Good morning all.
Later this afternoon we play Bate in a far flung freezing land. Perhaps not the most skillful of opponents, but certainly testing conditions. It will be something of a shock if we don’t return to London with three points in the bag.
After the result pulled off by our nearest, but far from dearest, neighbours last night ,against stellar opponents it would be nice if we impressed ourselves. This competition is Mr. Emery’s specialist subject, so there is zero chance of him allowing complacency.
Quite what sort of a team we will go with is beyond my powers of deduction, but I would guess it will be fairly strong. Of course we wont see Ozil or Ramsey, but we are used to that now and after the weekend I think we can be confident that Iwobi and Mkhitaryan won’t let anyone down.
I would expect Papastathopoulos (I had to google that spelling) to get some sort of a run out but whether that means starting is less certain.
This competition is our last hope of silverware this season and although it may be very much a second tier competition, it would be great to win it. Especially as I feel it is also our best hope of Champions League qualification.
So come on Unai and the boys. we are all behind you. Give us a treat.
Positively Arsenal 
Positively Mary Celeste
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If the road to next seasons Champions League means we’ll have to travel to Eastern Europe, so be it, and it’s said that Emery is a specialist in winning Europa games, not entirely sure what that means other than “beating farmers” but I hopes it happen.
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Lol @ first comment.
I guess I should be excited about matchday, but I’m not. Hopefully closer to kickoff. It is an important game for us after all. Until then, I’m trying to lay off commenting on anything beyond the game.
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In the football world when your rivals get a good result you can normally bet your life your gonna play shit. When four games in the CL include PL clubs strangely if the two Tuesday games go well then then the Wednesday is a cluster fuck.
So just a win would do tonight leaving the performance or a young team for the second leg.
When there is loads of crap off the pitch just getting results is the best way to remind everyone football is really about the white spherical thing on the long retangular green thing.
Of course I’m hoping for a masterclass and 27 goals, no injuries, no bookings but I’ll be happy with an ARSENAL win tonight COYG.
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Hoping this can be the tournament that can give this team under Emery a bit of a lift off and maybe take the shackles off the moneymen that seem to swarm the club.
It is also the tournament that may even have saved Wenger, had he wanted that, had it not been for some spectacularly poor finishing/ defending against Athleti, but that was then.
Tottenham shouldnt matter, though i do hate it when the UK media get a reason to gloat. This game is usually cyclical unless there is a large amount of money, or a Wenger or Fergie involved, things can change very quickly.
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I know I shouldn’t say it, I really do, but it just feels like the club have returned to the Zone of Ordinariness, somewhere we’ve not been since the early-mid 1990’s. A time when a draw or defeat was the average expectation, the occasional win a pleasant surprise.
Wenger made The Arsenal extra special, a place of high interest and stratospheric expectation. We may have often been ‘open at the back’ but we lived for our attack, our co-ordinated displays of pace and cohesion. We became accustomed to the thrill of every game.
When we the fans finally said ‘enough’, in the absence of substantial investment, we were always likely to return to a place in the league more fitting for our expenditure.
Where we are today, details aside, is hardly Emery’s fault. Yet the lack of interest here at PA is symptomatic of the wider lack of interest in our fortunes. Our expectations have been lowered and lowered to the point we are no longer anticipating the excitement we took for granted for 20+ years.
I wouldn’t mind betting some of us hadn’t realised we have a game on tonight.
Well, we always DID say ‘careful what you wish for’.
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If you are correct AA,hope the Kroenkes realise that wont help their global branding.
The Premier League clubs will always have a degree of revenue and some marketability worldwide,but a successful club will generate a hell of a lot more, than say, a Southampton or Everton.
I believe Emery is blameless, as are the players,and back them fully, but sounding like someone really needs to get a grip on this club from the top. if the owners want to be pretty absent, or as much as they outwardly appear to be at least, a shame, but that is their prerogative, but they need to get this TD appointment right. And they done need any cliques forming.
If our reported budgets are correct, we are going to have to be very smart,as it seems a significant number of teams in this league will be able to outspend us, something I find unfathomable, again, if these reports are correct. A rich club with high revenues, a stadium well on the way to being paid for, a wonderful location,we should have a very bright future,unless there is something we do not know about
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Arsenal FC
Verified account @Arsenal
17m17 minutes ago
🚨 TEAM NEWS
🔘 Cech starts in goal
🔘 Xhaka back from injury
🔘 Lacazette leads the line
https://pbs.twimg.com/ad_img/1096086465170341888/FPGo_vTW?format=jpg&name=orig
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Quite simply COYG
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David Ornstein
Verified account @bbcsport_david
Replying to @DailyCannon
This isn’t what I said. The @CannonInsider quote has a crucial grammatical error + is out of context. I say it’s what some I’ve spoken to think. I also gave my understanding: a deal was close. Story is wrong + damaging, please remove & listen to what I said on podcast. Tks. David
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Ahem. Ornstein has something to say.
Now, come on boys!!!
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Darn! Eddy still beat me to it.
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And now that the original story has been deleted because Ornstein came for them, I’ll tell you that it pushed the “Ramsey never intended to sign, always wanted to leave on a free, his agent played Arsenal” bullshit narrative.
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well alabama i did say the other day that ornstein was being misquoted
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a needless foul and booking for xhaka
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Trust the assorted clickbaiters on Twitter, who are always trying to gain eyeball to twist quotes from Ornstein to suggest Ramsey was at fault in this act of deception by the new Arsenal management. @ArsenalAndrew was absolutely correct at UFV in his description of the decline in values at AFC. He is also correct today in describing the growing lack of interest in Europa League games. Continue down this road and the club will lose many ordinary fans.
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now that was not very clever defending, bate take the lead
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HT: Bate 1-0 Arsenal
AFC started very brightly, then got bogged down, bate with a few good chances too, then a free header six yards out at a freekick see Bate take the lead on the stroke of half time.
need to get our tempo and passing going again in the second half if we are to win this. several of our players need to step up their performance
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poor defending, and the customary pre half time brain fart. How many times has that happened this season?
Hopefully the script reads to a better second half
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lacca goal rightly ruled out for offside
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about then minutes left and we are not looking any more likely to pull this out of the fire
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lacazette rightly sent off
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Lacca is a silly boy, was being fouled, and walked straight into that
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FT: Bate 1-0 Arsenal
Its great that we have progressed so much from last season, after all we only beat this lot 4-2 away then, this is so much better, is it not.
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Poor old Arsenal. The game should have been sweet relief and now we need pain relief.
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Too slow in movement. Nobody moving into spaces. Huge gap in the number 10 position.
Only picked up after Laca was sent off. He rightly got a red. But the guy who made the full should have got a yellow I thought.
Suarez seems slower than Ozil.
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UE should be congratulated having turned a reasonably good attacking team into one of mind-numbing mediocrity in less than 6 months so that they lose to a team that has not played a competitive game for weeks.
I hope the wobs are satisfied with what they have done
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this was BATE Borisov’s first competitive game since 13th December
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jigsol the WOB are on twitter right now blaming Wenger for this, really they are.
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Dearie me, that was not attractive.
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Maybe they could vary the attack by a route other than Kola?
Poor as that was, still reckon we are going through though. Know the Kroenkes don’t seem the most challenging of owners, but I suspect Emery will be put on the naughty step if he goes out to this team.
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7 defeats in our last 14 games, 6 wins, 1 draw, 22 goals scored, 23 goals conceded
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Edward, I believe it, but don’t understand it.
AW bought and trained players to be skilful and intuitive.
UE does not want that. He seems to want players that do what he wants, at the expense of their skill.
The players we have or some of them simply cannot do it or are so confused that they make mistake after mistake.
Surely when you lose the skill, and do nothing but press, you are no better than Stoke, which, it seems is where we are now.
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jjgsol
there is another option. That the players just don’t want to.
This has never occurred to me before, but surely the players we have didn’t sign up for this sort of football. Auba n Laca came to a club which had Mesut Ozil and they would have expected to be running onto his through passes. Tough as it’s been for us, and how we question the treatment of Ozil n Ramsey, I wonder what the players think of this. It’s been 8 months and were it only a matter of being confused we should be getting better by now. Instead it seems we’re getting worse. And the way Laca lashed out today, was to do him being fouled, but it kind of seemed like he’d just had enough with it all.
These players were all Wenger and Sven’s signings. They knew the sort of team they were building. It certainly wasn’t built for this kind of setup.
Still, I’m sure we’ll go through this round.
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shard I’m more of the opinion that the treatment of Ozil and Ramsey for tactical reasons, has seen many of the players question what Emery is trying to do, and any of you that have played team sport have probably experienced the effects it has on a team when the players think the manager is getting it wrong.
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I think you are correct as well.
The question I have asked before and seems to have been ignored is why was UE so unsuccessful at PSG, when he had all the money to buy he could ask for.
Could the be, the same as we are seeing in that the players are unable or unwilling to play the style of football that UE demands?
He could not cope with managing Neymar, most probably one of the top players in the world, possibly because Neymar wanted to play football and not run around like a lunatic closing down opponents.
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Goes beyond Neymar. Draxler blamed Emery’s caution/cowardice in the Real Madrid loss. They needed 2 goals, Draxler was set to come on, and PSG scored so Emery held the sub.. Draxler begged with him to be let on cos they still needed to score, and Emery then only made the change when it was too late.
The way he comes across to me is as a control freak. Probably defines his ‘detailed’ training sessions, and why going attacking and ceding some control to the vagaries of chance scares him.
He seems a decent enough guy and I don’t dislike him. But there is no way he’s doing what he was hired to do (Unless he was hired by Raul. Do Gazidis n Sven even speak Spanish? Was there a translator other than Raul in the room? That sounds like a joke, but I’m only half joking)
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well at least Emery has given the wob want they have been calling for, a balanced team, its now poor in attack as well as in defense, how much more balanced can you get than that
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Ed
You’re right. It would affect them. I think it is affecting them.
Ozil liked a post on Instagram telling him to stay strong and prove that idiot Emery and everyone else wrong. Lol. This is not what you’d expect from Arsenal. But Ozil doesn’t suffer fools. Neither does Ramsey. Maybe that’s also why they are being sidelined? I did think it was political in addition to financial. Tactical? Who knows with Emery. Probably that too. Whatever it is, today I got the impression the players don’t like playing for him.
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New post is up
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interesting shard about ozil liking that tweet, as for me it seems Ozil has with his own tweets suggested on several occasions now that he has been left out of the squad that he was fit and available. as you say, he does not suffer fools, he has called out journos, ex players, pundits, so I doubt he would be adverse to letting the world know that he is fit and available when its being suggested by the manager he is not available, or needed.
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Bloody hell the revisionists on Gnabry FFS
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