Arsenal 0 Liverpool 2 FA Cup 3rd Round Sunday 7th January 2024 4.30pm Arsenal completed a sorry hat-trick of defeats – two of them at home – in an admittedly entertaining FA Cup Third Round tie at the Emirates yesterday. However, entertaining as it was, and as delightful as much of the Gunners’ first half dominance proved, they failed to put the ball in the net, despite numerous chances. Talk of the need for a clinical finisher at centre forward is not new, but it is definitely louder after the matches since Boxing Day. The question is whether or not investing in one of the required quality will put the club in Financial Fair Play hot water. Ultimately, the situation Arsenal now find themselves in is a legacy of not being in the Champions League for six seasons. Year on year, that meant a significantly reduced income, all the time paying wages at a level that required participation in the competition. The Premier League income is not insignificant, but European income is the
Newcastle 1 Arsenal 0 Premier League Saturday 4th November 2023 5.30pm I am away for a few days for work and the timing of my commitments / workload means I was unable to catch the game yesterday and will not have two hours to watch the replay in full until I am back in London on the day of the Sevilla game. So I watched nine minutes of highlights and will simply write briefly on a discussion point that came out of the match. A friend messaged me with the following after the game - Maybe I’m paranoid but the “unlimited money” teams seem to benefit a lot from VAR. And I don’t mean just directly. Maybe coincidence. I’d like to see a study on it to (hopefully) assuage my paranoia. A couple of articles worth reading in relation to this from firstly The Guardian and then this from a Danish website In terms of regulation in the Premier League, a quote from the Guardian article sums it up nicely… “And then there’s Rumayyan (Newcastle's chairman), a member of the Saudi
Arsenal 5 Chelsea 0 Premier League Tuesday 23rd April 2024 8pm Before this game, I had a feeling it might prove an opportunity to enhance Arsenal’s goal difference, and in the event that Manchester City draw one of their six remaining matches, we could end up with a situation in which three teams finish on 89 points, in which case such wins as the Gunners registered last night against Chelsea could prove highly significant. Arsenal’s history has been shaped by goal difference, and before that goal average. The 1971 title was decided (fortunately) on the latter – otherwise Leeds United would have been champions. In 1989, beating Liverpool at Anfield 2-0 in the final game meant Arsenal’s goal difference was superior – simply because they had scored more goals than Liverpool, the actual difference being identical. The club have history for narrow triumphs, and who is to say we won’t see a similar situation less than four weeks from now? The bookies for one, who still have Manc
Comments
Post a Comment