Written by George Sezer Sunday, 20 March 2011 02:39

GunnerTalk Blog

Highlights

George Sezer

It’s obvious that the team is struggling for form and confidence after the events in the last couple of weeks. These are the times title winning teams dig in and grind results. The primary problem with our team - contrary to what many gooners think - is not the attitude of our players or even the depth of our squad. It is the goalkeeping problem that has handicapped us for the last few seasons.

Many people have been going on about Denilson not being good enough or centre back pairing of Kascielny and Squillaci being suspect or missing important players through injury and rightly so but every team in the Premiership have these problems. Teams do not have all the players on form at the same time or have an injury free squad.

My point is; although the team is not playing at their best, if we had a top goalkeeper in between the sticks, we probably would already have won our first trophy for 6 years, be in the semi – finals of the FA Cup and still only 3 point behind the leaders with a game in hand.

Who is to blame but Le Boss, he thought he could get away with not replacing our first choice keeper by promoting a new no1 from within the squad.  I know Wojciech Szczesny is a very good goalkeeper and will be Arsenal’s no 1 but not just yet. Only a couple of months ago Alumina was out of the picture and wasn’t even regarded as our second choice keeper yet when Fabianski was ruled out for the season with an injury AW still refused to strengthen the goalkeeping position in the January window and now he ended up bringing back our former first choice goalie who he failed to replace in the first place. It just defies logic.

The game itself was just as predictable as I expected; Arsenal conceding an early goal from a set piece when our defenders gave Reid the freedom of our six yard box to head in their first goal from a corner kick. I had feared the worst when I saw the team line up; Denilson in the DM position and Ramsey playing Fabregas position. With Wilshere our centre midfield 3 had an average age of 20. By the way AW, Denilson is not a defensive midfield player, please play someone else there...oh, hold on, sorry I forgot, you haven’t bought a cover for our only DM player Song and he is injured now.

Arsenal played tidy, neat football for the rest of the first half without the cutting edge – nothing new there.  The only clear cut opening fell to Ramsey but he shot straight at their goalkeeper from six yards out when Van Persie’s header hit the bar and rebounded perfectly for him.

The manager changed the formation to 4-4-2 by replacing Denilson with Chamakh for the second half but the pattern of the game didn’t change; lion share of the position of the ball but nothing to show for it. In fact we could’ve gone further behind when Brunt missed a glorious chance at the far post.

In the 56^th minute Wenger introduced Bendtler for Ramsey and pulled Nasri into the defensive midfield position in search of some sort of injection of a cutting edge into our game. Instead he got another comical moment from our calamity goalkeeper; a long ball from their defence caught out Squillaci but the French defender seemed to have the situation under control and then from nowhere Almunia appeared 30 yards from his goal. In desperation to get to the ball that he should never have come out for, he knocked Squillaci out of balance. Odemwingie had the easiest task of rolling the ball into the unprotected net.  Twice in two weeks we’ve had opposing forwards rolling balls into our empty net, something wrong somewhere Boss.

After getting over the shock of conceding a goal like this, the team started to play with more purpose. Arshavin got into the game and made a huge difference. He started our come back with a brilliantly taken goal; received a cute ball from Chamakh just inside their box, with almost one movement he control the ball and placed it into top corner.

He also had a big say for our equaliser with a deep cross to Bendtler who somehow cut the ball back for Van Persie to toe in our second goal. We huffed and puffed but could not find the winner for the rest of the game. But all credit goes to the team for team spirit and fighting qualities.

WBA could have nicked it but for a brilliant block-tackle by Squillaci on Fortune when the forward wiggled pass Koscielny and Nasri all too easily in our box.

I said it before and I will say it again; it would be a miracle if we win the title with the goalkeepers we have but...I believe in miracles.