The North Bank – “It’s got va-va-voom” (An Arsenal blog)

Not a whole lot going on today, to be honest. It’s very much the calm before the frenzied storm of tomorrow’s game against ManUre.

With that in mind I will be brief today ahead of a more complete match preview tomorrow.

It’s good that we have completely secured fourth spot in the league as this will take a lot of pressure off the players and allow for total focus on tomorrow’s game.

Also, it’ll allow for more playing time for the likes of Ramsey and Vela in the league as I think that it is unlikely that we will overhaul Chelsea for third, but at the same time you just never know. Should Chelsea go out on Wednesday night, it may have a knock-on effect on their weekend league game. Though the same goes for us.

Walcott has described tomorrow’s game as the biggest so far in the careers of most of our squad and with the exception of a few, he is right. Let’s hope that the occasion doesn’t get to them and that the crowd at the Emirates vocally get behind the team tomorrow because they will need all of the assistance that they can get in order to turn around the 1-0 deficit from the first leg.

There should be no complaints of tiredness from the players tomorrow as many of our key players got a breather at the weekend and so should be fresh and ready to really give it a go against ManUre.

Looking again at the Arshavin penalty incident, it is strange that even when the player that is at the centre of the incident says that it isn’t a penalty, the referee still doesn’t change his mind. The same thing happened with Robbie Fowler under a challenge from David Seaman a number of years ago when Liverpool played us at Highbury. I’m not complaining about us getting the penalty, not at all, as we had been denied one for a blatant foul on Vela earlier so maybe the Arshavin penalty was karma. All the same, if the player who is to benefit from receiving a penalty himself says it isn’t a penalty, you would imagine that the referee would take that into consideration. But, apparently that’s not on their list of things to do during a game.

Anyway, that’ll do for today. There is some more takeover doing the rounds but nothing that we haven’t read before, so no need to go into it today.

Finally, I’d like to wish the Arsenal ladies team all the best in their FA Cup final against Sunderland at Pride Park today. Let’s home they can take the cup home and put some pressure on the men’s team to get their collective fingers out and do the same. The game kicks-off at 13:00 GMT.

Take it easy.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 17:04 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.