Ugh

By: Martin | April 18th, 2009

Well, what can you say about that game? We played very poorly, we didn’t deserve to win, and so we didn’t.

The knee-jerk reaction from a lot of fans may be to blame Fabianski, who possibly could have stopped the first goal and came out too early and got beaten by Drogba, who tucked the ball into an empty net. The young Pole had a very bad day. But Fabianski plays very aggressively in the Lehmann style, and comes out and gets loose balls–against Villareal, it worked brilliantly, as he was kind of a “sweeper keeper” that never allowed Rossi to catch up to any loose balls. Today, it worked out terribly–Drogba very nearly headed a loose ball over Fabianski’s head into the net early, and beat Fabianski soundly to score the winner.

The bottom line for me is that that is Fabianski’s style, and he’s used to playing against lower-level competition, where coming out in that situation works most of the time. He’s got to learn that while you may be able to do that in the Carling Cup against Championship sides, you need to pick your spots against the Drogbas of the world. And the only way to learn that lesson is to get beat a couple of times. It’s just unfortunate that this “teaching moment” occurred in one of the biggest games of his life. And if he hadn’t come out, Drogba would have been through on goal with the ball, so I’m not even necessarily convinced there’s much he could have done to prevent the goal. The real culprit, as far as I’m concerned, is Silvestre, who Drogba outran and outmuscled to get to the ball.

Now, Wenger has forgotten ten times more about football than I’ll ever know, but I have to admit to having a “WTF?” moment when they posted the lineups–as did Travis in the game thread. Given that he was rested and motivated, Arshavin seemed a certainty to start somewhere, but was benched. Robbie started on the left wing, where as far as I can remember he’s never been that effective. And instead of sticking with the partnership of Song and Cesc that had been so effective in the last couple of games, Wenger stuck Song, our most physical holding midfielder type, on the bench in favor of Diaby and Denilson. Very puzzling decision, I have to say. And Diaby and Denilson both played further back in a holding role, pushing Cesc forward behind the forwards, where he’s never looked all that comfortable.

It is, of course, impossible to say whether the outcome would have been any different had the lineup changed. At the end of the day, it’s down to the players to go out and play and get a result. And today, we just didn’t do that. Toure had a solid game, and Eboue and Gibbs again looked good at fullback. Walcott was by far our most dangerous player, and it was only fitting that he scored our lone goal. Other than that, no one really distinguished themselves. Diaby was absolutely dreadful all day, giving the ball away like a cheap, unwanted gift. All the Arsenal fans were loudly hoping Song would come on at half-time or shortly after for Diaby, to no avail. And while in the last couple games Adebayor has reminded us that when he puts the effort in he can be a world class striker, today he reminded us how bad he looks when he doesn’t. In fairness, he wasn’t getting much service, but his first touch was nonexistent all day and he couldn’t hold the ball up at all.

Mostly it’s just disappointing because the team, and the players, seemed to be on such a high these last few weeks. It really seemed like we had turned a corner and were a threat to win trophies. But every winning streak has to end, unfortunately, and ours ended today. Now there are only two things to focus on for the rest of the season–try to scrape our way up to 3rd place, and win the Champions League. The real danger now is that the team gets demoralized at the loss and loses the good form we’ve been showing lately. We’ve got a league game against Liverpool at Anfield on Tuesday, and then host Middlesbrough on Sunday morning. Good performances there will basically sew up 4th place, but we can’t afford to slip up and give too many points away, because we don’t want to be too concerned about holding off Aston Villa and/or Everton as the season winds down.

So a bad day for the club, but here’s hoping we can put this behind us and move forward, as we still have our opportunities to make this a very successful season.