirates is over. We are not shouting pointless abuses at Sp*rs anymore. Robbie Keane is having a nice time playing foosball at Peter Crouch’s home as Ledley King motivates them by chanting the Sp*rs song which goes like this… “Weeee…….are the Spuds! Yes, weeeeeee… are the Spuds! We are always weeeeeeners! We are always weeeeeeeeners, but we always fuck up against the Gunnners! Ha Ha Ha! Yes, weeeeee….are the Spuds!” Some parts of that song is seriously disturbing, I tell you.

We’ll start off today’s blog with Van Persie mentioning his family life and how it has helped him in becoming a good footballer. We’ve clearly seen in the 13 years of Wenger’s tenure, the team has not only been disciplined on-field but has shown the same discipline off-the-field as well. And “that” brings about a different kind of respect for him and his players! Excellent!

As usual, we have some bull-crap coming from Sky, linking Eboue to PSG. There has been a total change in the guy’s attitude in the way he has gelled with his team-mates. The guy celebrates every goal with his mates and I recollect him giving a bear-hug to Arshavin during substitution against Sp*rs. That was so sweet, srsly! It seems, he says this… “One day I would like to play in Ligue 1. I like that league, there are a lot of surprises and developments.”. Yeah right. Who says such things? Ligue 1? Really? I don’t even consider that a league. In fact, I don’t remember anybody winning the “league” apart from Lyon in the last 62 years.

St Nicko has started dreaming about being a world-class striker, how he’ll take Arsenal to win a league treble, followed by an Euro and World Cup for Denmark picking up Golden Boots each time and how he’ll pick up the ‘Player of the Year’ for 5 consecutive years and how…Okay! It is good to have dreams, dry ones, ambitious ones and practical ones. I am not complaining.

Our captain has made a very important point about finishing off matches.
Cesc says…“On the days when we can’t score more, we need to kill the game off in other ways, by passing the ball more and keeping possession.”
Exactly! This whole story of ‘killing off games’ has cost us many a season. It has most certainly cost us Season 07-08’ afa I remember. We CANNOT repeat the same this season, if we are to lift the cup.

In other news, Wenger believes that Van Persie can reach the 25-goal mark. Let’s see, 28 games to go, 17 goals to score. Looks okay to me! But the point is, we need to win the league, it doesn’t matter to me if Vermaelen and Gallas score 15 each. WE WANT TROFEEEEEES!!

Our confident man wants to play against Man Shitty in the Mickey Mouse Cup, but I think Fran Merida is enough for those morons of Manchester. I am absolutely sure that Wenger won’t risk his front-man against ‘em.

We haven’t heard from the Arsenal physio about Bentner’s duration of the injury.

More from me, later!

Tener un buen día!

~S~

Sp*d You! Sp*d You! Sp*d You!

Four goals a game! Yes, that is our average ‘Goals Scored’ at home in the league. We now stand 3rd in the league with one game in hand, just behind the Manks and five points away from league leaders, Chel$ki.

Yesterday’s game was an entertaining one with huge expectations, not only because of the ‘derby’ element but surely because we ‘screwed it up’ big time last season in the same fixture. That was a 4-4 with 2 goals conceded in the last 5 mins. Disgusting!

This one ended 3-0 and it could have easily been 6-0 or 7-0 if Diaby had scored from an easy header off a Van Persie corner and ifffffff Dudu had scored two simple one-on-one chances. It is really outlandish to watch Dudu missing those straightforward chances, a guy known for his cool finishing. I believe, he just needs to put the ball in the back of the net a few times to get the confidence back. We might see him starting in this mid-week Champions League fixture and that might help him regain back some much-needed confidence.

Overall, it was a great game for us. We controlled the game and didn’t let Peter ‘The Colossus’ Crouch to have even one shot/header at goal. David ‘Ex-Gunner’ Bentley got his first start of the season and we defended really well and annulled out his decent crosses. For me, Vermaelen had a great game, clearing dangerous balls and heading out crosses from the right wing. Van Persie continued his scoring spree and we need to keep our fingers crossed and hope he continues to score like this. If he really does that, he’ll end up with 33 or more goals in this season and that’d be mighty tasty. * slurp *
‘St Nicko’ Bendtner picked up an injury (groin) in the first half itself, and will be out for some time (the exact duration of which will be updated in the next blog)

The match report is here.

In other news, Arsene Wenger had some really beeeeeg things to say about Robin Van Persie. Please don’t take that too seriously, he says such things to boost confidence and make the guy feel that he is really important to the club. Like say, he once commented ‘Sanchez Watt reminds me of Marco Van Basten when the latter ran after butterflies in his childhood days’ and once spoke highly of Francis Coqquuellinnee, comparing the kid with the legendary Diego Maradona…’Coqquuellinnee is like the next Maradona. Their noses look so alike, the texture, the size, the shape, as if they share the same nose’. So there!

I apologize for the massive delay between posts. It was because of my pet lizard sweetly called ‘Adabanchor’, he was really unwell! It seems he ate cockroaches having swine flu and lost his eye-sight and there were many other weird and bloodcurdling complications …we won’t really go into all that…yeah!

Before having a good night’s sleep, please repeat after me ‘Sp*d you! Sp*d you! Sp*d you’! Haha…thanks for being a sport!

Adios!

~S~

Too many captains….

Erm. Yes. I was lost. Lost in the wilderness of oblivious dementia! My trip to Egypt was a letdown. I got chased by wild camels who had seriously lost it. I took refuge in Mido’s house, but his house was on fire late in the night which made me leave Egypt and travel to Ghana. I met some very normal and refined tribal people. Hah! Funny. Refined tribal people, it seems. But, these tribal folks stole my wallet, just for the leather, they left all the money behind. Strange. I took a new wallet from Michael Essien and left the country for Europe. I was teleported to the World War 2 era in the space-time continuum where I met Hitler at Berlin. He told me that Arsenal football club has a great future. I nodded my head and left his house, congratulating him for some reason which I don’t remember. Faustino Asprilla, for some bizarre reason sent an army of frantic Chimpanzees to chase me out of Europe. I escaped somehow, diving into the English Channel and swimming like crazy. I was picked up by a boat which had Heather Graham and Michelle Marsh. They smiled at me….and * brrrr * I woke up.

Such things can happen. But, I am just lazy.

Now, I’ve found out some really interesting stuff from the Internationals.

Andrei ‘The Lord’ Arshavin captained Russia against Germany but unfortunately lost the match 0-1.

Tomas ‘De Man’ Rosicky captained Czech Republic and helped with an assist to get the better of Poland 2-0.

Thomas Vermaelen captained Belgium to get the better of Turkey. 2-0.

I am not sure if Gallas captained France or not, but they thrashed Faroe Islands 5-0. And yes, Gallas did score one.

Cesc wasn’t the captain of Spain but he did assist one and score one spectacular goal to beat Armenia 2-0. Ohh, we wish, he was the captain. Ohh, we wish he lifts the World Cup and the Premiership next season. Wishes!

Philippe Senderos scored a brace against Luxembourg to help his side secure a comfortable 3-0 victory.

Vela scored for Mexico in a comfortable 4-1 win over El Salvadore.

Ramsey, Eboue and Bendtner were involved too in their respective internationals.

So, it was a lot of good things happening for Arsenal players. We hope they can take the confidence back to the match against Birmingham. We’ll have some more friendlies coming mid-week. Let us keep our fingers crossed. We don’t want any injuries.

In other news, Samir Nasri is back in full training. So there.

That is all from my side. Hope we can survive the Interlull and get back to business as usual. God bless.

~S~

For you, Arsene!

From ‘Arsene Who‘ to ‘In Arsene, we trust‘, it has been a long journey. Over the past 13 years, we have not only seen a change in Arsenal football club but have also witnessed a change in English Football. Yes, nobody believed that a foreign manager could get success with an English club. But, there has been a massive paradigm shift in these years.

He is a good manager who has created good teams playing good football and he has won trophies for 10 years here in England, which is not easy. As one of the first foreign managers in the Premiership maybe it was difficult for him at first, but he has given the rest of us more possibilities

- Rafael Benitez, Liverpool’s manager, Septemeber 2006.

I remember meeting up with the Arsenal players at England matches and they all raved about him. No one had a bad word to say about him or his methods. It is a pleasure to have him in England and hopefully he will stay for the next 10 years

- Stuart Pearce, Manchester City’s manager, September 2006.

Arsene Wenger has not only earned tremendous respect among the Arsenal hoi polloi, but also among the revered managers to have managed English teams, over the years. Arsene has opened a new chapter in football. He has changed the outlook of many football fans. He has made them believe in him, his ways of doing things, his style of football, his style of managing a football club. There are people who worship him and that includes the players who have played under him.

Not only is he a great manager, he’s a great human being too

- Thierry Henry, Arsenal’s striker

Here is what one Jean-Noël Huck (a fellow football player at Arsene’s childhood club) had to say about Arsene,

He was always the technician, the strategist of the team. He was already getting his ideas across,but calmly.

Nothing has changed. He is still the shrewd technician, the mastermind behind every move of Arsenal. He is not only involved in “coaching” the players, but he gives his thoughts about how to run the football club and everybody respects his views. And why won’t they? He has brought success and profits to the club at the same time. We generally don’t see that happen in this mad-money-spending-era-of-the-Galacticos. Arsene always did things his way, he has always been incredibly patient and unbelievably far-sighted. If he believes that he can do the same things with Denilson, Song, Cesc, Theo and Van Persie, which he did with Bergkamp, Thierry, Freddie and Pires, then you gotta believe in him.

The timeline from the day Bruce Rioch was sacked 13 years back to this day, Arsenal Football club has reached new levels of footballing superiority. We have witnessed absolute dominance, ‘invincibility’ and most importantly what we call today ‘beautiful football’.
We have tremendous faith in you, sire and we wish you success with this club for years to come.

I’ll leave you with some immortal words by the great man, himself…

“With your club it is a love story that you have to expect will last forever and also accept that you could leave tomorrow. You have to act every day like you will stay your whole life there but you must accept that, from one day to the next, it can stop. It is a bit like life”

More later, have a great day.

~S~

They came, they saw, they didn’t conquer, they left…

Arsenal 2 – 0 Olympiacos
Van Persie 78, Arshavin 86

Two Words. Complete Dominance.
I can remember Olympicsakostic attacking our goal three or four times and it was a bit scary but again our defense was solid enough to hold on to the clean sheet. It remains to be seen, how long
can Gallas and Vermaelen stay fit and perform at this incredible level. According to me, Gallas is at the peak of his Arsenal career and has absolutely no issues with anybody, not even with Van Persie.

As far as our attack goes, Arshavin was very quiet in the first half, but he showed his true colors in the second, and was very danjurious to say the least. Rosicky showed some moments of absolute brilliance, but he still lacks match sharpness and that is quite understandable. Cesc missed a few chances but was his usual self with his accurate passing. I think our captain needs to work a bit on his shooting. Every great player needs to work on something during training. Nobody is perfect. It is not like…Zidane coming for training…and wondering…’Okay, so what am I supposed to do? I am excellent in all departments, I think I should go home.’ NO. Eboue looks very natural as a full back and it suits his style of play. Van Persie was okay, what matters most is, he has scored two in two matches. I don’t think this Olympiacos team will even bother us in the away fixture until and unless we have one of ‘those’ days at the office.

In other news, Theo was involved in a Reserves friendly with Olympiacos Reserves, which we won 3-1.

In some breaking news, Wenger won’t be spending just for the sake of it. My God. I was almost sure that he’d bring David Villa, Francesco Totti, Marcus Senna this winter and even make Dennis Bergkamp come out of retirement and play for us. But NO, such incredible things won’t happen.

Watch out for this space, we’ll have a special blog tomorrow going through Wenger’s incredible 13 years at the club.

If you find your windows wide open, please don’t jump out of the house even if you are incredibly high on shoe polish odor.
I’ll see you guys tomorrow.

P.S: Sorry for the little F Up. Had to take the blog ‘off-air’ for an hour.

Please welcome the Greeks!

Ohh yes. It is Champions League time yet again.
We play the Greek Champions Olympiacos and I must confess that apart from Zico being their coach, other stuffs about ‘em are quite latin and greek to me. From close quarters, I’ve heard that Olympiacos are the Greek champions for the last 457 years and must say that is one heck of an achievement considering that no one even played football that long ago.

I’ll start off with some team news. Denilson is out for 2 months due to a back injury (a back fracture, I believe). We’ll certainly miss his energy in the middle of the park, but that job is well handled by that strange-looking Cameroon guy. Nicolas Bendtner, meanwhile, went and crashed into Van Persie’s car, only to find out later that Van Persie was not in that car. In fact, when the Dane woke up this Sunday morning, after a hangover, he realized it was not even Van Persie’s car, but Craig Bellamy’s new green turbo scooter. I am a little scared of the possible consequences but yeah, the guy is not available for tonight’s Champions League game. Thanks to a dubious chest infection, Almunia won’t be available too. That will hand out Don Vito Mannone an European debut. I hope he still maintains his 10 out of 10 performance.

I believe our squad will look something like this:

Mannone, Clichy, Gallas, Vermaelen, Sagna, Song, Diaby, Fabregas, Arshavin, Eduardo, Van Persie, Szczesny, Rosicky, Eboue, Silvestre, Ramsey, Gibbs, Wilshere, Vela, Watt, Walcott.

…and I’ll be really happy if we see Rosicky starting ahead of Diaby,
tonight. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll go to my study room and observe two minutes of silence for all those brave parents of Gooners who’ll have to stand up to 90 minutes of non-stop expletives-hearing.

About their team, I just know, Olof Mellberg, a very close friend of
former gunner legend Freddie Ljunberg, is at the heart of their defence.

The match will be live on Zee Sports for Indian viewers.
Have fun.

See you later.

Vito, The Don at Cottage.

Aloha Friends and your pet dogs.

There was a time, not many years ago, when it felt really good winning matches “beautifully“, netting five goals and all that. But now, I feel really good coming back home with three points from any part of the world. Likewise, I felt quite close to ‘really satisfied’ after the win at Cottage. Don Vito Mannone was exceptional and he almost single-handedly secured three crucial points for us.

The game started with the usual line-up and yes, Abulacostala Diaby did start ahead of the Czech captain. Van Persie and Bendtner looked okayish with their striking role. Arshavin looked off-color as he strayed quite a few wrong passes, but it was obvious Arsenal wanted a lot of things to be done from that left hand side. I wish Theo comes back and starts doing things from the right hand side too. Ok, the last two lines sounded really weird, but am just talking football here. Thanks. In fact, Theo’s inclusion will be interesting for Bendtner who might actually speak to Wenger…”Pheww, now you have a right winger, please can I play more central, for heaven’s sake.”

The goal came from a classy curling long ball from our captain which was controlled in exquisite fashion by Van Persie and shot home with his famous chocolate leg. Now, that is what a striker is supposed to do, score from the one chance you get in an entire match. Vintage Persie, as the commentators rightly put. Apart from that, there was nothing great coming from the match as far as our passing was concerned. But yeah, it still leaves us to ponder about that one big thing, “Why is Abou Diaby a footballer?“.

Whatever. Thanks Vito for the multiple saves. Three points. Job Done. Next match please.

In other very disturbing news, Fernando Torres looked scarily brilliant, scoring a hattrick against Hull City, while, Irishman Robbie Keane put four past Burnley and looked highly impressed with himself. Narcissist. And Chel$ki got tricked by Wigan as Peetar Cheque was sent off for exposing. Disgusting.

We have drawn Liverpool in the Carling Cup. Mouth-watering, I understand. We’ll talk more about it in the days to come. The draw is here.

We have an interesting article about our spirit and spine or something like that, here.

I’ll do some pandal-hopping for now. It’s our festival time.
You guys take care of yourself.
More, later. Alligator.

~S~

Fool-a-ham shall we?

For all ye gooners, here is some really good news. You can now sleep peacefully and not worry about your swine-flu infected cow. Yes, Arsene Wenger has finally banged the last nail really hard on the right-hand top corner of the disfigured coffin of Morutulana Chamakh. Thanks a lot for all the entertainment. Have a great life ahead. I mean, Afterlife.

Arsene has also spoken about his retirement plans…Well…That he has no retirement plans. Yes. Excellent news. The club is in safe hands. We’ll play beautiful football for some more years. Beautiful football is eye-candy and we all love candy, don’t we? Naaiice.

Our Dutch striker who was supposed to carry on with the excellent form he showed last season, is speaking a little too much for my liking. I think he should concentrate more on scoring goals for Arsenal. We really need him to wear those boots (whichever color it might be) which adds a goal to the Arsenal scoreline. About the color thingy, he might as well consult his Dane team-mate.

Ok, let us concentrate on the big match ahead tonight. Big match, why? Simply because, if we rewind back to 2008, this fixture was by far our worst performance of last season. So we need to pull up our socks even if they smell really bad, get charged for the big occasion and feed a lot of balls to Arshavin so that he can score the 5 goals he desired to score this season in a single game.

I would also want Bendtner to say a few nice things about Arsenal football club to Hangeland throughout the match. That might be helpful in bringing the lad to our club next season. Even if that doesn’t work out, at least the big lad will be distracted the entire game.

The game at Craven Cottage kicks off at 17:30 BST. More team news and the intellectual talkolla here.
All the best lads, go get three points.

More on the match outcome, tomorrow. Adios.

~S~