Two goals just before half time ultimately condemned Arsenal to defeat against the Premier League champions in a high-profile money-spinning friendly game in Beijing’s National Stadium.
Arsenal actually had the upper hand for the entire game, but two defensive lapses let them down. And guess what? The Arsenal fanbase went ape-poo.
Reading through twitter, the bile was incredible. I’ll quote, but not name the people (wouldn’t want to embarrass them).
“Arsenal get trounced by City, welcome to life without Van Persie #depressing”. (This person had previously stated he wasn’t watching the game).
“Omfg Arse are a joke now wenger ruin this club he sign nobody sell best players no reason get him out”.
“Gibbs, Jenks, Diaby, Gerv GET THEM OUT #WENGEROUT”.
Now let me start by making one thing clear. This was a friendly game. History has proven that friendly games have no bearing on what a team’s performance will be like in the coming season. For example, our delightful neighbours Spurs once beat Roma 5-0 in a pre-season friendly, and were bottom of the league by October.
Friendly games only exist to re-establish match fitness, identify which players need more training or maybe need to be loaned out. If you win, then great, if you lose, oh well, more to practise.
Arsenal had a huge amount of positives to take from this game. Abou Diaby appears completely fixed and is playing well to boot. Gervinho was dangerous playing as a centre forward, and Alex-Oxlade Chamberlain and Aneke gave excellent performances in the second half. Indeed, the two goals were largely the fault of Carl Jenkinson, who won’t be playing right-back when the season starts.
Manchester City were playing their first-choice forward line of Tevez and Aguero, and Arsenal’s centre back pairing (again not entirely first-choice) kept them quiet throughout. Yaya Toure was City’s largest threat, and it took individual errors to let him in. Only idiots like the journalists who claim that “Arsenal are miles behind City by evidence of today’s friendly” could say that Arsenal weren’t the better team today.
And Arsenal have left most of their best players at home! Lukas Podolski and Olivier Giroud, our main strikers, weren’t there. Sagna, our first choice right back is recovering from injury, while Laurent Koscielny (current flavour of the month after his new deal) is regaining his fitness. It’s fair to say if Arsenal were playing those players the result would have been largely different, (still a friendly though).
Another group of tweets were the ones who said things like “this shows Arsenal need to spend some money”. Ignoring their little cognitive bias ignoring the 22M splashed on our new numbers 10 and 12, Arsenal now look set to bring in Nuri Sahin on a year’s loan and Santi Cazorla, after he had a fall-out with Malaga over unpaid wages and unfulfilled promises. There’s two top-quality midfielders who would be exciting signings for anyone, though I expect some of the unappeasable fans will still be disappointed.
Sure, our defence needs a bit of work, and our finishing wasn’t great. But Arsenal outplayed City today, and it would take a fool to claim that Arsenal are anything other than on the up.
Latest:
