West Ham 0-3 Arsenal: Keep calm and carry on

Well, that was better. Arsenal came out with all guns firing and utterly dominated West Ham at Upton Park, who looked well worth their spot at the bottom of the Premier League table. The Gunners managed three goals, and honestly the final scoreline did not flatter the away team's form.

In recent weeks Arsenal have not performed to the level they should against lesser competition - not even lower level but lower league, as both Leeds (1-1 at home in the FA Cup) and Ipswich (1-0 loss away in the Carling Cup) outplayed them. That was not the case against West Ham, as Arsenal dominated play essentially from kickoff to whistle.

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Here are some stats from Orbinho to back that up:

HT Stats West Ham v Arsenal Shots 5-12 On target 2-7 Fouls 5-2 Duels Won % 47%-53% Passing Accuracy 62%-80% Possession 33%-67%

FT Stats West Ham v Arsenal Shots 9-21 On target 3-11 Fouls 9-8 Duels Won % 45%-55% Passing Accuracy 67%-85% Possession 30%-70%

As you can see, Arsenal utterly dominated play in the first half (for example, Fabregas had more first-half touches than the whole of West Ham's midfield), and if anything they ramped that up in the second. This may have in part been related to last year - in this same fixture Arsenal led 2-0 at the half, like this year, but they allowed two in the second half to end up drawing. Arsene Wenger said after the game that last year came up in the halftime team talk - in fact, he said that Cesc was the one to bring it up - and they avoided a repeat of that debacle.

Beyond everything else they were able to keep from overreacting. After a few lackluster games in a row, Arsenal could have freaked out and overplayed. They didn't do that - they kept calm and played their game, and it led to domination. That was important, because it shows the maturity that Wenger talks about in the above video. It's maturity that Arsenal has lacked in recent years, with a young team and poor veteran leadership for the most part (I'm looking at you, William Gallas). And it's maturity that will lead them to the title, if they get there.

The domination would not have mattered if not for the games that Robin van Persie and Theo Walcott. They combined for all three Arsenal goals:

1. Walcott low cross into box, dummied by Nasri and received by van Persie, shot for a goal.

2. Clichy breaks offside trap with pass to van Persie, who dribbles to end line and passes into box to Walcott, who bangs it home.

3. Walcott takes ball into box and is fouled by Wayne Bridge (who played a part in all three goals as well); van Persie converts the penalty.

Both players are coming off injuries earlier this year. Walcott was in incredible form before the injury, and is only just now starting to find it again. Everyone knows van Persie is insanely talented, but he's frequently injured and as such has found it hard to influence proceedings as much as he should. If both can get healthy and start producing (particularly van Persie), Arsenal will become a much more dangerous team on the offensive end.

All in all, a good return to form for Arsenal - an important performance and result both in the Premier League campaign and before the FA Cup replay this week.

MLS is trending

The MLS Superdraft was this morning, and I actually watched ESPN2's coverage. This is pretty big for me, considering less than a year ago I was strongly opposed to following the league at all. I got into football as an Arsenal fan (if you read this blog regularly, you probably know that already), and after watching Premier League and Champions League football, the game in the MLS looked like that of a U7 league. You don't often see stuff like this, or this, and definitely not this, in MLS. Basically I was spoiled by the awesome level of football in Europe and I didn't see any point in bothering with MLS.

I have since changed my mind. Sure, the football being played in MLS is, for the most part, awful. That's okay though, because if you watch it you have to do so in mind of the fact that as a football-playing nation, the United States is decades behind the rest of the world. In England, the Football League First Division formed in 1888, and "became" the Premier League in 1992. The MLS was formed in 1993 and first played in 1996. The United States didn't have a top-flight football league from 1984, when the NASL folded, to 1996. So I think we can be excused for having a sub-par league (which, by the way, is improving, but that's a conversation for another day).

The realization that I had was that my complaining about MLS being awful wasn't going to help it stop being awful. While most of the time I don't support bad products, the way to improve football in the United States is to help the game grow, and if fans of the game avoid the league that's never going to happen. So I'm in, MLS.

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Anyway, I watched the draft mainly because I was curious about where IU's Will Bruin would end up, and was hoping to see him drafted by one of the teams I "follow" (namely the Chicago Fire and Portland Timbers FC). In case you're wondering, he went to Houston Dynamo, which mildly upset me.

But I noticed something during the draft (I refuse to refer to it as SuperDraft, as that is a stupid name) that surprised me. I was on Twitter, keeping up with the various Fire and Timbers tweets, and I noticed the trending topics. They included #mlssuperdraft, Omar Salgado, and other related stuff. Four of the ten worldwide trending topics at one point were directly related to the MLS draft.

Now I know that's not a huge thing, but it's far more than I expected. I was pretty sure that I was the only person in the country and probably one of five in the world who cared even a little about the MLS draft, much less actually watched it. Evidently I was wrong. This will not, in one fell swoop, make football in America popular. But it seems to show that not only are people here interested in the game, but people here and around the world are actually at least briefly interested in our domestic league. And that can only help things.

Final thought: I occasionally have arguments with people over whether or not football will ever catch on as a major sport in the United States. My stance is that while it will likely never be as popular as the NFL (actually, almost definitely not), it can become a fully mainstream sport at least at the level of the NHL, and maybe higher. A lot of people disagree, and that's fair. Many of them will likely dismiss this as nothing, and that's fair too - I totally disagree, but I'd be loathe to put too much stock into Twitter trending topics, to be honest.

But watch this. It's from a Timbers match last year, when they were still in the second tier of American football. When we have lower level teams with this kind of support, I have a lot of faith in the possibilities of American football growth.



This game can thrive here; whether it will or not is another question.

Ipswich 1-0 Arsenal (Carling Cup): This is why I don't gamble

Yesterday I placed a very minor wager on the outcome of today's Carling Cup semifinal first leg. I bet on Arsenal to win the match, and I bet on the under (with a line set at three total goals). Well, at least I won half of it.

Arsenal played a lackluster match to say the least, and they were not able to escape the deserved result as Ipswich struck again and again on the counterattack and finally were able to score a late breakthrough. Arsenal now will have more work to do in the second leg than they would have preferred.

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The result of the game didn't stem from unfair play by Ipswich or a howler by any of the Arsenal players, and that's what makes it most worrisome. Arsenal lost because, for the most part, they didn't really try. They took the opponent lightly and did not put in the effort necessary to come away with the result. I don't understand why this team does this again and again when there's plenty of evidence to show that doing that leads to a bad end. All they have to do is look at 2-3 West Brom, or 0-1 Newcastle, or any of several other matches. When they bring effort, like they did against Chelsea, they win. When they don't, this happens.

My biggest worry is the fact that the lack of effort appears to me to be centered around certain players, who again and again are given chances to prove themselves, and again and again they fail to do so in fairly spectacular fashion. Nicklas Bendtner has been vocal in the past about wanting more opportunities, but at the moment he's the third-best striker at the club, and that's in a system that plays one striker (and I'm leaving Theo Walcott out, as he plays on the wing almost exclusively at the moment). Andrei Arshavin has been a wizard in the past both in scoring and creating goals, and he's one of the most talented players in the side. But in this game and in the recent past, neither player has impressed in any way.

I can excuse not playing well - sometimes a player is unlucky and just can't come through. But those two players in particular were without any sort of influence at all. They weren't really bad, they were just invisible. When you have players who are out of form with superior talent ahead of them, you would think that when given the chance to play - especially against Championship-level competition - they would make some kind of effort. We had too many players today who did not.

There's really not a lot to be said about this aside from that. Fabregas and Walcott didn't have particularly good games, but they at least were making visible efforts. Sczcesny played relatively well, though he didn't have too many opportunities. Djourou and Gibbs playes well, Koscielny was decent, Eboue was pretty awful. If I think about this much more I may have a stroke, so I'm going to stop here.

Now let us never speak of this again.

FIFA, die in a fire

Sepp Blatter evidently wants to play the 2022 World Cup in the winter, which pretty much proves that Qatar's magic air-conditioning was bull (I wish the Americans had promised world peace in return for the Cup, it'd be more likely). Twitter is all atwitter with people claiming that a shift will hurt viewership in the United States, and stunt the growth of the game. The idea is that people won't watch because of NFL football in the States, especially if the Cup conflicts with the NFL playoffs.

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An issue that I haven't seen mentioned is that while I'm sure overall coverage will be affected - ESPN will never cede to another sport; in fact, they rarely do so even during the NFL offseason - the actual games will not conflict with NFL games, unless the NFL decides to play in the morning. Time zone differences will prevent that. I'm not sure whether this is something nobody else has realized or whether they're dismissing it intentionally, but I think it bears mentioning.

The true issues are twofold: first, the US fanbase will not grow during a Qatar World Cup or even, more than likely, during a Russia Cup, due to the aforementioned time zone differences. The casual fan could fairly easily spend an afternoon watching soccer during South Africa 2010, but he's not getting up at 7 am to watch a Spain-Uruguay match. Soccer fans will watch, but that's not going to raise American interest. I'm not implying that it's all about the US here; just that FIFA has expressed a desire in the past to expand the game here, and the next two World Cups are more than likely going to be missed opportunities on that front.

Scheduling is also a major issue. The world football schedule is built around a winter club season with a summer offseason. That offseason is where the World Cup gets slotted in. If the Cup were to be contested during the winter, it would wreak havoc on club team schedules. The only options would be outrageously early starts and late ends for league seasons, with a month-long break in the middle for the World Cup. It's been done, in a way - the NHL does something similar to allow its players to play in the Olympics, but the Olympics are much shorter than the World Cup. I just feel that a winter Cup would be logistically impossible.

I take great issue with this idea, for those reasons and one more. As I hinted earlier, Qatar was granted this World Cup based on a bid that included air-conditioned stadiums. This talk of moving the Cup to the winter is a tacit admission that there's at least a good chance that one of the main pillars of the Qatar bid is not possible. In my opinion, that means one of two things (or possibly both): Qatar submitted a fraudulent bid, or FIFA approved a bid based on fantasy. Neither is acceptable.

I am American, and I wanted the 2022 World Cup to be played in the United States. That said, that's not why I'm upset about this. I would have been disappointed, but not angry had Australia or Japan or Spain/Portugal or Holland/Belgium been awarded the Cup. What upsets me is that we lost to a country that it clearly at best not able to back up its promises, and at worst flat-out lied to win. Either way, this isn't making me feel any particular confidence that a Qatar World Cup can be successful.

FA Cup preview: the damned United

I think it may be sort of sad that I'm actually much more productive as a writer while I'm at my actual job than I am on days I don't work. Perhaps it's the lack of Football Manager at the school at which I am employed. I really need to get that straightened out, I'm in danger of becoming a real live blogger again.

Anyway, on to the cup match tomorrow, which will find the Gunners facing Leeds United. I have not been a football fan long enough to remember Leeds United as a powerful club. They haven't done much since the early part of this decade, and when I say "haven't done much" what I mean is they've gotten themselves relegated twice and they're currently in the Championship. They haven't been relevant since I've been watching football.

However, I'm still not a huge fan. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that in my research for this post I discovered that Rio Ferdinand used to play for Leeds. I hate Rio Ferdinand, so that's a strike against them. Unfair? Maybe. But he's a pretty loathsome person. Just have a look at his Twitter. Ugh.

The other reason I have for hating Leeds is Michael Sheen. Yeah, you read that right.

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My primary exposure to Leeds before this FA Cup draw was the awesome film The Damned United, with Sheen as wonder manager Brian Clough. I highly suggest the movie, especially if you watch it tonight or tomorrow before the match because it will get you in a proper Leeds-hating mood. As portrayed in the film (and I understand based on comments from present-day fans that this part, at least, was realistic), they were just the sort of team that I ranted about yesterday - they were kickers. Actually they were probably more like today's Manchester United, in that they could win playing football properly, but chose to mix in some kicking as well just because they were awful people. It worked for them, in that they won the league and played in Europe, but that doesn't mean I can't hate them.

Is it silly to hate a team because of a movie that was only half about them? Honestly I don't care, because nearly the entirety of the Arsenal blogosphere (including plenty of people who watched them play) is in agreement with me, so I feel like I'm probably on to something, regardless of how I got there.

It's going to be a tough match one way or the other. They're not quality enough to go to Europe these days, but they're improved from the form that got them sent down to League 1. They're good enough for Wenger to send Sanchez Watt there on loan - in fact, he may play Saturday - so they must not be taken lightly. This is a game that Arsenal should win, though, even with a vastly inferior side to the one that faced Manchester City this week. To lose this game at home to a Championship side would be an embarrassment, but that's nothing earthshattering in terms of analysis.

But boy, do I ever hate Rio Ferdinand. Let's win it for Brian Clough.

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I was going to post some links to other match previews, but evidently I'm the only one who's got one, at least out of the blogs I read. Check out Arseblog in the morning, and 7amkickoff and Short Fuse later on today, as I'm sure all three will have quite interesting opinions on the Leeds match. In the interim, I wanted to share a non-Leeds related post. Darius from A Cultured Left Foot appears to agree with what I said yesterday about Arsenal as a whole club. To reiterate, the club's philosophy as I see it is (and should be) to develop a process that can win silverware - if it doesn't (which I find highly unlikely) I feel that will be much more attributable to chance than something that can be blamed on the manager.

That's all I've got at the moment.

Arsenal 0-0 Manchester City: Paint dries

I wanted to expand a bit on my three-paragraph recap from yesterday. It was a boring game and a result that's very annoying, but nothing catastrophic.

Manchester City came into the game with a lead over Arsenal in the table, and they were desperate to maintain that lead. They employed a clearly defensive formation (see Zonal Marking for more on that), with Jo and James Milner playing the "winger" position in name only, and Carlos Tevez playing a lone striker role starting mostly from his own end. They put all their men behind the ball and hoped for the draw, and that's what they got, despite an early Arsenal assault.

I feared that when two Arsenal shots hit woodwork, a loose ball in the 6-yard box wasn't slotted home by van Persie, and another RvP shot was well saved by Joe Hart, it would all come back to haunt the Gunners. While a point was earned, two more would have been theirs had any one of those chances been converted. In short, bad luck and Man City's tactics were the keys to the draw.

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One of the main reasons that I'm an Arsenal fan is because of the style of football they play. I'm not old enough to have experienced the offside trap, "Boring Boring Arsenal" days so the way I think of Arsenal football is Wengerball. This is why I'm so annoyed by the match yesterday. I can respect any team that comes out to play, regardless of what style they choose. A team doesn't have to play modified Total Football in order for me to consider their existence relevant. But there are two kind of teams that I will never respect - those that park the bus and play totally defensively, with little to no attempt to actually score; and those who try to kick the opponent off the pitch, simply to stop them playing. Yesterday, City were the former.

The connection is that neither, in my eyes, is really trying to win the game. I've grown up watching American sports, and my favorite is baseball. Baseball is structured such that a draw is impossible; extra innings continue into infinity until one ends with a team holding a lead. You have to try to win. This doesn't mean that I cannot appreciate a sport in which draws are possible - the simple fact that the game ended in a draw is not what annoyed me. The cause of my rage is the fact that Roberto Mancini was not trying to win, not even a little. The draw was sought and obtained, and that's not how you play sports in my book. You don't play not to lose. Losing the two points is annoying, but particularly so considering the circumstances.

The consolation is that we got 4 points out of 6 from City, and with a little luck yesterday on any of about 5 chances on goal we’d have had all six and a season sweep against an important title rival. Recently I've tried an experiment - I'm trying to divorce emotion from my analysis of sports. It's nearly impossible to do that in the moment, and that's not what I'm going for. What I mean is that in big picture issues, there's not a lot of room for emotion. This is a situation appropriate for that kind of analysis.

Like I said, there were a handful of chances that Arsenal didn't convert; that wasn't because of anything they did wrong, it was just bad luck. The process was sound, even if the result was not optimal. That is what any team should seek. Good process is more important than good results, because a good result obtained via bad process is far less likely to be repeatable than one obtained by good process. (If you'd like an example, look at the 2006 Mets season record, then the records for the rest of Omar Minaya's tenure as general manager.) So when the process is sound, even when the team doesn't win, it does no good to get angry. If van Persie's shot saved by Hart had gone three inches higher, it's 1-0 to the Arsenal and the conversation changes. What I'm saying is that whether or not the goal is scored, everything that needed to be done to score the goal was done. Bad luck shouldn't change decision-making.

Speaking of the process, I'm not certain how I feel about either of the in-game substitutions. I wanted Walcott in the starting XI, but when he was subbed out for Arshavin I supported the move. It didn't end up working out. When Wilshere was subbed out for Bendtner, I supported the move. It didn't end up working out. I'm not going to subject Wenger to my 20-20 hindsight, because I agreed in real-time with what he did; I will say that when I saw Bendtner come in I was expecting him to play more centrally.

On the red card: I am not happy. I don't think that should have been a red to either player; however, it was a goddamned stupid thing to do on Sagna's part, and it's a situation that he shouldn't have put himself in. He now has to serve a three-match domestic ban, effective immediately. Now on the bright side, because of the vagaries of scheduling, Arsenal get a little bit lucky here. Sagna’s missing two cup games and the worst team in the league. We must not take Ipswich, Leeds, or West Ham lightly, but if I had to choose three matches to play without Sagna, these are probably the three that I would choose. However, I firmly believe Bacary Sagna to be Arsenal's best defender - especially with Vermaelen still injured - and one of the better defenders in the league. He will be missed, even if Emmanuel Eboue is a relatively effective replacement.

I'm quite annoyed by this match, but it is not a mortal blow to Arsenal's title chances by any means. We can still win the league. I don’t know if we will, but this is a team that’s good enough to win real silverware, and it’s a team that’s in position to be able to win four competitions. The process is sound, no matter whether or not it will deliver victory. As a fan, that’s the most that I can ask.

A New Year's resolution

I don't typically make New Year's resolutions - not because I think I'm particularly exceptional, but because I'm just not all that moved by the institution. This year, though, I'm making an exception. I've made two resolutions. One isn't germane to this blog, so I'll not bore you with it. The other, though, is relevant, in that it is the blog. I HEREBY RESOLVE that I will more regularly update and maintain this space, for the entertainment of the three or four people who actually read what I write.

I'm doing something that I think will help me keep this resolution. I've started a Tumblr account, which is going to be a part of the blog in a similar fashion as my Twitter account. Here's how it's going to break down in terms of content (at least until I figure out something better, if such a thing exists):

1. Twitter: This will be updated the most often, mostly because I can do this from my phone. I'll just vomit out my brain here in 140-character increments. The subjects will be typical of my life on Twitter - mostly sports and things that annoy me.
2. Tumblr: I'm still trying to figure out how this medium works. I think what's going here is going to be similar to Twitter, but longer - anything that I can't compress to 140 letters, but can't expand to 500 words. Also there'll be a bunch of pictures and videos, because I really like the multimedia aspect of Tumblr. This will change a lot as time passes, I think. But for now, that's how that will go.
3. Blogger: This will change in two ways - first, the shorter posts will, for the most part, be moving over to the Tumblr. Some may show up here as well, but we'll see about that. Second, the regularity of posts will (hopefully) rise drastically. I won't be doing what I did when I first started it (that is, posting 5 or 6 times a day - that's for the Tumblr for the most part), but I will be updating this blog on a daily or semi-daily basis. It will be concentrated on the Mets and Arsenal almost exclusively, but also on baseball and football (the soccer kind) in the larger sense.

So in short, my Twitter won't change much; the Tumblr will mostly be media and medium-length writing; this blog will be longer-form stuff. My blog posts will all show up on the Tumblr, and all the Tumblr posts and blog posts will be on the Twitter, so everything should be accessible from there (though you can still check the sites themselves, because there'll be non-post changes occasionally). More changes may come as time passes and I figure out better ways of doing things, but if this all works out hopefully it won't take too much alteration.

Thanks for reading, following, and all that. If you're reading this, you're in at the ground floor of what will hopefully eventually be some kind of writing career. I hope everyone else gets as much out of it as I do.