NEW STRIKER LINKS

by .

I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed a hit of CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW reaction. So here it is now:

I like it.

Bayern Munich is the perfect blend of super club at a lowish ebb that is very beatable. If you win, you’re really happy. If you lose, that’s just the level of the Champions League for you.

I’d give us a 40% chance of making it through to the next round. Bayern has nothing to play for, the away leg is going to be really tough, and I’m not sure how the boys are going to handle the bright lights away from home.

(more…)


BENNY AND TOMI PUT PEN TO PAPER

by .

What are you doing Friday? That’s right. CHAMPIONS LEAGUE QUARTER FINAL DRAW.

Feels sexy, right?

That is a very nice collection of top tier clubs. No Qarabag for us. Just pure heritage clubs that’ll have American gooners crying off sick for sure.

For me, the who do we want and who do we NOT want lists are very simple.

DO NOT WANT:

Manchester City: They are the strongest team in the world and we do not have a particularly great record against them over the last 10 years. Though cup games are not that bad – league games are bad. Very bad.

The counter-point to the fear here is that the one team Pep doesn’t want is Arsenal. We have had their number this season. Arteta puts extra on City games, and they will know the jeopardy involved in losing to Arsenal. Weirdly, I think it would be far worse for City to lose in the QF than for Arsenal. We have nothing to lose because we’ve never won anything major…  they carry the bigger rep and when you are the king, you cannot lose a public power struggle to a young princeling because all your power dissipates.

Atleti: No. No. No. No. This is not a peak Atleti side, but it is a technically gifted shit-bag iteration that can turn anyone over with the darkest of dark arts. Inter Milan has been on fire, they defend like monsters, and they were easily beaten by the Spaniards. I want a nice quarter final, not one I’ll need therapy to get over.

DO WANT:

All the teams that will come to play football against us. Bayern, Madrid, and Barca are all weaker teams than Arsenal, but they aren’t going to shut up shop against us. Their fans wouldn’t allow it. Dortmund are decent but 4th in the Bundesliga. If we lose to them, it’s two very, very bad days.

So who will we get? City or Atleti. You just know it.

Still, the Champions League is like Pokemon… you gotta beat em’ all. Right?

Josh Kroenke was in town for the BIG game. No one gets on a PJ for 14 hours to watch 120 minutes of excruciating football in the Champions League. So what was the reason? It would seem like he might have wanted to be around for the BIG re-signing of Benny Blanco and Tomiyasu.

MAYBE MIKEL AS WELL? Who knows. That’s just irresponsible speculation by me.

Back to the full-backs.

Two extraordinary talents that people didn’t quite get when they landed… now we do. Ben White arrived as a centre back and now he dominates the right side of defence with outrageous performances every week. Tomi arrived as a right back and now he plays wherever he’s needed.

Two top talents, though I would put a lot of pennies on one of them not being here in two seasons’ time.

Once again, I find myself saluting the sporting execs who have signed player after player to new deals with minimal fuss. Tim Lewis, Edu and the MIGHTY Richard Garlick find a way every time. If you’re a young person thinking this is normal, please review the history books from 2015 onwards. It wasn’t pretty. We’d lose big players on free transfers (Aaron Ramsey) or we’d panic and sign declining players to deals they couldn’t get anywhere else (Ozil). It was a mess. We live in a much more sensible world these days.

Ok, short post today. We’ll be dropping a lovely Thursday Therapy session a little later this afternoon. So keep your ears PRICKED for that.


DAVID RAYA CEMENTS #1 STATUS WITH HERO PERFORMANCE!

by .

Arsenal is through to the quarter-finals of the Champions League for the first time since 2010.

Wow.

14 years out in the cold. And here we are. What a feeling!

I’m a touch emotional about it because I wasn’t sure we’d ever get back the peak of European football. The club allowed itself to sag and bloat under a manager who had declined, they made a horrible mistake hiring a meek replacement paired with a horrendous football director… they finally saw the light and hired Arteta.

So few wanted to accept hiring someone with City and Pep ID was a good idea, no one wanted to accept he had the sauce, and people constantly ridiculed the idea he was generational.

Where are these guys now? They’re Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone. Alan Hansen saying, ‘You don’t win it with kids.’ Gary Neville scoffing at the Arsenal strategy.

There are so many people that have helped pull Arsenal back from a very dark place and I hope all of them are enjoying this moment.

Arsenal has been honest about who they are, what the strengths of the club could be, and they’ve gone all-in on a strategy that required taking a lot of pain along the way.

4 years into Arteta’s tenure, and we’re one of the 4 best clubs in Europe.

That is mad. Wild. Crazy. Too good to be true.

The FC Porto game was absolutely disgusting. We won, but I felt dirty. Like I’d tripped an old lady to win a sack race. I’d forgotten what the Champions League was about – the nostalgia always takes you back to attacking free-flowing football. The reality is closer to a brutal chess game in a very nasty prison cell.

Arsenal weren’t at their best, but they handled a very streetwise Porto side, then nailed them in a penalty shoot-out for the ages.

I told you I wasn’t selling my stocks in David Raya, and thank goodness I didn’t; he’s just gone NVIDIA on the base. As Matt said on the Arsenal Opinion, ‘he’s been near perfection since Dubai.’

That was his best game in an Arsenal shirt. He made saves, caught crosses, distributed like a king all night, then pulled off two world-class penalty saves (nearly three) and sent us into the next round.

There were rumblings we had two number twos at the club. Those silly proclamations can be laid to rest. David Raya is a special keeper and he’ll be knocking on the door of Ederson and Allisson very soon if he isn’t already.

Other notable performances: Martin Odegaard. He was an all action hero again. He pressed, he dropped deep, he drew players from all over the pitch to track his danger… then he struck with a Bergkamp like assist, serving up Trossard with a stunning pass he could dink home.

Not a big game player? Please.

There weren’t too many individual performances worthy of paragraphs – so I want to talk about the team.

Only Jorgi and Havertz have been this far in the Champions League. No one else in that team had. The game was tough, the opponent relentless, the jeopardy serious. Those boys did men things out there. They showed the type of maturity many a Wenger team could not. It was a very, very professional performance under huge pressure.

Then the penalties came… my word. They were stunning.

Odegaard – BANG

Saka – BANG

Havertz – BANG

Declan – BANG

I doubted every single one of them – but those guys didn’t. They were brutal penalties struck by young men keen to impress on the greatest club comp in the world.

We moved into the next round. Bayern, Madrid, PSG, Man City, and Barcelona… the sort of names you dream of! The only team I fear is Man City… and I suspect the only team Man City fears is Arsenal.

Let’s enjoy the moment and see what the Friday draw kicks up for us! x


MATCH DAY BLOG – DEFEATING CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DARK ARTS

by .

Well good morning my darlings, how are we today? Good? Great? Incredible? Surely not a 3 out of 10? Don’t be like that, we have a Champions League game this evening.

There’s exciting injury news, Tomiyasu is back in contention after a very long stint out. He’ll make the bench this evening, there’s no doubt he’s going to be ready for the run in, he might get a few minutes if things are going well and we’re trying to lock-up the game.

Timber has also been in the training pictures, but don’t get your hopes up on that one. End of the month if things go really well. That’ll be City at the earliest, which would be great, but again, it feels like we’re being hopeful that Mikel would use a bench space for a player out for that long in a title-contending game.

Arsenal’s content team sent the world of fandom into meltdown when they put Zinchenko on the tune-in post. I mean, come on, could it be any more obvious he’s going to start against a dirty, dirty mid-block?

… or maybe it’s just a mind game?

Who knows, but I’d certainly be gearing up for a very similar game to the one we just played against Brentford. The main difference? FC Porto simply doesn’t have the physicality of Brentford to cause us the same type of problems.

This will be a similar game from a gamesmanship perspective, but it’ll be a different footballing experience. My big hope is the shocking refereeing in the last round will be addressed. No one wants to see Porto in the next round, the TV gods will want to see Arsenal there. We can’t have a ref supporting a disgusting anti-football team in the next round. Arteta was asked if the refs will have to be on their game, he didn’t go too hard at it, but the point was raised.

This is a big game for the entire team. No one wants to see Arsenal go out in a Monaco-like mess of a game. This team is too good to exit now. We need to be competing against a top-8 team like Madrid or Bayern before we can give up our chance at Euro glory.

My gut says the team will see Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus back in the starting 11. Gabriel Martinelli is struggling with a very deep cut to his foot that has put him out of contention for Brazil next week. Trossard didn’t shower himself in glory against Brentford. So for me, it’s a frontline of Havertz, Saka, and Jesus.

The Brazilian really comes out of his shell in Champions League games. He’s a very good player against a mid-block. He’ll drop deep, force chaos, and he’ll want to show off to his Brazilian National team group chat with a goal or something nice like that.

There might be a question about who starts in midfield – could it be Thomas Partey and Declan Rice? Sheesh, I’m asking so many fucking questions in this post. Especially annoying when we know it’s probably going to be Jorginho and Declan. We need the fit boys starting and Declan and Jorgi have a very vibey partnership. Both like being on TV shows and they are in elite form.

This game is going to be interesting because we don’t need to worry about away goals. We have the privilege of no Chelsea game on Saturday, so we only need one goal to take the game to extra time. It’d be ideal to just unleash brutality and kill them, but this is the Champions League, and Porto is absolutely dogged. One goal takes us to extra time, we’ll have a strong bench, and the home crowd will be on FIRE.

I fancy us. This is the big show. The tournament young Bukayo’s imagine themselves scoring a winner in. Big players know their heroics will live on in history. Who wants to be a history-maker? Every single player.

Porto is not a good team. They know they are inferior. The only advantage they have on us is they know the dark arts. We’ve seen the playbook, let’s see if they can replicate it at Fortress Emirates.

That’s all I’ve got today. If you want to join the On The Whistle, sign up for free on Patreon for the LIVE show and we’ll have some fun. Xxx


ARSENAL FINISH OFF BRUTAL BRENTFORD

by .

That was my favourite victory of the year because it was exactly the sort of game the narrative gods thought they could control.

They couldn’t.

The injury-ravaged bully boys of Brentford came to our house to rough us up and put some perspective on our title run.

They took a wild swing, grazed our cheek, and fell over the pool table.

The footballing gods had the cheek to weigh in and stack the cast against us. They put a referee in charge from Liverpool and they had Paul Tierney in the VAR room after his shocking mistake for Liverpool against Forest. You couldn’t make it up, only divine intervention plays these sorts of games.

(more…)


MATCH DAY BLOG – ARSENAL VS BRENTFORD

by .

The team sheet is in and Arsenal is looking very strong for the home game against Brentford.

Key news: Martinelli has a deep cut on his foot, so I suspect that’s the last we’ll see of him until after the international break. Just thank your lucky charms it’s a cut, not something worse.

Tomi is out, but he should be in the mixer for the game on Tuesday. No need to take a chance when you have a lot of coverage at full-back.

(more…)


LEVEL SETTING ON NEXT PITFALLS

by .

You can’t come here every day expecting this to be a joy fest. I’m sorry, that’s not what we’re about. I will always find something to complain about. This will keep you on your toes.

First thing we need to chat about.

Arsenal became the first Premier League team to score at least two goals in eight consecutive halves of football.

A mega achievement.

Domestically, we haven’t gone a goal down since the Liverpool FA Cup game, and it was an Arsenal player who scored that goal (Kiwior). You have to go back to 2023 to find the last time we went a goal behind because of an opposition player.

This is good news, correct?

Wrong.

(more…)