West Ham v Arsenal; the ref competency, the slug as manager, Demel, etc « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

West Ham is a diminutive principality on the eastern fringes of London two stops from Barking.  They pride themselves on flowing exciting attacking football, but are managed by Sam The Slug.  Quite how they balance these two I have no idea.  Or rather, given the nasty things the Slug said about WHU supporters I presume they don’t balance anything.

Onto the Ref: Dean was the third best ref in the league last year.  In the home/away bias table has home bias of 1.421 (the worst is 6.8).  In terms of straight competence he managed a score just above 70% – anything less than that and he should be out of the League (but he would not be for as we know PGMOL don’t do things like other countries.

Sam the slug Allardyce got a terrible reputation when working with Notlob for developing rotational fouling and rotational time wasting.  His contribution to football is utterly negative at every level.

But then there is Guy Demel who signed for Arsenal from Nimes and played 13 games for the reserves before going on to develop his career in Germany.   He is now a full back with West Ham Untidy.

West Ham go into the game above Arsenal in the league by one place and two points having scored seven and let in five.  And now they have Andy Carroll – and five of the seven we have let in have come from dead balls.

At this moment I don’t know if Per Mert will play having been ill – but then the defence without him doesn’t look too bad to me, so why risk him?

I’d go for Gervinho as centre forward again – he looks like he is getting the hang of this sort of thing.  Mr Wenger recently revealed how these positional changes come about: “I did not always think he could play this role when I bought him I thought he was a wide player but I discovered using him in training sometimes through the middle. His runs and his movement were interesting. Of course there was a big question mark about his finishing, but he has improved on that front.  Sometimes the players create their own obstacle in their head and when they start to score, they think ‘oh I can score as well’. It becomes natural for them.”

So to the team:

Mannone;

Jenkinson, Koscielny, Vermaelen, Gibbs;

Arteta, Ramsey; Oxlade-Chamberlain, Cazorla,

Podolski; Gervinho.