It looked like a day more suitable for diving equipment and rubber ducks than playing the beautiful game. After the effort put in against Bayern on Tuesday it seemed rather unfortunate that Mother Nature should give Everton a weather  advantage to go with many tired legs on our side. Even our Duracell bunnies seemed a little off the pace. But this Arsenal is a different animal to many we’ve seen before and fully deserved the 2-1 win.

With three changes to the side, we still looked sharper than the toffees and Mesut proved he has one of the finest football brains on show. Equally Petr Cech proved that he is truly in a class of his own with some outstanding keeping.

And what about Olly Giroud? Replacing Theo in the line up he also had a stunning game which deserved better reward than his one headed goal from the Wizard of Oz’s pin point cross. His shot that hit the bar in the second half deserved a goal.

Within a minute or so, Kos doubled our lead from Santi’s cross and bearing in mind their performance against ManU perhaps some of us started thinking back to the 7-0 hammering we gave them several years ago.  This was not to be regrettably and  from one Everton breakaway started by the Ox’s mistake, Barclay went through and scored via a massive deflection from the Archangel who in my mind should be credited with our 5^th OG of the season as Petr had the ball well covered. In fairness, Barclay probably deserved to be credited with the goal, he played as well as he was allowed and Gabriel had such a good game that to sully it with a negative may be an unfair reflection. Certainly his late in the game tackle on Lukaku followed by such a happy flashing of his tombstone teeth was a joy.

A thought on the Ox…is he perhaps trying too hard? He’s a far better player than his performances suggest and neither his attacking nor defensive roles are in tune at the moment. He probably needs a good run to get his confidence back.

Despite going into a far more defensive mode in the second half, we still created several chances and apart from Olly’s hitting the bar, Oz was also unlucky with a shot that clipped the outside of the post. The defensive duties were ably carried out by all concerned, Le Coq unperturbed by a soft yellow card that Mason gave him early doors, maybe in retaliation for the second card that he hadn’t given him earlier in the season.

Barry getting a red card was unfortunately too late for us to take advantage.

So top of the league for the time being, a chance to rest many against Wednesday and maybe to see some new faces, and then the Swans. A definite need for a bit of payback there.

Guten Morgen Positivistas,

A foul morning in NW Norfolk but a lightness of touch in the fingers as I sit down for another day of digital derring-do.

What a night eh !

My impression of Us ?

A massive EFFORT from every player in red, and one in orange. They applied themselves throughout the 94 minutes, for every minute and every second. A plan had been worked out, it had to be. That performance was not spontaneous, it was not thought up ‘on the hoof’. It was designed and efficiently executed.

I admit, in my weakness and at times, I began to doubt the wisdom of allowing the opposition so much of the ball. Surely to allow players of calibre and speed we were facing that amount of time/space/possession 30-40 metres out is to invite calamity ??

But no! As the Germans tried to take the game into the scoring zone the door slammed shut in their faces, their runs were frustrated, their shots sometimes high, sometimes wide and when on target our keeper dealt with them effectively and with no theatrical flourish. Not once all evening were we opened up. Not once did Mr Cakir have a hard question put to him about any ‘incident’ in the Arsenal box.

After careful overnight reflection I have come to the inescapable conclusion that was probably the best Arsenal defence performance I have ever had the pleasure of watching, taking into account the quality of the opposition.

I am sure you each have a favourite performer on the night, some for the spectacular and decisive moment, other you will have chosen for a relentless contribution to victory over 94 minutes. However I shall name no names among our lads as man or men of the match. All 14 were equally responsible. Had one failed to concentrate, to keep their foot firmly on the writhing Bavarian serpent then we should surely have failed.

And our opponents ?

A magnificent football team. Hugely impressive in the confidence of their passing, one touch, bang and the ball is gone, 10-15 metre passes all night. I imagine that style of play is incredibly hard to play against. The moment you go to the player with the ball it is gone. As you concentrate players on one side of the defence the ball is the other side of the pitch.

Unlike Guardiola’s earlier Barca sides there is no ‘tippy-tappy’, every ball seemed to have a purpose. The one thing they do have exactly in the style of FCB c. 2011 is their style of play without the ball, and particularly in the first half it showed. If the visitors lost possession a posse of black shirts would surround the Arsenal player and the slip retrieved. It took us the first half to really get to grips with that intensity.

The stand out individual in black ? Douglas Costa is good, a bit of quality. A classic winger, quick feet, can go inside and out, difficult to knock off the ball. Having read the aggregated efforts of Her Majesty’s Press Corps ( Sports battalion) this morning I saw that, apparently, Hector Bellerin put in a poor performance. Utter nonsense in my view. Costa put in an outstanding performance and left poor Hector on his arse a couple of times first half. That however is a mark of Costa’s quality, not Bellerin’s ineptitude. Our young Spaniard however stuck to his job, stayed with Costa, frustrated the Munich wingman, and eventually mastered the Brazilian. It was Costa who faded, not Hector. Pep is not an idiot. He knew the race had been run for Douglas and why.

The final observation I can offer is one that comes from being in the ground last night. So detached was I from what was actually going on that I thought the second goal was the final whistle. I was baffled to see Bayern kicking off again !

However because as a spectator I am not locked in to the action for 94 minutes it gave me the opportunity to look at other things, and one thing tat struck me is how ‘SLY’ Bayern are. This is not a criticism as such but every opportunity they had to gain even a tiny advantage, for example slow the taking of an Arsenal free kick down, they took it. Nothing is wasted, no incident too trivial to try and screw some benefit from. I contrasted that approach with, at one point, Theo sportingly giving the ball back only to see the Germans take advantage as we were unprepared for their quick effort. There is a lesson there, somewhere.

Enjoy your day.

Good morning Positivistas far and near,

Grey and quiet at 9.00 on Sunday morning in Norfolk. Another week and those leaves will be down.

A formidably straightforward task this morning in reviewing an entirely straightforward away win at Vicarage Road. Like any sane Arsenal fan I travelled, in my mind’s eye admittedly, up the line to Watford through Metroland, with a degree of caution as to what might await against a home side whose first eight games in the PL this time have earned them respect and a few well won points. I anticipated a vigorous work out and a win by the odd goal. With the unexpected win by the red Mancs at Goodison my irritation edged up a notch before kick off.

Within three minutes my apprehension had been quelled as we took control of the ball, and the game, and the contest settled into the pattern that it would more or less follow for the next 90 minutes. We probed Watford, sharp movement and intelligent use of the ball, they defended in numbers and sensibly. They had their plan, which consisted of hanging on to the point they started with, and we had ours that consisted of depriving them of the pleasure. Commendably there was no rough stuff from the home side and only the occasional bit of deceitful theatre. Mr Jones I thought had pleasant afternoon with little to do.

We made a number of decent chances first half that on another day would have seen us go in 2 or 3 ahead at half time. One sticks in my mind but I shall name no names but he made up for it after half time. The others were a split second of timing off or a the ball a half a yard beyond an outstretched foot. Gomes did well, albeit with a bit of panicked scurrying.

Watford were not entirely supine and Deeney and Ighalo posed us some problems. Cech made his one save of the evening and Kosc and Hector had to tidy up but that was about that as far as I recall. Nothing wrong with Kosc’s hamstrings apparently. I am sure Watford are good enough to stay up but they really need to sign a world class striker etcetera etcetera

Oranges sucked Jones got us underway for the second half and I sensed a little more vim in our approach, an extra sharpness of movement, though that may have been wishful thinking on my part.

The hour bell rang and suddenly Watford’s roof fell in. What we had been threatening to do all afternoon we finally did, Alexis, Giroo and finally Aaron put away what were effectively three consecutive chances. Whether the home side had run out of energy at the hour I don’t know. There was an interesting remark by Redknapp (I think) who spotted Capoue had stopped running for our first goal, the will to resist he had managed thus far having apparently run out of his laceholes.

The remaining 20 minutes or so both sides went through the motions. Watford’s crowd did their best to keep the players spirits up, we had one eye on Tuesday. Ozil and Sanchez hooked, Olivier could have had a second but it was Gomes’ lucky day. The Ox looked a little frustrated, for his brief cameo, the boy was trying too hard I thought. Relax son, relax.

No injuries I heard of, Arsene may be weighing up Per’s experience against Gabriel’s speed for Tuesday. No doubt hindsight will determine the correctness of his choice.

So as we trudge back to Watford High Street with three points collected, we are back on to Citeh’s shoulder. “Thank you very much, enjoyed ourselves”. “Oh do come again” “We certainly shall”.

On a final point I was incredulous to read on the Arse.com report of the game the following;

“Until the hour mark this game looked like it could go either way.”

As a famous American football owner once said “WHAT are they smoking down there ? “

They broke the news today, oh boy …

Another day, another sporting dollar and so the week begins with many column inches in newspapers filled with a certain kind of journalistic copy.

Whatever is written in one outlet is rarely too far removed from what will appear elsewhere. The fear of being separated from the media herd is a great motivator for all but the bravest and most established writers to avoid delving too deeply into what may actually be going on in the lives of the players, their managers and our clubs. Instead, we tend to get a perpetual rehashing of last week’s news with new added ingredients intended merely to support the existing ‘wisdom’ rather than challenge anything too seriously.

Unlike, for example, the financial media, whose journalists’ entire raison d’etre is to seek out and identify development, trend and change, the sporting pack is an altogether different beast.

The football media in particular is largely dominated by simpletons writing for, dare I suggest it, simpletons.

There are worthy journalistic exceptions to this observation, just as not all football fans are thick and/or illiterate. The hallmark of any simpleton is the degree to which they are comfortable with the realities of their world (or sporting) view being represented in black and white terms.

As we know from too many of our own agenda-fed fans, players are either ‘rubbish’ or ‘brilliant’. Yet the reality is prone to impact from all manner of variables I don’t need to list here.

So at the moment, it’s Martial Awe time and the fall guy is Giroud.

But the crowd-following mentality is no respecter of reputation, form or even history, no matter how recent. One of the most shaming media moments was the scandal of Mesut Ozil, whom we were most unreliably informed was one caught bang-to-rights not earning a living. According to the headline above Neil Ashton’s low-point Daily Mail article back in March 2014:

“Lost and lazy Ozil might have cost Arsenal £42.5m but he isn’t worth two-bob … and he’s nicking a living.”

So there you have it, one of the finest footballers of his generation, with almost 100 caps for Germany at all levels, 105 caps for Real Madrid and the small matter of a World Cup winners’ medal, is (at at least in 2014) not worth “two-bob”.

Theo Walcott, miraculously playing at the highest levels despite, according to Alan Hansen, doing so without a football brain, is also one who effortlessly decries the reputation of sections of our sports media, themselves widely guilty of multiple write-offs of the player over the years, simply by his very presence in the current Arsenal and England sides.

The kids that you supposedly could never win anything with, went on to win a European Cup-led treble, defying the hapless Hansen defined odds and providing the former Liverpool defender with little to defend his somewhat shredded reputation. The only surprise was how long Alan’s media career managed to continue; ironically, maybe that might be considered a heist of sorts.

But when someone with a media profile like Hansen could condemn players largely on a whim and without troubling themselves with detail such as ‘evidence’, then it is far easier for lesser lights like Ashton, Durham and others to come out with unsupported, unsubstantiated judgements which has the potential to do real and lasting damage to the careers of their chosen targets. This becomes especially true as their myth-making gets picked up by those of a less critical disposition and repeated over and over until they either become ‘true’ or, as in Ashton and Hansen’s cases, are shown up for the short-sighted and, frankly malicious comments they originally were.

Where it gets marginally more entertaining is when players are appearing to move from being ‘brilliant’ back to (relative) ‘shit’ as currently appears to be the case with Rooney and last season Spud-wonder Kane. There is that delicious opening up of a journalistic no-man’s land as the media shy away from the evidence of their own eyes of Rooney’s decline (legs’ gone?) and Kane’s apparent loss of confidence (head’s gone?).

The reality?

Probably neither have turned to ‘shit’ overnight but Wayne’s decline is likely matched by his struggles to motivate himself in the twilight of a patchy career that saw his international form in tournaments never truly replicate his club contribution. Kane is young enough to bounce back to form though he could help himself by finding a decent club to play for.

But the media, in the meantime, struggle to digest and assess what is in front of them. To the extent that you have to wonder if they are really trying.

We are unlikely to find a non-headline grabbing assessment of where Wayne and Harry really are anywhere in today’s media outlets. Maybe the credibility of this small army of paid observers would be salvaged were they better able to provide a more measured response to the vagaries of player form and development. Then, at least, the state of Theo’s footballing brain may never have become ‘a thing’, to Hansen’s enduring embarrassment.

Brilliant or rubbish. Rubbish or brilliant.

The disservice done by this linear approach to describing and understanding players who are seeing out their careers in one of the most competitive sports environment on the planet is as shaming as it is impossible to justify.

One can only wonder how many players were casualties of the burden of being (mis)judged in this manner. As the press play out their agenda and the crowd, instead of getting behind players get on their backs instead, we are left to wonder whether the likes of Denilson, Eboue, Arshavin, Bendtner and Gervinho, might have seen careers thrive rather than dive. Flapihanskii and Sanogoals provided cheap headlines at one time or another and it was hard at the time to imagine their careers surviving this kind of ridicule. Maybe they weren’t ‘good enough’ but we will never know for sure how far these players might have gone with a more sophisticated appraisal of their contributions.

Back to the future and at some point the current media generation will twig Wayne’s game may finally be up and possibly Kane’s development has stalled or even gone backwards.

But all the while legions of football fans rely on mainstream media for their footballing verdicts, we shouldn’t be too surprised at the quality of the arguments of those same fans, or be too puzzled by the limits of their understanding of the game.

We should remain unsurprised, too, at continuing reports of the declining numbers of readers, viewers and listeners of the perpetrators of football’s black and white world.

Slowly and surely, possibly helped by social media, more and more are waking up to the limitations of the writers of the headlines and the weasel words underneath them.

Apparently, now is the time for change …

Just prior to kick off, the above scene presented itself to thousands of fans arriving from the south east of England ahead of the crucial Manchester United encounter.  This was a game that had United won, would have seen one of our greatest rivals consolidate their unlikely position at the pinnacle of the Premier League, one point ahead of Citeh, six points ahead of Arsenal and eleven points ahead of the Champions of England.

The timing of the protest left everything to be desired, not least some support, and even managed to clash with the nationwide “£20’s Plenty” campaign to reduce ticket prices for fans of visiting teams.

Positively Arsenal would like to take the opportunity to apologise for the size of the photograph illustrating this article.  As you can see, it is a very small banner with an even smaller turnout from the supposedly seething anti-Wenger ‘masses’. Forensic examination of the image reveals as many as nine gathered around the bannerette which reads:

“ARSENE Thanks for the memories but it’s time to say goodbye”.

The image was tweeted just before kick-off, supposedly a contemporaneous scene set above the Armoury Superstore. It’s as laughable as it is inconsequential but it did lead this writer to wonder: just how many people really do want to say goodbye to Arsene Wenger?

Naturally there are many of us not backward at coming forward to express disappointment at the occasional under-whelming performance/near total disaster in Europe. One of Wenger’s greatest achievements is that few of us can actually quite believe our eyes when our boys lose the occasional game. But reading Twitter from a safe distance suggests that there are followers of the club who think it’s time for Arsene to hang up his zip-unfriendly coat and say farewell. After match-day setbacks, the numbers of these fans seem to quell exponentially, as shrilly hysterical on Twitter, blogs and radio shows as their incoherent, and generally random, blunt barbs are hot-headedly inconsistent.

Yet when the team is doing well, these ‘contributors’ to the Gooniverse are largely silent.  At such times, the phrase ’empty vessels’ springs to mind and the quieter majority bask in the golden sunshine of an Arsenal era quite unlike any other.

So just how large is their number?

Well, in the aftermath of the Olympiakos defeat, an online petition was launched to have the evil dictator, I mean Arsene Wenger, removed from office once and for all.

“Now is the time for change, do the right thing Arsene Wenger and GO!” exhorts the internet petition, replete with its own little red logo of a cannon and the words ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH WENGER OUT!

Ah-ha, at last, a handy metric for calculating the true scale of this pluckily determined protest group seeking to mobilise the views of the dispossessed, the disheartened and the disbelieving. And, at the time of writing, some seven whole days after the launch of the petition, the numbers signing it have risen to the heady heights of almost 1,300. Numbers seem stuck on 1,265 today and if the instigator of this petition and the carriers of the banner, above, were hoping for support to match the recent Mike Dean petition (106,445 signatories and still rising), then they have been badly misled.

However, all is not lost for the would-be revolutionaries, as there have been at least four other ‘Wenger Out’ petitions in the last year alone and support for some of them have even reached double figures. No fewer than forty end-of-their-tether types have pitched up to sign up to see off Arsene. So the latest petition, with nearly 1270 names has actually done comparatively well.

However, when you consider the official Arsenal Twitter account (@arsenal) has 6.3 million followers and Arsenal Facebook has 33.5 million ‘likes’, then it looks as though the petition has a fair way to go yet.  As a percentage of Arsenal’s Facebook following, the petition has attracted almost 0.0037% of the fanbase. By comparison, the organisers of the banner-led mass-protest achieved a far superior result, attracting nearly 0.016% of the estimated 57,000 Arsenal supporters swirling around the Emirates Stadium on Sunday.

Cleverer statisticians than me (that’s most readers) will point out that even if all 57,000 had joined the banner protest, this would still have been a small percentage of the club’s total global following.  But the fact remains that online, there are (virtually) no geographical boundaries, so a petition conducted in cyber-space really should be doing a little better.  Indeed, to achieve parity with the laughably slim turn-out at the Emirates, the petition should by now have reached an absolute minimum of 3,500, which would of course, give it 0.016% of Arsenal’s Facebook following.

Yep, all of us hate losing games and most are fed up when the team doesn’t appear to fulfil its potential.  A fair number will make a fair racket on Twitter.  But very, very few, actually want Arsene Out, it would seem.

So maybe, as far as the Wenger Out Brigade is concerned, enough really is enough?