How motivated will the Arsenal players be to play Barcelona tonight? by KM
Hello fine ladies and gentleman! How excited are you to watch the all mighty Arsenal face Barcelona tonight? I’ll watch the game with a bunch of friends and I’m fearful of the scoreline. Arsene said we will be going gung ho on the attack.
“I am convinced the players have decided to give a strong response. We have to deliver something special. I am convinced it would be a big boost for us to have a great game tomorrow”. This is a dry statement for me. Why didn’t the players decide to put a strong game against Watford? Isn’t that the manager’s job?
“I have no doubts about my huge motivation. I built this club with hard work, without any external resources and, if you compare where we are today to when I arrived, we have moved forward and without any money from anybody, just the money we produced from the work.”
Is this the champions league or a business meeting? He “built” the club? I thought he was an employee at it? Maybe he named the club after himself, after all he’s been here so long, some people don’t know Arsenal existed before Wenger! The younger generation coming up know Arsenal as the failure club, but who cares about them right?
Oh right, Barcelona! Enough praise has been heaped on them, so I’ll jump over to the other team. Imagine you are an Arsenal player right now. You’re probably low on confidence, overplayed, out of form, generally not that good either and you have to play Barcelona from 2:0 down at home.
Worse you have a manager who doesn’t have a clue how to beat Watford, let alone the champions of Europe. I’d just be hoping the game is over sooner rather than later, so that we can live with another humiliation, which at Arsenal is treated like bad luck and special circumstances.
It’s never the reality though. I can safely bet a ton of money tonight that we’d not progress, because the expression on the faces of the players says it all. I watched Atletico Madrid and PSV yesterday and I saw two very disciplined teams. Disciplined over 180 minutes + extra time.
The managers had a real tactical game, where either team wanted to win, but never went too far over and never left itself exposed. If anybody wanted to score a goal, they needed to work hard. Tackles were flying, bodies were on the line, but nobody let their guard down and it went to penalties.
Diego Simeone was waving all the time, screaming, shouting, taunting the fans to show their voice and eventually it worked. It got to the PSV player and he missed the seventh spot kick. The kind of desire that man showed was electric! It made me feel fired up watching on the TV. I’ve not seen the Emirates feel like that ever.
I have not seen the Arsenal players put out such desire since the first 20 minutes of that 3:0 win over United. And I don’t expect to see it tonight. In fact I expect us to be hammered, just like Bayern did to us in the group stages. Not that it really matters, for Arsene it’ll be just another special circumstance. “We tried to attack and got punished” or something like that.
He’s the master of excuses and he’ll have another, then he’ll say he doesn’t want to discuss his future because in reality there’s nothing to discuss. He ain’t leaving, because no other manager can spot a better striker than Giroud and because nobody can do so little with 8.5 m salary a year.
We’re no longer moving forward. We haven’t moved forward for at least 5 years! This is the truth and I’ve accepted it as it is. When will Arsene accept it?
Konstantin