Arsenal/Bolton; a quick review while the site is up! « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Tony Attwood

If you have been following us this past week you will know that the various sites we run have been going up and down like the proverbial.   So, I won’t take too long writing this, in case we lose service again, but here’s the quickie from last night.

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Recently when I went looking for a newspaper report of the England under 21s win in which the Ox scored three, I was bemused to find it wasn’t there.   Last night, having been at a dance club rather than the game, I nipped out to hear the details of the match at 10 on Radio 5.

I got a comment saying, “I am not impressed with Arsenal” and a eulogy about how wonderful Bolton were and how they were on the way up.  There was then another comment out of nothing to the effect that “We all know how much Wenger wants to win the league cup”, which I couldn’t understand (was it sarcasm?  was it meant to be a truthful statement?  whatever it was it was incoherent since the meaning of the words was lost).

Then eventually the result was given, and I found they had won after all.  So I stayed to listen to the next half hour.  I had a lot of chat about how Manchester United responded perfectly to their defeat, a lot of Tevez, and some stuff about Palace.  But in that half an hour from 10 to 10.30 there was nothing on Radio 5 other than the one mention of the result about Arsenal.

I don’t know what the station and their allies in the press hope to prove by this sort of nonsense, but all it does is alienate me.  (Any attempt to complain is met with “we have so much to get in and we can’t cover everything”).

Yet the game at the Ems was important, and not just for the result.  The almost capacity sale of tickets (I am told we were let down by a low number of Notlobians but I am not sure if that was true) for what was effectively a reserve match, says a lot about Arsenal.

So did the game say a lot about Arsenal’s backup team, which can beat a lesser light in the EPL.

From what I have now seen Arshavin was as good as I was suggesting he had been in the last couple of home games I have seen, helped I guess by the fact that he could play through the middle rather than out wide.  Maybe he should do that more often.  The Ox showed that he has enormous talent, but isn’t yet ready to do it for every game throughout.  That’s no problem – it happens to most players.

Now we have had a proper look at Nico Yennaris, Park Chu-young and Francis Coquelin, and the reserve future continues to look bright.  In a sense what we were seeing is not so much a youth team as we had a few years ago, but a genuine reserve and rehab team.

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