We will win Silva-ware for Eduardo.

Thanks to Siren for half of today’s title. Gonna be a short one today because i’m still suffering from a lot of anguish. And lots of work-related crap.

The other half of today’s title was semi-quoted from Matty Flam’s reaction to the E.D.S injury. “We wanted to win the title before but now we want to win it also for him,” said the Frenchman afterwards(the birmingspam game). “He is not going to be with us for a long time, so of course we want to win it for him.

I’m highlighting Matt’s words because i hope the rest of you Gooners saw his reaction when Eduardo was still on the floor. He walked around the pitch shaking the shoulders of his teammates who were looking distressed and quite rightly so. One time, when he walked over to Philippe Senderos, I could make out roughly these words, “Hey, HEY! Get over it! We have a match to play, come on!”.

Is there a better reason to why the likes of Arseblogger, Gunnerblog and Sggooner (myself included of course) all want Flamster to sign on his new contract?

I think his attitude is spot on, i’d like to try and focus the energy that saw a fallen comrade in battle to win the war. If you were on the battlefield, dodging bullets and all that manly stuff, and you see your best friend getting shot in the leg…do you, as a proper soldier;
1. sit down, hold your head in your hands and cry for mama
2. give a battle cry so loud and fearsome that the enemy would dread the vengeful onslaught?

I’d think i’d choose option 2 anyday and I believe Matty wanted it so badly i could see the fire burning in his eyes. Imagine if all of our players had his fire in their bellies, after recovering from the initial shock, would all give a great big battle cry ala Patrick Vieira…do you think the Birmingspam players would be scared shitless? Of course. We would be showing intent to destroy them with supreme skill and drop fucking 20 goals on their asses.

But no, we looked distraught and clearly the signal to Birmingspam is for them to continue testing our nerves with hard tackles. And that they did.

I hope you’re reading this, Fabregas, Senderos, Gallas, Adebayor, Sagna, Clichy, Bendtner, Rosicky, Hleb, Toure, Almunia and Lehmann. Follow Matty’s fire and we’ll do this for sure. For Eduardo and for the beauty of football’s sake.

Updated: Go here to see the article on people all around the world sending well-wishes to Dudu. I’ve already sent in my email and i think you should too. A certain Mark Tan has represented Singapore proudly and if you are reading this, Mark Tan, send me an email and i’ll buy you a drink. You can click on this link to mail directly.

We’re Praying for you, Eduardo.

Its been a tough week as i’ve had shitty clients to deal with and also my call-up to the army reserves. Thus the lack of blog-age. Compounded with a fine display against an aging Meelan defence but only ended the game with a draw, I was looking forward to the Birmingham match because i know the lads would be full of vigor to shake off the mid-week crap.

Little did i know…

I won’t bother with the usual match review, because its still painful to remember the looks on our players’ faces. Its even more painful when i look through the pictures available on the internet to show us how horrible the tackle is. Arseblog has a picture that shows Martin-Taylor-”i am a nasty fucker with no values and i have leprosy on my testicles, plus i was molested as a child” sliding in for a tackle with studs up ABOVE the ankle of Eduardo.

The more i look at that photo, the more i’m convinced that No-Values-Raped-in-the-ass-Nasty-Fucker-Leprosy-on-Testicles-Martin-Taylor had other intentions than to get the ball cleanly. If you look at picture no.4 from this link (originally from ANR), the fucker was smiling. Smiling! There are no words to describe the kind of things i want to do to 2 people right now.

1. Martin-I-went-to-school-with-rapist-janitors-and-they-called-me-Baby-Taylor: I’ve only had the heart to read 2 Arsenal blogs so far after saturday and both suggested rightly that the fucker mentioned above would need to be punished far more than 3 fucking matches. Ban him for a year? I want to ban him from ever playing football again. Or better yet. I want to play footy against him and have all my mates, including the rapist janitors give him sliding tackles above the ankle, with the fucker’s boot firmly wedged into the ground and after one fracture, i’d like to tape it back crudely and do the same again, for over 45 minutes, i want him to not be able to stand up again. Yes, that is the degree of violence i’m willing to inflict on him.

2. Mike-I-am-a-half-ass-fuck-face-and-i-used-to-lick-goat-balls-Dean: Fuck you. You are full of shit and you are not even fit to referee a playground game. If i were in Italy, i’d pay top dollar to take a contract out on you. Clichy tackled the ball cleanly and you fucked it all up. Fuck you and i’ll gladly pay anyone to shove a year’s worth of garbage up his ass. I should not go on anymore because i’ll just keep going.

All the Singapore Gooners’ thoughts and prayers are with Eduardo Da Silva. He does not deserve such an injury and may God bless him. A career that was on the verge of taking off with Arsenal and i pray my darndest every day and night that he’ll return and continue his journey with us. I hope you would join me in prayer for him as well.

At the same time, my wish is for this incident to fire up the lads to go on and finish the season strongly. Like Arseblogger says, fuck all the rest and let’s just go do this. For Eduardo, and for Arsenal. We’ve gotten this far without any foreign investments and if those billionaire owners want to sabotage our efforts by paying off hatchet men and referees, they’ve got it coming. Let’s do it lads, if this is not a sign that we need to stuff their words back into their asses, i don’t know what is.

Domestic Cup or European Glory or Both? - Part II & FA Cup Match Preview

Ahhh, Mes Ami, sorry for the delay of Part II from Thursday. I was out for “personal reasons”, heh.

So FA Cup or UCL Trophy? Le Boss helped me out a whole lot by showing signs about which competition he’s valuing more. Lasagne Chef from The Cannon has his thoughts and theories which are interesting. Before i get to that, i have looked through some stuff for 2 days and here i try to weigh the possibilities of either competition.

FA Cup - The world’s oldest football competition with a whole chunk of history. No, really, the history of the cup is so great it would be stupid of me to bring it up. We drew Yanited for the next round about 3 weeks ago and some have already said “its the 2008 Cup Final drawn too early”. A few things come up for me when i look at this competition -

1. Arsenal 10 - Yanited 11: As the top 2 teams who have won the Cup in its history, we’ve won the cup just one less time, we can even it up this time round. Normally it would be safe to assume that if you beat your strongest rival, you should go on to win the whole shebang.
2. Psychological effects: It would be great to get one over them in the domestic cup, but there’s always 2 sides of the tale, whoever loses might also be hungry for revenge when we meet up again in the League.
3. Supporter mentality: Will we bay louder for Italian Blood if we lose tonight? If we win tonight, are we going to scream our heads off for the League match? Importance of crowd support has been quite important. Look how happy Ade is (no, seriously, think about it) when we gave him 2 songs. The second one being chanted over and over again, urging you on to score and when you do, the confidence and power it gives you is bloody fucking magical. Imagine it.

Relevancy: 2/3. History and Supporter pride are the main 2 factors that i want this win. However, as explained further in the match Preview later, it seems like Le Boss has come up with a solution to counter my Supporter value. Overall Relevancy: 1/3

UCL Trophy - Formerly the European Cup, we, the famous Arsenal, have not laid hands on the trophy once. The closest we got was when a certain TH14 led us all the way to the Final against Barcelona. A few of that squad still remain and those few are the main pumps in our current engine, Toure-Cesc-Flamini. Wenger would like to win this competition at least once in his illustrious career with Arsenal. All the Gooners would love to see our greatest manager ever to win it. I bet he’d cry when we do. We are drawn against AC Milan, the current holders and a positive result of our match against them this coming Wednesday could bring us a lot of confidence to go further in the competition.

1. Squad: I believe our current squad is most balanced squad so far. Wenger’s Mk I was a solid back 4 and a creative striker/playmaker in DB10 (bless him). Mk II was a spine held by a robust midfield general(PV4), an experienced skipper(Tony Adams), creative striker/playmaker DB10 and ultra fast winger Overmars. Mk III was the Invincible team who had the Left flank assasins, Cunt-Pires-Henry-PV4 (Paddy plays on the left of central midfield) and the stealth duo of DB10 and Freddie. We are now witnessing Mk IV and we are pretty strong all over the pitch.
2. Hunger: Our youthful team has the most hunger and exuberance to sustain this run. Even the oldest in our outfield lineup, our Captain Big Willie, can be considered the most hungry. Desire is always important when you are chasing something. When you consider that we really want this Cup we have to assess if the personnel wants it as much. I must say we really do.
3. Future: UCL success has always been dominant in the future of big teams. The money is one thing, but the other factor would be the ability to attract big players. With our new stadium generating more moolah for us, we can safely say we will be able to compete for expensive stars (if we really want to) with our pedigree in Europe. Staying in the competition every season is one thing, winning it before is another.

Relevancy: 4/3. Why the ridiculous figure? All 3 points mentioned above, in my opinion, are relevant to our future endeavors. And you know very well that we are building for the future with such a youthful squad. I’ve been thinking about certain things Le Boss has been doing this year and they sort of reflect one big desire, to win the bigger catches. No, i’m not belittling the Fa Cup. But be honest, when you haven’t won something before, you’d choose that over something you’ve had for a few times already.

Wenger has taken drastic steps this season to change the mentality and shape of our team. Known to be loyal to his players, it was a huge shock that he dropped Gilberto from the captaincy and also from the starting 11. True that Flamini’s performances merited that change but the armband snub confounded me for a while. Looking at our team structure though, it makes a whole lot more sense. As mentioned by Arseblogger, Gunnerblog and a few other experienced bloggers, we have lacked something for the past few years where we’ve won nothing. A blood and guts leader. TH14 was a great leader who lead by example on and off the pitch. But he hardly screamed for a victory, when he did, he screamed at his teammates to make a better pass for him. Gilberto is a very quiet leader, who shows his hunger for victory by doing it himself, trying to score the important goals last season and was successful with that.

However, we know that the best leaders are the ones who can inspire the whole team, who can emote desire and translate them through his own actions and also infecting the team immensely. Gallas scores the important goals because he refuses to go without a fight. He screams at his teammates to spur them on, “Don’t lose focus! Come on! Lets go!” is very different from “Pass the ball to me! I was right there!”. He improves the spirit by bringing back ideas from the past, team huddles. It has influenced the team greatly, i remember Ade getting into it and insisting that other teammates to join in quickly. If i were in that team, i’d be fucking hunting for blood every match because i know the man beside me wants it just as much. I got chills just looking at the pic above.

Looking at our squad, i find it drastically amazing that i’ve not come to the realization till now. Almost everyone is complimentary to the person next to them. I wrote about that but i’ve taken it out because i think its another post for another time. So the gist is, we have potentially the most balanced team we’ve ever had under Wenger (or even in our history). When else would be a better time to challenge for the trophy that has eluded us thus far? I say it would be now.

For me, i want to aim for a Treble but Wenger has already taken a step to lessen the burn if we don’t beat Yanited today. So realistically we are focusing on 2 fronts and i’d choose these 2 fronts after the experiences of seasons past, where we did not prioritize properly and suffered for it.

i just ran out of time. I predict 0-1 to the Arsenal. Cheers.