Kevin Whitcher's Arsenal Blog

Day Four – Monday 17th June 2024 Rest Day 1 (of 2) No game today, and after three days of lengthy drives, it was a welcome break. Germany is a big place. The roads are good, and you can cover a lot of kilometres faster than in England, but there are a lot of kilometres to cover. And once you reach the accommodation, it’s generally a fair distance to the stadium for the match itself. We have used public transport to reach the matches in Berlin and Hamburg, and enjoyable as the whole experience is, it does take it out of you.    For the two nights in Hamburg, we are staying in a quite idyllic hotel next to a river on the outskirts of the south-east of the city. It’s a fair distance from the centre, as the photos suggest, and as we were in need of a day doing nothing, we just relaxed and caught the three matches on a screen.  It’s for the good of the tournament that we are seeing such surprise results as Romania’s beating Ukraine, and even more remarkable, Slovakia defeating...

Day Three – Sunday 16th June 2024 Netherlands 2 Poland 1 Hamburg Volksparkstadion – 3pm local time It was back on the road in the morning to make our way from Berlin to Hamburg for the first game of the day. Slight delay in that my son lost an airpod, so we had to return to the hostel to scour the room. No joy, but he found it in the car later. Such are the delights of constantly moving on. At least in Hamburg we’d have two nights, although as the game was a 3pm kick off we didn’t have time to check into our accommodation before attending the Netherlands v Poland match.  We parked up next to a station nearest to where we are staying and even had time to sit down and have a meal in a place next to the station. Afterwards, a couple of trains and a mile or so’s walk to Hamburg’s ground and we were there in time. There are no stations nearer the stadium, which is surrounded by woodland – very picturesque it is too, although the woods did provide an impromptu toilet for many lager fuell...

  Day Two – Saturday 15th June 2024 Spain 3 Croatia 0 Berlin Olympiastadion – 6pm local time They say the journey is better than the arrival. When you are criss-crossing Germany for football matches with a deadline for your arrival time, that isn’t necessarily the case. Our check-in at Berlin wasn’t until 3pm, with the match – across on the other side of Berlin at 6pm. We timed our journey from Paderborn to arrive around 2.45, dump our bags and then head for Spain v Croatia.    However, leaving around 10.20 am (journey time was under four hours, but we’d stop on the way to refuel and in the case of my son buy food), we met an issue en route. Waze, my sat nav app of choice, is generally reliable, but its failure to realise a major motorway was completely closed in one section for roadworks cost us a good 30 minutes, and then the delay of the detour once I switched to the more informed apple maps added another 20 minutes. With a petrol stop, and my son deciding he needed to...

  Day One – Friday 14th June 2024 From London to Paderborn as the tournament kicks off I am on my travels once again, and enough people have enjoyed my past jaunts around various major foreign international tournaments for me to get out the laptop again and relay the experience.   So, Germany 2024 – and this one’s a little different at I have my 22-year-old son in tow. We had a brief warm up back in November when we flew to Italy for a three-night trip, taking in three matches in Milan, Empoli and Bologna, but this is the real deal. 13 nights, ten games and a hell of lot of driving. Germany is a pretty big country.    As usual, the itinerary was laid out before the draw was made. The aim, to see a game in every one of the 10 stadiums, with the group stage the easiest and cheapest way of achieving this. Getting tickets was a challenge, although timely work on two of UEFA’s resale phases (7 games) and favours from two friends with contacts (3 games) completed the set. ...

Arsenal 2 Everton 1    Premier League    Sunday 19th May 2024  4.30pm     It was not to be. Manchester City’s incredible run of winning Premier League matches continued, meaning that despite Arsenal winning three points in their final match, they finished two short of Pep Guardiola’s side in second place.    That City’s victory over West Ham was so expected meant there was less tension in the Emirates air than there might have been, especially when Arsenal looked like they might fail to win the game as the second half wore on. It all felt a bit academic by that time with the league leaders two goals ahead, and coasting to victory. It was as much as Gooners could realistically hope for when West Ham did score, but they were never going to get three.   Bukayo Saka was neither in the starting line-up nor on the bench, as a ‘muscle injury’ was given as the reason for his absence. It meant Martinelli starting on the right side ...

Manchester United 0 Arsenal 1    Premier League    Sunday 12th May 2024  4.30pm     The points were the main thing for Arsenal, and given that they historically struggle to win at Old Trafford, nothing could be taken for granted in the Gunners’ penultimate game of the season. On paper, given the relative strength of the two teams, you’d have liked to see a scoreline akin to Manchester City’s at Fulham on Saturday lunchtime. If only football was that simple.  An unchanged Arsenal line-up did enough to win, in that they produced better efforts that Manchester United, whose finishing was woeful, but they didn’t play that well. As one friend commented,  “ That match was painful. We played like a team on the Wednesday before a cup final. Too cautious but a win is a win. Agonising as it was!”   That they kept a clean sheet was partially due to defensive resilience and organisation, but also the woeful quality of U...

Arsenal 3 Bournemouth 0    Premier League    Saturday 4th May 2024  12.30pm     After the disappointment of the home defeat to Villa, sandwiched by the Champions League quarter final legs v Bayern, all Arsenal were left with to finish their season were six Premier League matches. With Manchester City’s record of closing out campaigns from a winning position, the prevailing wisdom was that Arteta’s players would need to win every game for the remainder of the season, and this was the fourth out of the the six.    The manager stuck with the same eleven that had delivered wins against Chelsea and Spurs, and people were conscious of how good a run of results Bournemouth have had in 2024, so were not to be taken lightly. Last season it took the last minute wonder goal by Reiss Nelson to secure three points in the corresponding fixture (and keep Arsenal’s title hopes very much alive back then). Same consequence of the win yesterday, ...