An angry rant and Newcastle preview

Morning Gooners,

I started to write a separate blog yesterday, to be fair, I wouldn't call it a blog so much as a rant. Two stories in two days from the lazy sods at the nations 'favourite' paper got me more pissed off at lazy journalism than I had been for a very long time.

The first story was written by Steve Howard and entitled "Now Bale's left Theo standing" first of all WTF!! They have compared a player who has two goals and a single assist after playing every minute of every game in the league this year with a player who has scored four goals and aided with one assist in only 5 games, only two of which being starts and one of them only lasting 6 minutes. But obviously because Bale has had two good games against Inter Milan then he is the brightest player in English football and no one, especially an Arsenal player can touch him!

Secondly the groundbreaking story that Wenger is a dirty lying cheat and has been sleeping around with a blond French rap star. Firstly, Wenger doing the dirty with a rap star...... Really? To be honest I don't want to give the tosh more advertisement however I'll just add my favourite line from the front page "They kissed on the cheek and held hands at the table in an airport hotel" They kissed on the Cheek? THEY'RE FRENCH FFS!!!! and just a little point, Arsene is one of the smartest people in football, would he really air his dirty laundry this easily and openly? Look, even if Le Boss has been having an affair then it's his business and if it's been going on for two years then it's not effecting our football is it?!? Anyway, It's not like he's sleepy with OAP prostitutes or maybe regular prostitutes while his wife was pregnant at home or getting it on with his wife's sister or even shagging a team mates wife is it, I mean seriously, who would be sick and twisted enough to go down that route? Bottom line is Arsene Wenger has earned enough trust and respect for us to just leave him to it.

Right, rant over, on to the preview:

November traditionally sucks for Arsenal fans. Shakhtar ensured that the month started on a bad note now Newcastle come to town to try and make it worse. Newcastle will face a different and stronger side to the team that beat them at St James Park in the Carling Cup which should be great for us but we will also face a different, stronger Newcastle team. The big differences for the Magpies and the only ones we should be concerned about are Nolan, Carrol and Barton. Kevin Nolan is bang in form at the moment after his hat trick in the Sunderland game, Carroll is in my opinion hugely over-rated but he is big and strong enough to cause our defense all sorts of problems, he is also good in the air and our full backs are not the best at stopping those crosses coming in so our entire defence will have to be on their game. Those crosses will be pinged in by a certain Joey Barton. Now I'm not going to pretend to like the man but he does seem to have actually been quite good this season, the big problem we will face with Joey 'Jailbird' Barton is the legs of our very, very, very fragile players. The referee will have to be right up with play and as strict as he can be otherwise I can see someone getting hurt.

In our midfield, Jack Wilshere serves the last game of his 3 match ban for his red card against Birmingham so won't be involved, Song, Denilson, Arshavin and Fabregas are all back in contention after their *adopts sarcastic tone* "injuries" that kept them out of the mid week defeat to Shakhtar *drop sarcastic tone* The real question comes around where will Samir Nasri and Theo Walcott slot into Wenger's plans. Wenger has spoken of Walcott taking up that central role but I don't see it happening for a while and Wenger seems reluctant to play Fabregas and Nasri together in the middle of the park. I can't see Walcott being left out as he's the player back from injury, in form and scoring goals so that leaves a couple of options, play Nasri in the middle with Fab (please, please, please), drop Arshavin and play Nasri or Walcott on the left but seeing as our Russian wizard got a rest was injured mid week I don't see that happening either, the other option is dropping Nasri to give him a breather, all I can say is that it makes a gorgeous change to have these sorts of selection problems rather than our normal 'everyone's injured' problems. I have a feeling that Wenger will play Song and Deni in midfield to keep a close eye on Nolan which means either Walcott or Nasri will miss out.

Goonerfish's line-up:

Fabianski


Sagna - Koscielny - Squillaci - Clichy


Song


Fabregas - Denilson


Walcott - Arshavin


Chamakh




Score Arsenal 3 - 1 Newcastle

I think we have enough in our locker to see this one through but I think that Carroll will be enough of a pest to either score or create a goal for the visitors, especially if they team him up against Koscielny. Walcott should hit this game running whether it be from the start or the bench and Fabregas is due a league goal.

We need to make November a good month for us this year as I have previously said, it is a month that on paper at least, we should be looking to gain maximum points and hopefully Liverpool can do us a favour and take points off Chelsea.

Here's to some change of fortune for November for us Gooners so when we get to our tough fixtures in December we can get past Christmas confidently top of the league.

Till next time,
Goonerfish.