Quite simply, I thought I might take a look at the month of January.
And although I could hardly believe it myself, it’s actually not that bad, when it comes to games played.
Yes, we drew at home to Palace, lost away to Leicester and lost at home to Liverpool in the Prem. Not good.
But we also beat Blackpool and Bournemouth in the FA cup.
Ok, ok, I’m clutching at straws, but moving on in the cup many years ago would have been seen as a very good thing.
The fact is though that the Premier league is miles more important and we had poor results either side of January, which makes things look much worse.
Don’t shoot me though; I’m talking about January and nothing else, in other words.
As for the transfer window, well that has to go down as the biggest damp squib winter window ever, in my opinion.
We seemingly did well, in signing Carles Gil and Scott Sinclair, as both are the sort we require and at a quick glance, have looked decent.
But I’m sure many will agree that it just wasn’t enough, was it?
Lambert practically killed any hope we might have had of the club spending some serious money, when he said he couldn’t see anyone else coming in.
Similar to Lambert’s footy, my only thought there was “what a killjoy”, especially as I know that many love the speculation that the windows brings.
And then, it seems he did a 100% U-turn and tried to sign Rickie Lambert at daft money and probably a similarly daft long contract.
I’m actually glad we didn’t get him, but that’s by the by.
The annoying part for me was that we apparently had nothing to spend and then all of a sudden, did.
Which just sums up what’s going on at the club, in my opinion.
Anyway, now, I’m interested to see where you think we’re going to finish at the end of the season.
Should I make the choices go as high, as say, 8th?
No, probably not.
The Arsenal of last year, and a few year’s previously, were a poor man’s Barca in style. Lots of ticky tacky on the floor. Little guys with constant passing, playing a high line, trying to keep the ball and trying to walk it into goal.
This year they came to Villa Park and outplayed Villa using our tactics. They sat back absorbed the pressure and counter attacked using pace straight down the middle. If the Villa full backs pushed forward Arsenal also got in behind them.
The case against Lambert is what happened in the return game at the Emirates. Wenger is no Mourinho, he won’t change a working tactic. So it was a certainty Arsenal would play the same way at home against us as they did away. The best back four available to Lambert was Sissoko Hutton Clark and Okore. Yet on the basis of one game v Cherries Res Richardson takes Sissoko’s place. Hutton is removed from the back four altogether and plays as a classic #7.
Delph we know will be targeted if he drops into the back line – with two-man pressure. Wenger also applied the same pressure to Sanchez – who also couldn’t cope and gave the ball away. But Sanchez is supposed play with 4 defenders behind him, changing his options entirely.
Villa are poorly equipped to break down 6 to 8 players defending their penalty area. However, given the players we have, they must stay out of the area until the wingers have the ball ready to cross and then the strikers sprint in. Standing on the 6 yard line waiting is hopeless for Benteke and Weimann, and yet they persisted with this failing tactic.
The conclusion is Lambert knew how Arsenal would play, and still made it as easy as possible for them to succeed.
We’ll be bottom 3 in 2 weeks (if not this weekend on goal difference after we get truly spanked by Chelsea) and then will not recover due to poor motivation from a poor man-manager in Lambert.
We’re going down this season
The bookies still think there are three worst teams. They are rarely wrong
I think of this video everytime we play now – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZnYloe5rhw
Nice one Adam, I never seen or heard that before, if you don’t laugh you’d go loopy loo, problem is we are dire in the game.
I know mate, what’s the betting we give Chelsea new boy Cuadrado who looks likely to start, the easiest and nicest welcome to the premiership and he gets rave reviews afterwards?
I hope not, I really hope we do a Balotelli on him and give him plenty of sly kicks and make it tough for him but I can see us rolling over again and getting spanked.
Villa 5 – 3 Chelsea
;).
I have a mental picture of the Chelsea players sitting around discussing plans to beat Arsenal’s goal tally.
And what’s scary is they could double it. They whipped our ass a few years back when we were still good 8-0 (in case any of us needed reminding). I dread to look at our goal difference come Saturday night. It could be close to -30…
It will be about 3-0 . Costa is banned
BBC Predictions – Lawro gives it 2-0 and John Cooper Clarke 3-1 both to Chelski. What a nice man JCC is, he actually thinks we might score a goal!