Gooner comment – worth reading

In case you haven’t seen it in a reply on my last thread – it is worth it’s own thread.

Wotcha, friendly Gooner here. I didn’t get a chance to do this yesterday, work being a bit of a mission right now, but I wanted to repost a long comment I posted on my favoured Arsenal blogsite, Arsenal Arsenal:

“OK, this is the first chance I’ve had to think about last night’s game, and before reading everything that’s been posted already, just wanted to jot down a couple of thoughts:

1. Bloody well played Wigan, for me that was the best performance of any visiting team at the Ems this season, perhaps only approached by Marseilles back in November. Turns out it wasn’t just Ferguson’s mind-games. Definitely a better performance than when United and Liverpool won. The intensity and concentration, as well as skill, that Wigan displayed was very, very impressive. I thought Victor Moses was absolutely tremendous up front (I really would love us to try to sign him this summer), and Caldwell marshalled his defence superbly. The way Wigan switched formation seamlessly, and constantly denied our players time on the ball, was really excellent. Without doubt, our guys contributed to their own downfall, but make no mistake, to a great extent, Wigan made them play badly. Pretty much the only really pleasurable moment I had the entire evening was staying to applaud the Wigan players off at the end (my seat is near the tunnel).

2. There are silver linings: for football generally, it’s got to be good that a side with as much quality as Wigan are three points closer to staying up; we’ve made life harder for ourselves but it is still recoverable, we are still ahead of the other three in the race for the two CL spots; we may well have seen the best job interview for Wenger’s successor – the level of Wigan’s performance has so much to do with the coaching, Roberto Martinez is most certainly the real deal.

3. I can’t remember Alex Song playing a worse game for a long, long time, he was woeful, sluggish and immature last night. Theo Walcott and Bacary Sagna almost as bad, and the rest, bar perhaps Vermaelen and Rosicky, were poor. I thought we were bad in the first half, but the performance in the second half was terrible, Al-Habsi had barely anything to do. But a defeat like that should be an invitation to any serious sportsman to prove themselves, to show that they can do better. Big game on Saturday now.

OK, back to the top of the page now.”

Best of luck to you guys for the remainder of the season, I’ll be rooting for you!