Wednesday, December 16th 2:45PM EST Turf Moor Recent form: Burnley: W-D-D-L-L-D Arsenal: W-W-L-L-W-W Recent squads: Burnley: Jensen, Mears, Jordan, Carlisle, Caldwell, Alexander, Bikey, Eagles, Guerrero, Fletcher, Blake, Elliott, MacDonald, Guerrero, Nugent, Penny, Kalvenes, Gudjonsson, Thompson. Arsenal: Almunia, Sagna, Gallas, Vermaelen, Traore, Denilson, Song, Fabregas, Nasri, Walcott, Arshavin, Silvestre, Diaby, Ramsey, Fabianski, Wilshire, Eduardo, Vela.
Arsenal may rest some starters with Stoke City coming up this weekend. Burnley is winless in five but are not to be underestimated.
Looking forward to this one. I'm hoping Arshavin is on a rage-spree and will start scoring left-and-right. Also, Burnley's defender's severely lack pace so hopefully we can rip them up with some nice one-touch football.
I slept in, so I only caught the second half. Big blunder by Almunia almost cost us. I haven't been sure about any of our keepers since Seaman. Almunia regularly makes bad blunders, I don't rate Fabianski at all (is shocking at coming out to close down defenders, and too short to deal with crosses), at the moment Manone may be the best of the three but he’s young and prone to brain fades. I like our possession based gameplay, but it needs one of two (or both) things to be successful: A killer pass – this is what Cesc is great at, and occasionally Van Persie, Arshavin, and Nasri. It’s very hard to pull off though, and is a very risky strategy to only rely on this to score. Fast movement of the ball, and off the ball – we rarely seem to do this, you can have all the possession you want, but if the movement is slow, it gives the defence time to react. A lot of the time we seem very half hearted in our efforts, but when we step things up we look immeasurably better. One of the main problems I have is that we look passive, or timid. Players regularly seem to take the safe option of retaining possession, instead of being aggressive. We wait for other teams to make a mistake, rather than making something happen. I think defences in the EPL are now far too good for us to play this way. Stack your defence, let us pass it around, press us so we can’t play the killer ball, and hit us on the counter; it’s pretty simple. I reckon this is one of the reasons we usually play far better against tougher opposition, and in Europe; because they’re not afraid to attack us.
