shabby

what a crap performance. it fucking figures. i finally cave and get television after six years without just so i can watch the gunners play, and what happens? they come out of the gate sucking huge balls. as you can see in the picture wenger is pissed, and he should be, but his anger should not just be for the shiite central defending of cygan and toure.

no, some of the anger should be directed at himself.

the problem, as i humbly see it, is twofold: arsene is still playing 4-4-2, and he has no bonafide target man with aerial potential. today henry would have made a difference because we were playing boro, but everyone is playing us the same now: 4-5-1. the entire league knows our game. the entire league has watched and rewatched the tapes of the undefeated season, realized what an amazing threat to score we were and rightly decided that the way to shut us down is to bottle up the midfield and catch us on the counter-attack. everyone does it to us with varying degrees of success. what shocks me is that we've even won a game at all this season.

forget about plan Bs, we don't even have a plan A anymore.

but here's my plan A until we get ourselves a decent target man. here is the ideal set up with the players we've got, assuming they're healthy:

lehmann

lauren campbell cole

ljungberg gilberto hleb pires

van persie henry reyes

subs: toure, bergkamp, senderos, fabregas, lupoli

cygan is like a fucking hole when he's out there, so drop him to the reserves forever; toure is hot and cold, so change him out with lauren (or whoever needs a break in midfield); give lupoli a chance for first team play, subbing in for the inspired van persie; give bergkamp's old bones a rest and let him come into the game for late inspiration, replacing reyes or henry depending on need; keep senderos and clichy where they should be, as first team subs, and bring them in a little bit early to keep cole and campbell fresh (or pires and hleb too in the case of clichy).

since we can't do anything about our beautiful passing game that is getting us nowhere my idea should make our attack a threat again by weighting us heavily in the attacking third; it keeps our midfield stable, and doesn't change a damn thing in the back (haven't we been playing with three defenders since campbell got hurt anyway?). at least this way teams would be forced to adjust to us, rather than watching the tapes, practising ways to slow us down and trap us, and then simply walking onto the pitch and springing the trap on our beautiful to watch but ineffective eleven.

fucking arsenal. you ruined my weekend. and you're going to keep on doing it, aren't you, you bastards?