For those saying “it is good, we can now concentrate on the league”, my guess is football is a TV show for you.
Winning trophies and days out. That is what football is about. And the League Cup can often throw up so cheeky different away days, and concludes with a trip to Wembley.
Due to the World Cup, we do have to fit games into to a shorter period of time, but “freeing up time” by being knocked out of the League Cup means nothing if you finish the season trophyless.
I also think it would have been a huge advantage getting through to the next round.
The last 16 of the League Cup is due to be played around the 19th of December – a week before Premier League football returns after the World Cup.
Even if you are in the “glad we are out camp”, you have to admit it would have been nice to have a competitive game to blow the cobwebs off prior to the game against West Ham.
I am not upset about the team Mikel Arteta put out. It was pretty much the team I expected.
And we looked decent, taking the lead with a fantastically worked goal. Then Karl Hein slipped coming out for the ball and it was penalty, 1-1.
We shouldn’t pile onto the young keeper. He is a talent and what happened is a once in a career incident.
At 1-1 we had the chance to win, but could not finish. Then we went 2-1 down and the heads seemed to drop.
For those saying “our squad is too weak, we need to improve it”…this is not exactly breaking news or an insightful take.
We all know that we need better cover for Thomas Partey, a new winger to provide competition to Gabriel and Bukayo Saka, and perhaps a new striker.
We may or may not make signings in January.
It will be a bit like last year where we won’t sign a player for the sake of it. A new signing will only be someone who is one of our top targets.
There is not point going for a 6th or 7th choice winger, who we do not really want, and then you don’t have the money in the summer to sign your 1st or 2nd choice.
Mykhailo Mudryk is a name we have been linked with a lot. If he is not available until the summer, I would rather wait than spend £15-20m on someone else who we do not want for the long term.
Some might say “that could cost us the title”, but realistically I do not think we will win the title this year. And would making a Lucas Perez-style signing really make a difference in the title chase.
Tomorrow, we need to bounce back strongly. Beat Wolves and go into the World Cup top of the league.
Wednesday, 9th November 2022. Kick-off time: 7.45pm
(4-3-2-1) Karl Hein; Cédric Soares, Rob Holding (c), William Saliba, Kieran Tierney; Albert Sambi Lokonga, Mohamed Elneny; Reiss Nelson, Fabio Vieira, (Marcus Vinicius Oliveira Alencar) Marquinhos; Eddie Nketiah.
Substitutes: Matt Turner, Ben White, Gabriel Magalhães, Granit Xhaka, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Thomas Partey, Gabriel Martinelli, Martin Ødegaard, Gabriel Jesus.
Scorers: Eddie Nketiah (19 mins)
Yellow Cards: Mohamed Elneny, Karl Hein
Arsenal Possession Percentage: 57%
Referee: Jarred Gillett
Assistant Referees: Neil Davies, Steven Meredith
Fourth Official: Andrew Madley
VAR is not in operation in this season’s Carabao Cup competition
Attendance: circa 50,000
Our team tonight is a very different Arsenal side though, chock full of confidence after our superb start to the season. We come into this match off the back of a much-deserved win over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, one that has kept us top of the Premiership. For this, the third round of the Carabao Cup match against Brighton and Hove Albion, ten changes have been made from Sunday’s team, as William Saliba keeps his place, and young Karl Hein makes his Arsenal debut in goal.
Almost immediately after the kick-off, the visitors came for us quite aggressively, and there was a free header for Julio Enciso after just a minute into the game, but fortunately he could not make the most of it, but the ball fell to our former striker Danny Welbeck, who had a shot deflected over the bar, which was a real let-off so early on in the match. A couple of minutes later, the first booking of the game occurred when Moisés Caicedo was shown the yellow card for a bad foul, and the opening stages of this match were looking to be quite scrappy. Following a period of pressure on our goal, after a quarter of an hour’s play, Fabio Vieira was desperately unlucky not to score after some sterling work by Reiss Nelson; just four minutes later, we took the lead when Reiss Nelson again ran most of the length of the pitch with the ball, neatly found Eddie Nketiah on his left side, and after controlling it, somehow curled the ball into the far corner to open the scoring tonight. Everything started to look good, until Mohamed Elneny received our first yellow card of the night for a foul, just before Solly March placed a through ball onto the path of Danny Welbeck, who was unfortunately brought down in the penalty area by our young goalkeeper Karl Hein, who appeared to slip on the greasy pitch before committing himself into the feet of the Brighton striker. Sadly, he was booked, and Danny Welbeck converted the penalty to equalise the scores. Just before the half hour mark, Eddie Nketiah had a great chance to score, when his right-footed shot from the right side of the penalty area narrowly went past the left side of the post. Both sides were creating good chances, but nothing was coming of anyone’s efforts, as the match is moving quickly from end to end. After a well-taken Kieran Tierney free-kick, Marquinhos had a good chance to grab our second of the night, but unfortunately he was intercepted by Tariq Lamptey in the visitors’ penalty area. As the minutes ticked away for the end of the first half, we started to place pressure on the visitors’ goal, and had it not been for the interceptions of Joel Veltman and Levi Colwell, we could have gone into the break with another goal under our belts, but sadly it was honours even at half time.
The second half started in the same spirit as the first one ended, and the first ten minutes of this half saw us being very unlucky in not scoring, with Reiss Nelson, Albert Sambi Lokonga and Marquinhos wasting chances, that by rights, they should have put away with ease. Despite all of our pressure, the visitors broke away, and on the fifty-eighth minute they took the lead when Jeremy Sarmiento slotted the ball to Kaoru Mitoma, whose right-footed shot from the centre of the penalty area flew past Karl Hein and ended up in the bottom right-hand corner of the net. We were visibly shaken by this goal, and five minutes later, Mikel Arteta made a double substitution when William Saliba and Marquinhos were replaced by Gabriel Martinelli and Gabriel in order to try and get something out of this match. The game appeared to level out a bit, but on the seventy-first minute, our nightmare continued when Billy Gilmour passed a simple ball to Tariq Lamptey, whose left-footed shot from the left side of our penalty area ended up in the back of the net for their third goal of the night, which means that we have an absolute mountain to climb to claw anything back now. A couple of minutes later, we made another double subsitution when Fabio Vieira and Kieran Tierney were replaced by Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko to try and make some impact on this game. A superb Cédric Soares pass found Gabriel Jesus on the edge of the Brighton penalty area, but unfortunately his shot was blocked by the opposition’s defenders, and then we appeared to spend the next few minutes trying to keep the visitors from scoring a fourth goal, and with that in mind, Granit Xhaka replaced Albert Sambi Lokonga with just ten minutes of the game remaining. We got close to scoring a second when Gabriel Jesus stroked the ball to Gabriel Martinelli, whose clever shot from the left side of the penalty area was saved quite easily by the Brighton goalkeeper. We continued to create chances to score with Gabriel and Reiss Nelson getting very close to scoring after receiving quality passes, but somehow the ball just would not go into the net, which in many ways, was the story of our evening. After six minutes of injury time, referee Jarred Gillett put us out of our misery by blowing the final whistle.
It really was a bad night for everyone. Not only did we score first, but we lacked the final push to get more goals in order to finish the match off. Instead, we allowed them to come back at us, and score three very opportunist goals, all of which could have been stopped. Okay, we didn’t put out the best team that we possibly could tonight, as there were ten replacements from the Chelsea match, but we could have done a whole lot better, particularly in the second half. Certainly a match to forget.
Remember everyone, keep the faith, get behind the team and the manager, as this season is going to be crucial for our future success in all competitions. Stick with the winners. Our next match: Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux on Saturday, 12th November at 7.45pm (Premier League). Be there, if you can. Victoria Concordia Crescit.
Steve
Too Dearly Loved To Be Forgotten: Arsenal v Racing Club de Paris 1930-1962 by Steve Ingless (Rangemore Publications, ISBN 978-1-5272-0135-4) is now available on Amazon
After our worst week of the season, we needed to bounce back and make a statement.
The media, opposing fans and Arsenal-incels had spent the last few days out from under their rocks.
“Burn Out Central” they cried after the defeat away to PSV.
We needed to make a statement and did.
5-0 did not flatter us. It could have been more as we returned to the top of the table.
This was arguably Mikel Arteta’s strongest Arsenal XI, with Ben White at right back making another claim that he should be on the plane to Qatar.
We were fantastic and showed no cobwebs from the Thursday loss to PSV.
When you look across the Premier League, you can see how European football is affecting clubs.
Chelsea were thrashed by Brighton, Liverpool lost at home to Leeds United.
Tottenham got away with it at Bournemouth, whilst Manchester City were below pair in victory against Leicester City. Manchester United also scrapped a 1-0 against West Ham.
The Hammers, meanwhile, sit just 3 points off the relegation zone.
It has been a tough October for all of these teams, each of whom played 9 games.
And the games continue to come thick and fast – with all those sides having another 4 games before the break for the World Cup in 2 weeks time.
That will be 13 games in 6 weeks. A huge workload even for a squad with the size and depth of Manchester City
It is why I was not calling crisis after the draw to Southampton.
With 7 wins from 9 games, I would be surprised if any team across Europe’s top 5 leagues won more games in October.
In the Premier League, only Newcastle got more points than Arsenal in October; and they played a game more.
Over the month, we have 4 more points than Spurs, 3 more than Man U and 6 more than Liverpool. Yet it was only Arsenal that came in for huge criticism following a single draw.
Despite winning 5-0, some still moaned. Gabriel Jesus didn’t score and Bukayo Saka was “mismanaged”. Fact these people still find something to moan about despite us being top of the league says a lot about them.
Zurich at home on Thursday should see a similar result to Sunday.
The team will be interesting with Chelsea a noon kick off Sunday, and Arsenal needing to win to top the group.
Zurich will be up for it, there won’t against Bodo/Glimt last weeks means they still have a chance of dropping into the Europa Conference.
Arteta would have hoped we would wrap the group up last week, but it didn’t happen, so expect a fairy strong team on Thursday, especially in defence.
Enjoy your day and we will discuss the team for Zurich later in the week.
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 