Cesc Crowned October’s Player of the Month
By: Martin | November 3rd, 2009It was just announced that Cesc Fabregas edged out Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba as the PFA Player of the Month for the month of October.
Ultimately, of course, such awards are pretty meaningless, and Cesc would probably be the first to say so. But it is nice that his superb play all month was recognized, as he was consistently pulling the strings for a club which was undefeated on the month.
You’ll recall that I was a bit worried about Cesc coming into the season, because he was injured for much of last year and wasn’t as good as we expected him to be even when healthy. But this season has been a different story altogether–Cesc has 6 goals and 11 assists in 12 games in all competitions so far this year, and had 4 goals and 5 assists in 6 October games. He was involved in over half of Arsenal’s goals on the month.
Congratulations, Cesc–you truly are the rudder of the Arsenal.
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Not to be too self-hating or negative after such a comprehensive win and such an awesome goal from Player of the Month, I just don’t see how Fabregas is playing as well as he’s credited by you and, apprently, by the PFA. Look at the Spurs game again. Yeah, it was a hell of a goal, and he was very involved. But count the lazy passes, the too-soft short ones that were easily picked off. Think about the situations where he has two teammates in one “line” for a pass–you used to expect him to pass it to the long guy and shift the field that much more, but against Spurs, it was always the closer man. Sans the goal, it wasn’t a dominant performance by any means, and dare I say it, he was uncreative.
In fact, I think the whole team was relatively uncreative. What they were was fast. They did exactly what they needed to win given the tactics in use, and that means being in the right place at the right time. This eliminated the need for particularly great passes and, even, great individual play.
I thought every individual performed excellently, except for maybe Diaby for most of the match. But everybody had their few moments of bad giveaways (Bendtner had great on-the-ball skill, but awful attack-killing passes; Song, though he cleaned up and became absolutely PERFECT towards the end of the second half, was delivering not a few hospital balls deep in the field–remember that Bentley tackle on Vermaelen?), and you always felt that those moments occurred with enough consistency that they had to give up their dominance at some point. And that did happen, early in the second half, in the typical way: come out guns blazing, get two gilt-edged chances, miss them both, and then spend five minutes in our own box.
But we got the dominance back, because of the tactics. The organization was so good in this match that it gave each player enough confidence to clean up their mistakes from the first half (man, I wish Bendtner had played in that environment, the way things were going for him there).
Okay, Fabregas is good, but he wasn’t pulling strings really. From where I was sitting, everyone was pulling the string they were assigned.
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Ill agree with above but also remember the Olympiacos game and that 2-3 game stretch where Fab was setting goals up for fun… Most werent finished but creativity was not the issue then… I really think Diaby does so much to harm the teams performance going forward. Cant wait for Nasri/Rosicky to hold down that spot…
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I agree with you, MoMONEY. While the Spurs goal was great, Cesc didn’t have a terrific game overall, but for the month as a whole, he’s been phenomenal. And Diaby’s regular place in the side is really making me miss Denilson, and hope that Nasri can take that starting spot from him.
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I don’t know, even if Cesc wasn’t a world-beater on Saturday, he played well, and that was some kind of goal he scored. But in terms of brilliance, I would challenge you to name me a single player on any team who had a better game in the month of October than Cesc had against Blackburn.
But we’ve definitely found something we can all agree on–Diaby is awful. Seriously–with Cesc, Song, Denilson, Nasri, and Ramsey, at some point even Wenger has to acknowledge how much he’s killing the club, right? There’s a funny feature on the official site right now where Diaby explains why Wenger got mad and threw his jacket on Saturday. I just love the idea that they go to Diaby for that–and it makes sense, because I know when I’m watching Arsenal and yell and throw things, it almost always has something directly to do with Diaby.
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