It’s @LaboGoon once again
“Daunting”… That’s the word many in the media space use to draw us a picture building up to our game at the Etihad. I don’t necessarily think they do this to dishearten us per se, it’s more to do with the excitement and the ‘aura’ that encompass Pep’s team at the moment.
Now let’s be fair; scoring 35 goals in 10 games, 21 in 5 home games, is nothing to scoff at. That is impressive.
With this ‘runaway train’ narrative comes the question: “Can anybody stop them?”
I found this on the Beeb:
• Mancity’s only win in the last 9 games vs Arsenal was a 1-0 PL victory at the Etihad last season.
• Arsenal have scored at least 2 goals in 8 of the last 10 fixtures, with City failing to keep a clean sheet during that period.
Now THAT is nothing to scoff at either and it does show Arsenal is the one team that can stop them.
I’m not gonna fool myself and pretend today’s game will not be difficult, because for us to get any joy we will need to put our backs in, stay focused through out (all over the pitch) and play to our potential.
Man City has been creating and scoring goals from everywhere, and for us to have any hope of getting a positive result we can not afford to be all over the place defensively. Petr Cech, the back 3 and Xhaka will need to be aware at all times and ensure their reading of the game is near perfect, as well as trying to be in the right positions at all times, especially in anticipation of something happening against the run of play.
Bringing me to this point: if there is one thing we need nothing of today, it is our propensity to give the ball away rather cheaply when on the front foot. The majority of our goals conceded is because of this and Man City will hurt us if we just gift them chances. We can expect them to make us work for it so there is no reason why we shouldn’t let them do the same.
That being said! Man-City conceded twice mid-week as well as twice vs WBA last Saturday. So Alexis, Ramsey and Lacazette can expect getting goal scoring opportunities, and against a team of this quality it’s crucial to make the most of it.
In our last game vs Man-City in the FA Cup semi-final Mesut Özil was the rock on which a brilliant Arsenal performance was built, and my wish is for him to provide us with that same composure today.
On team news there’s some mixed reports on whether Sead Kolašinac will be available. If he’s not we can expect Holding or Debuchy playing alongside Koscielny and Mertesacker with Monreal moving to the wing. Whether Sead will be available I guess we won’t know till few hours before kick-off.
Whatever happens the Arsenal will need show their testicular fortitude to keep a very good City team in check.
Brace yourselves Gooners, don’t listen to the great and good of Arsenal twatter that doesn’t give us any chance. If we can be resolute in defense and quick-witted in attack this will be an exciting game.
Good luck to everybody watching and supporting the Arsenal from all over the globe. To quote Shotta from the previous comments thread: keep the fingers and toes crossed.
If there’s one thing in the back of Pep Guardiola’s mind it’s that a game against Arsène Wenger’s chargers – be it from his time at Barça, Bayern or now City – it has never been easy. In fact it’s been quite “daunting”.
Positively Arsenal 
Morning Labo, a day of great opportunity today. Last season after a decent first half and a narrow half time lead we had a poor second. We need the concentration switched on from the first second to the last.
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Nice one Labo,
Daunting is the word, carvorting with positive vibrations is how I prefer to frame this duel. Manchester City can most definitely be beaten. Arsenal must just want it more.
Simple really.
AOL have to bring their A+ game to this one. Attack & defend like mad men.
Granit & Aaron must be supremely disciplined like they were during the FA cup SF (& Final).
I absolutely pray Kolasinac plays…at full blast.
Other Qs:
a. will it be Per or Holding alongside Kos & Nacho in CB3?
b. who gets to come on later for creative duty, Iwobi or Jack?
c. Coq or Neny on bench for DM relief?
I expect,
CECH
KOSCIELNY – MERTESACKER – MONREAL
BELLERIN – RAMSEY – XHAKA – KOLASINAC
OZIL – LACAZETTE – ALEXIS
+ MACEY, HOLDING, COQUELIN, WILSHERE, IWOBI, WALCOTT, GIROUD.
V
EDERSON
WALKER – STONES – OTAMENDI – DELPH
DEBRUYNE – FERNANDINHO – SILVA
STERLING – JESUS – SANE
+ BRAVO, DANILO, MANGALA, TOURE, GUNDOGAN, BERNARDO, AGUERO
Good luck to our team
COYG!
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Morning guys. Since that infamous 6-3 defeat at Etihad we’ve only had that one loss of last season against them. Man City seem to bring the best out in Arsenal and hopefully today will be no different.
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Good preview to start my Sunday Labo.Hope our game is as good. Daunting, yes but certainly not unachievable.
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This game is going to be very tough, though not impossible. We can hurt teams, just hope our defenders are well prepared for a rough ride, could really do with Saed for this game
Should be a very open entertaining game, which means it will be a boring 1-0 decided by a dodgy pen, but you won’t do that , will you Mr Oliver.
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A lovely post to set up the day,
Its not just the back 5 or six who will have to defend well today Ozil and especially Sanchez will have to be diciplined and support the wing backs when city have the ball and all of the front three will have to get back quickly when we lose the ball.
Obviously we cannot afford to lose the ball in dangerous areas but the game is not all about defence and one of the most important things today will be how clinical we are.
If we finish well that always hwlps the team defend and takes the pressure off and means you dont have to take risks later on in the game.
How do stop a train? you blow it up COYG.
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Our defense should be stronger than city’s this season, but for various reasons Kat hasn’t. Same with our midfield – I never thought Fernandinho was anything special.
It will be up to the attackers to make the difference today.
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Tika-tactics!
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Fernandinhio must have nightmares about playing opposite Ozil but it’s iwobi who he’ll need to worry about.
Gives away possession following pressure from Iwobi, leads to an Arsenal corner, City follow up with their first counter of the day comes to naught.
Hopefully the contest we hoped for.
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8 mins in City win a fk and try to get some possession.
Arsenal counter and Stones avoids the early yellow (it’s usually a yellow for stopping a counter attack like that).
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Sane scares me
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City with the best early chance so far.
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KDB scares me more the Sane.
The only consolation there is that this player completely exposes the charlatan from across Manchester for the fraud that he is.
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Fucking hell City are good.
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Yes they are good.
Barcelona and Bayern in light blue.
However their goal should have been stopped in my view by Czech and could have be avoided of they had not tried to pass out if defence and booted it out.
After letting in so many goals because if that you might have thought that they would stop doing it
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The best money can buy PG…
I wonder what Pep is compensating for. Maybe I should ask Troy Deeney.
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That final ball……
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Lava on – Iwobi off ?
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FFs that looked a bit soft, again. We concede pens like that on a regular basis but rarely given them
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Not getting the rub of the green with this ref today, surprising as that is
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Can see us getting a red if not careful in this game. Nicely worked goal for lacca
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Match officials decisions only appear to be going one direction.
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And now an offside goal. We are being cheated out of this game. Again.
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Won’t hear a peep out of the media about this cheating display of course. It will be Arsenals defence switching off for the offside, naive for the sterling dive etc
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I fancied we had the bastards – I was wrong
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why is it so hard to allow the same rules for both sides? soft pen, off side goal
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Why do we have to listen to such biased commentators.
If they want to admire man $ity then they should be doing that not on air.
The lack of impartiality added to clear ignorance of the rules makes it quite obnoxious.
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That third goal looked like off side to me.
None-the-less, City were better than us. Just that little more switched on. Again, they were better at anticipating where the ball will drop after a ricochet.
Santi is our Silva. We really miss him. Wilshere was impressive in the few minutes he had. My worry with him, as with all our beautiful players, is injuries.
I’m not completely sold on Xhaka.
I think we can still get into the top four.
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For the third time in this fairly young season, we have been cheated out of points by inept/biased or worse, officials.
City are hard enough to beat play against, without officials who gave them absolutely everything.
No, it does not even itself out. I expect more of the same when we play Spurs, their serial divers must love playing is.
When Wenger decides to call it a day, perhaps this systemic media/PGMOL problem might even go with him, but if not, I hope he is replaced by the most wily streetwise manager who finds a way to put us on something resembling a level playing field.
That was a disgrace to football. MOTD will find an angle to suggest a hair on sterlings leg was brushed, or something to suggest two players were not offside for the goal, but we all know what we saw today, and at least two other matches this season.
I had a feeling Oliver would award a dodgy pen, posted as much on here An untold article only reinforced this view.
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Well well what else is new in the PL universe. 2 offside goals against the Arsenal!
Nah, we’ve seen that before.
Not much to whine about when you’re blatantly cheated again and again and again.
Well played by our team. What they expect of us might never manifest for as long as human beings dorm the red & white.
Well done to the cheating ref and linesmen.
We know who you are and one day the truth will reveal itself.
It used to be just a game. Now the betting, the agents and the mindless minions have their greedy myopic hands all up on it.
A disgrace is an understatement.
In a world where regular lives are being marginalized every second, where else can football go.
Universal law awaits.
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That’s three out of the last four league games involving Oliver where he has given dodgy divey pens against us. Today, then at Palace and Tottenham last April. He graciously spared us at Chelsea this season.
Also, now consecutive games at the etihad where there have been offside goals against us, last seasons really turned the game. On top of the infamous 6-3 up there of course.
How does Wenger keep going?
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for the BBC commentator to say this tells u how bad the refs are. I think this affects players like Hleb, Van Persie and Co choosing to go at times, just my thoughts…
Almost as if there is something against the arsenal
FULL-TIME
Manchester City 3-1 Arsenal
Arsenal didn’t get the rub of the green with decisions but City was by far the better side.
Fabian Delph looks to have picked up an injury too, one to watch.
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Pretty low after that. Hard enough to accept they are..ah, they’re a better team than us, but yet again to suffer with crucial big calls against us…very hard to take.
See no end to us getting screwed on those calls. Could take us becoming much more cynical in all respects- on and off pitch- some time after Wenger has gone, could take us joining the billionaire sugar daddy club (and becoming more cynical with it)…VAR could help some. The compromising photos of Riley being found. Anyway, no end in sight
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No credit for them being the better team from here by the way. Switch our spending patterns and we’d be the ones on top, by more most likely
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Hmm. 12 penalties against Arsenal for this season so far. Mr Wenger says today’s pen was soft. I didn’t see the match but he simply confirms the data I published last season. It showed the PGMO bias vs Arsenal is most evident in the Penalties Against. 20 years of data showed we were among the lowest in the top-6 for Penalties Against. Hope all illusions about Oliver being independent of the PGMOB has been shattered. He is just more clever than most of Riley’s minions.
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I’ve all but given up caring. Obviously need to see the match but to hear yet again that we’ve been diddled is no less than I expected.
Maybe one year if we stop competing we might get even officiating.
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Rich, not sure it will end, but sense things may improve when Wenger has gone.
Just think there are systems, things going on amongst clubs in this league, agents, the media that Wenger refuses to have anything whatsoever to do with, so not only do his team regularly suffer calls like we got today, media BS , it may also mean that teams who do play the game a bit more are protected.
Maybe I read too much into this, but to me, there is clear evidence things are not right,it happens too often against, and not enough for to balance things out.
Make no mistake, we were not robbed today, they were the better team , as they should be, but those were two terrible calls, as posted earlier, we are suffering at the hands of Oliver and his pens.But we were robbed at Stoke and Watford.
When Wenger knows, perhaps we need a canny old fox like Ancelotti to improve thing.
That said, I completely back Wengers stance, this club are clean and do things the right way, Wenger refers to it as values. I just do not underestimate what he seems to be increasingly up against, and I also wonder how much longer he will put up with it.
I cannot imagine what it must be like for our defenders, they know that with absolutely minimal contact, if any, an opponent will go down, and will stand a great chance of being rewarded in a way that our players are not.
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Didn’t get to see the game, but when I listened to the BBC report after the game and listened to them say that Arsenal were clearly on the “wrong side of the decisions”, with a “debatable penalty” and a “clearly offside” goal, I knew it had to be another one of those awful PGMOL fit up jobs, and looking at the comments on here, it seems my instincts were correct.
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On the offside goal
You have seen what I have seen. The fact that you tell me it’s an offside goal shows enough.
I didn’t want to take away from their quality but it happened at a moment when we were really in the game at 2-1 and it killed the game.
We came here last year and conceded two offside goals and now it’s one again this year.
Apart from that I thought we started well in the first 10 minutes, after we suffered because we played too deep then we came back into the game.
Second half was an even game. We were dangerous on counter attacks.
I felt we put a lot of effort in and at 2-1 we felt we could come back. 3-1 for them was immense relief and an unexpected present.
At 3-1 of course we had to go forward, we played with four offensive players and every counter attack it looks like they can score a goal.
But it was the history of the game that made that.
On whether things would have been different if Ramsey had scored just before half time
I don’t know. We knew before the game we would have some moments where we suffered, we tried to be solid at the back.
Before the game I knew we could be in trouble with their pass because of the strikers they’ve got and that’s why we tried to play our usual system.
When you go 2-0 down of course you have to take a gamble. After that I felt we were more in the game.
Can you explain why Coquelin played at centre-back
I can explain to you that Mertesacker came in yesterday morning sick and that Holding had a thigh strain. Debuchy just comes back from a long time absent.
I don’t see that as a big problem. To play in the middle, if you are a defensive midfielder it is exactly the same.
I don’t think that was a problem in our game.
On Alexis Sanchez’s performance
I felt in a difficult moment of the game he did very well because he was on his own up front.
I felt in the first half he was sharp but did not have enough support. Overall I think he gave everything.
It was a huge mental test for him but I had no doubts before the game.
I know that he is focused and wants to win.
On Manchester City
Can anyone stop them? It will be difficult this season. The way they have started and with the quality they have.
They will be difficult to stop but you never know. At home if they have decisions like that they will be unstoppable.
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Nice pic Eduardo, two players offside, poor decision, again.
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oddly though Mandy I have seen many Arsenal bloggers and twitter experts blame several of our players for the third goal, Xhaka for not tracking back, Monreal for stopping for an offside(yeah I kid you not), Koscielny for not stepping up(God how many players do we have to play offside for some of our fans to admit the defenders got it right.
I’ve seen some blame Monreal for the penalty, I do laugh when fans blame our defenders for opponents dives being awarded a penalty, of course it does not fit their blame Wenger/player x, y or z, the board etc etc, very odd indeed that they just never blame officials for getting it wrong.
on the topic of blame, I see in several match rating articles Ramsey and Ozil getting a lot of blame, but Alexis who despite being given lower marks overlooked for any blame, its almost as if these bloggers have an agenda against some of our players
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Manchester United under Jose Mourinho away against the Premier League’s top six: W0 D3 L4 (one goal scored)
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Orbinho @Orbinho
Win % M Oliver as ref
Man C 69%
Leics 64%
Chelsea 55%
Spurs 54%
Man U 43%
Liv 42%
Sou 36%
Stoke 35%
Eve 31%
WBA 30%
Swa 29%
CPal 27%
Ars 20%
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Strange, blame being apportioned to any members of a team playing twelve men, including one of the most expensively assembled squads ever put together.
So many just want change now, for changes sake, I fear they may even get it sooner that some may think, Wenger must be so weary of this bs,,and the undoubted affect it is having on the players.
Not at our best today,very hard to be when a ref signals his intentions in the way he did, but we were up against a team financed by a rich state, managed by one of the best going, who also happens to know what he can get away with , and uses it to the max.
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Seems Oliver is the new mike Dean.
On that subject, Dean, Swarbrick or Atkinson for the Spuds?
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Looks like Usmanov under a bit of investigation for Everton links
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panarama doing a program on usmanov’s links to Everton
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