Fuck me, but there's some over the top posts this morning. Knew there would be, but it makes for depressing reading. And I'm not a happy clapper, so don't bother to say it.
Down, but not despondent. Arsenal are four points ahead of us at the halfway point of the season. What's four points, at this stage, in the general scheme of things? Not a lot. And they have to come to our place. We'll see. There's work to do, and things are serious. Nothing is decided.
Some people on here — more than a few, in fact — expected us to be spanked. We were not spanked. Not at all. Let's just be big enough to concede that we were beaten by the better team, on the night.
But the weird thing is that Swansea battered our defence more than Arsenal did, and Joe had to pull out a number of world class stops against them, which, by and large, he didn't have to do except in the second half, just the once. We were defending really well for nearly all of the first half, doing something that we haven't seen for weeks. Not that Otamendi and Mangala were playing particularly well for that first half. They didn't have to. They had almost nothing to do, because they were being given terrific protection by the men in front of them — Ferny, Silva, Delph (by God, the work he put in! Silva as well, he ran his socks off). Even Yaya was putting in a shift, until his legs started to go in the second half. The stats say that Arsenal had two shots in the first half. Two. Ok, both of them goals, and that's obviously unacceptable. But the plain fact is that, apart from those two shots — one a world-class strike by Walcott, I've always rated that man, and a well worked move that Giroud finished well — Arsenal were hardly threatening. The two goals came out of a clear blue sky. That's the first half that I saw, anyway.
And if KDB puts that ball over for Merlin early in the match, as he should, rather than taking a shot from a difficult angle, that could be a different prospect altogether.
Yaya's goal. Stupendous. That's what the man does. Although, alas, he does it all too rarely for us now. He was the only man on the pitch, on either side, who can score a goal like that. And after that goal, Arsenal were clearly bricking it.
But — and it is a big but — of our fourteen attemps, none of them seriously troubled Cech. Even the goal didn't 'trouble' him, in a sense. It was in, he knew it, he didn't even move.
That's the worrying stat. For all our possession — superior numerically, as were the corners, as were the attempts — we produced almost no clear-cut chances. That's got to change, and soon.
This may sound as though it flies in the face of the evidence, and the scoreline, but the signs I saw were that we're on our way back. Merlin's gradually getting up to speed, Sergio of course always takes two or three matches to get up to it. KDB was looking a bit more like his normal frisky self, up for it, taking chances, after the rest which he so badly needed.
Leicester are starting to worry me, though. We've now put ourselves in a position where we have to get a result there. If they were to go nine points ahead, that would be a pretty frightening gap. A mate of mine who's an Everton fan, but whose judgement I trust, told me that there were periods when Everton were battering them on Saturday. I didn't see any of that match, so I can't judge.
Sunderland first, then, and on to them. This is the turning point. One way or the other.
