The heating is broken (from Tuesday) and it is freezing in my office room, so this will be a very short post. Arsenal have an early kick off against Dyche’s Clarets tomorrow.
What do we know about Burnley? They are currently 15th in the league mainly due to a relatively good defence as their attack is very poor: just 19 goals which is the second lowest tally. They have the fourth most negative goal difference of minus 16 but, as Leicester experienced midweek, they make themselves hard to beat and Arsenal will have to be on the ball from the start to crack huskey Dyche’s resilient bus-parkers.
How should we line up against them? Well all had a good rest and only ESR is not (yet) available, so the gaffer can choose from a large pool of talent and hungry players.
Here is my preferred lineup:
I am also happy with a start for Auba and/or Willian in this one, but they could have a game on Thursday. Arteta will have to give and take a bit here. I am also happy with Mari and Holding getting a start at the back, but right now I reckon Big Gab and Luiz are giving us the widest skill set and good chemistry in defence. A start for Bellerin would be ok with me, but Soares is in fine form and, to be honest, is the better full back. In fact, this may be close to Arsenal’s strongest lineup…. What do you think?
Looking forward to this one.
C O M E O N Y O U R I P R O A R I N G G U N N E R S !
By TotalArsenal.
Bergkampesque 
Brrr -.No heating?
I couldn’t imagine if we were to be without heating as our average outside temperatures are around -12c – from mid November until late March.
That’s a good looking selection Total but Burnley will be a hard nut to crack and will give us all sorts of problems, I hope we get an early goal that will open them up and make them more vulnerable to our attack.
JW1,
I’m still waiting for your selections for this weekends games.
Burnley v Arsenal
Aston Villa v Wolves
W.B.A. v Newcastle
Man C v Man U (correct score game)
Tottenham v Crystal Palace
Atletico Madrid v Real Madrid
Madhu,
The Highbury ground held a special connection for me as i was born just up the hill on Avenell Road. As kids we used the gates of the stadium as a goal and imagined that we Arsenal players, I was always Jimmy Logie.
My maternal grandfather took me in to my first game for a birthday present the game was on November 22nd, 1947.
As I grew older I would be in the ground every Saturday – 1st team one week, reserves the next, it was like my second home.
To this day I miss both the ambience inside the ground and the wonderful odors coming from the many food carts outside the ground – just writing about it makes me imagine the smell of the fried onions that filled the air ………………
GN5, Wow that must have been magical. Obviously you have treasured that memory and going to your first game is always special. The smell of fired onion and hot dog i assume would be great. I remember the smell when i visited London and right under the Westminster bridge there was a stall from which the fired onion and Hot dog smell is still in my nostrils.
As they say memories of smell seems to be the strongest and lasts long. I guess loosing Highbury would have made you very sad. I still feel that it would have been better to have Highbury and compromise on the gate revenue, but have a magnificent team that would challenge for the league all these season.
I can telly you, GN5, it is cold here too mate. The boiler will not be fixed till Monday at the earliest, so yeah a challenge.
I loved Highbury too, a real temple of football, but I also really like Ashburton Grove. Such a great stadium that deserves much more success. The Oilers spoiled the big, beautiful plan sadly.
I feel for you Total – lets hope the boiler man is on schedule.
Total – I’ve never been inside the Emirates – but a group of us street urchins did play on the site when it was a bunch of ruined buildings. It was just around the corner of my grandparents home on Stavordale Road.
Great stuff, GN5.
To me it looks like a spaceship just landed there. I especially love the evening games.
All we need then Total is some out of this world football.
Haha, GN5, Arteta the Vader is working on it
Most important T, is your choice of Lacazette against a low scoring defend to the death type team. It’s the major decision to be made and I’ll be disappointed if Arteta doesn’t see it the same as us.
Your other point about Thursday is even more important. To me, that should be the priority from now on, and we have one of the biggest squads to rotate. I’d actually start Ceballos at Burnley, and give Thomas a few minutes work coming on later, to have him ready for Thursday.
British Gas Homecare Total, it’s worth it’s weight in gold and it’s never let me down.
You’ll also be pleased to know that my heating is working like an absolute dream, in fact, I had to turn it down and get into my shorts. 😆
Sorry mate… 😉
Hey J, your appreciation of Ceballos is commendable!!
Kev, we got new boiler last May, so it is warrantee and that is why it takes this long. The name of the brand…. Ideal. Anything but! Should have gone for a German one. 😁
🚨TEAM NEWS: Leno; Chambers, David Luiz, Mari, Tierney; Partey, Xhaka; Saka, Odegaard, Willian; Aubameyang
Ideal, never heard of them Total, I guess it’s a combi boiler, and yeah you can’t beat Der Deutsch brands. In all seriousness it’s not the weather to be without heating, or hot water, especially up there!
Burnley were never in contention in the first half and what do we do? Gift them a goal due to individual error. Against Leicester I said the same, our kamikaze back passes is very dangerous. I am stuck by the complete lack of footballing inteligence that these Arsenal players depict in the game. Burnley is not in the game didn’t create any chance but we gift them a goal by our inane backpassing. Let’s not kid ourselves that this team is prone to self destruct and we need to address this pronto.
Expecting a nervy second half. It’s so frustrating and apalling to watch such inane football.
Not creating chances is immensely irritating but I personally find wasting chances even worse, because you know that you’re going to pay for it, just as we did at Wolves.
I’m not sure what the issue is with this team, is it just a chronic lack of composure at the exact time you need to be calculating or is it as simple as a lack of technique. Why for example would a player like Willock have probably taken one or two of those chances but Saka and Partey haven’t? It doesn’t make Willock a better player it just points to Joe being cooler in those situations. Is it something you can coach, I don’t know but it cost us at Wolves, it’s cost us in other games and it’s costing us today and it drives me up the wall…
Kev we are playing a very low percentage football and that’s a huge problem. Both in attack and defense.
I don’t really want to go over old ground again, but I will and it could be as simple as a coaching issue but I’ve felt for a long time that Leno has a weakness in his game when it comes to distribution and especially quick distribution, in other words he holds onto the ball too long when we are in for a turnover and he plays too many short passes which sees us compressed in our penalty area.
Maybe Madhu, but I think it’s as simple as keeping a cool head and finishing properly, if we were 3-0 up as we should have been then Burnley’s level falls away and they don’t press and score, it’s really in our own hands.
There was lot of talk of Burnley tiring wiht a small squad. It doesn’t look like that they have more desire and fight. One mistake in defense due to inane back.passing and we loose two points. A pass cannot miss the first opposition man who is two yards out. It’s a pathetic performance and again individual mistake costs us points.
Exactly my thoughts, Kev. Not taking out chances early on only served to spur them on once they got the equalize.
Disappointing result, really, especially when you consider the penalty shout the VAR has not given. This is hard to take.
Maybe Burnley are just a bogey team for us how we didn’t score with some of those chances is unbelievable. It was a lackluster performance but we still had enough opportunities without the penalty decision we deserved but I will not cry about the VAR anymore. We almost lost with the fine chance that they failed to score when the striker only had Leno to beat. If I am not mistaken Burnley had some injury issues and had played in midweek so it is a very disappointing result.
We need to be winning games now. We looked like we lacked energy and David Luis seemed to need too much time to make up his mind what pass selection to choose, having his pocket picked too many times for comfort.
We had a week’s rest for Peter’s sake! Burnley played midweek. It just tells you our players have the nack for letting you down when you give them days off. I don’t know how Wenger did it but with a whole week off any competitive action, we would be dancing all over the opposition,with zipped passes and clinical finishing. I am upset with the performance or lack of it, honestly. Leno should have reconsidered passing to Xhaka, with his back to the play. He, shouldn’t panic and hurry his attempted right foot pass which deflected off the Burnley striker. All a shambles.
Reminds me a little of the game where Soares and Gabriel had the early mixup to concede an early goal and we never recovered but the difference today was we created but could not finish. These are the games where that extra individual quality should have shown Pepe was really trying to make things happen and is still on an upward crest with his form it just would not come off for him today. Now onto a much tougher week ahead hope we can bounce back.
Eris it was a stonewall penalty from Pieters when he blocked Pepe, but the VAR again proved the lack of quality we have among our referees, even Peter Walton sounded embarrassed, it’s a joke but nothing will change. The thing is if we finish our chances it’s not an issue, to me it’s not the pens it’s our players inability to put the ball in the net, it’s why they’re paid hundreds of thousands of pounds each week…
Why did we not get a corner from the second penalty shout, the Burnley player deflected it over the bar, the fact that the pen was overturned means nothing, how do Burnley get to restart from a free kick?
Very disappointing.
I had not thought of that Kev good point why was it not a corner at least, laughable officiating but like you its an annoying talking point when we blew such an opportunity.
Ihave to say it was not Tierney’s finest game crossing wise but then he has that mentality of “the invincibles” as he keeps going to the end and as a result he produced a great cross for Pepe to finish on a platter so I will hold onto that one positive as we are still developing that ruthlessness and future captain KT will drag us over the line on some of these days where things are not going according to plan. In time I am hopeful Partey will produce that extra thrust and drive as well in the way Vieira used to, I am just glad he got through another game unscathed.
I hope Dortmund can do something against mighty Bayern later on to put a smile back on my face. I must admit I have been thinking about the Spurs game for a few weeks it is a game I want to win badly even though Europa is more important I just want to get one over the old enemy and Mou.
@ Kev, mate me and my son were discussing the same. If its not a Red card and no penalty but why not a Corner. Its bizarre refereeing, but what is disappointing is that we are create our own problem. How can a professional footballer not able to pass to his team mate just yards away with no pressure on him. How many times we will keep doing the same mistake? how much of leeway we can provide to these professional footballers making basic errors without consequences?
That was great to watch in the 1st half until the Leno/Xhaka moment – just what was Leno thinking?
A different team came out for the second half (which is not unusual) and it was awful to watch.
End result was a useless point.
I had harbored secret ambition of top six challenge. Now I think we really have to load up for every Europa leg as if it’s a final.
New Post 🙂