Lazio Gave Them An Eagle

There's a movie that won some Oscars, or at least was nominated for some, that I don't really think is very good.  Lots of people did though.  They probably still do.  It's hard to tell however, if they like it because someone told them it was good, or because they actually think it's good.  Steve Carell plays a super rich guy that has a sort of long touted melt down and ends up shooting Mark Ruffalo.  Channing Tatum plays Mark Ruffalo's brother.  It's based on a true story and in real life Mark Ruffalo's character didn't have a brother.  And the real life Steve Carell guy became fixated on an olympic wrestler in his stable of sponsored athletes who was from Bulgaria.  When the cops surrounded his compound (in real life), and negotiated his surrender for having murdered a really, really nice guy, he said he was coming out of his house and he'd be wearing his Bulgarian colors.  So fixated on this Bulgarian guy, who was in real life, the Mark Ruffalo guy's best friend, the wealthy guy managed to convince himself that he had some Bulgarian roots, which he didn't.  Turns out that Ludogorets are actually really from Bulgaria - Razgrad, in the north east, not too far from the Romanian border.  They're top of the Parva league, which sounds like something I get my dogs inoculated for.  They're nicknamed the Eagles and when Lazio played them recently, the Romans gave the club a live Eagle.  Knowing this now, I'm a little annoyed that Ludogorets didn't pay it forward and give us a live brontosaurus.  Instead, they gave us some easy chances and some slack goalkeeping which led to a few goals.  We should've scored more.  Theo and the Ox man could've had at least another each.  And likewise, we should've had enough in the team to restrict their chances.

A big tonking win has been well overdue, and I'm not going to deconstruct the one we just had because I watched a replay of the game after I already knew the score and had read the match report and because on about 15 minutes the super strong weed brownies I had eaten about an hour previous kicked in pretty hard.  So, I'll spare you the insight of someone who had recently committed brain cell genocide and instead, I'll be happy about the fact that for the first time in a long time, we've really hammered a team for goals.  Ozil's hatrick is a bonus too.  6 goals for that funky-eyed genius, so misunderstood, so complicated.

Playing a team from a tiny place, with a tiny stadium and players on tiny wages (compared to the 2008, big bank exec bonus style wages on offer in the prem) will always make for tricky PR.  Especially for the Arse.  Drop points and it's a crisis, win standard and it's par for the course, win big and it's just a piddly team from Bulgoromainastan.  It's tempting to roll out the 'you can only beat what's in front of you', but I'm tired of that and about an hour ago I ate some more of those sweet sweet brownies so I really can't be bothered.  All I can say is that we won big, the most beautiful brush stroke of a footballer on the planet got a rare and well deserved hatrick and David Ospina came up massive when he had to.  Coquelin was excellent and that pass from Cazorla to Ozil for Ozil's first goal made me want to fast forward 17 years to when the two of them rent a run down mansion in the south of France for a summer where they spend their days playing backgamen and smoking joints together, entertaining a dozen esoteric, thinking poets and calculated young beauties with bangs and rosy cheeks and disdainful expressions, all listening to old Malcolm X speeches and getting blind drunk on mescaline sherry.

Up next we've got Middlesborough, a team that for no reason at all, or maybe it was the league cup Semi's in '05, I absolutely loath.  We're on a strong, strong run, our squad looking deep, our boys looking good and the results excellent.  It's the perfect time for some Ray Parlour, Paul Merson stealing bunch of league cup semi final winning, Juninho signing bunch of Brexit voters to come and spoil it.  Let's hope it doesn't happen, we should have enough to keep our run going and lets hope we do, I'd love a good game for the Ox and maybe an out of the blue goal for Nacho.

Talk soon, bye for now.

Arse In LA No.1

I’m starting this blog so that I can write about Arsenal and so that I can write about football.  Blog is sort of a dirty word to me, has a shitty connotation, pretentious maybe, even though I read a bunch of them and I have written blogs before.  So not only will this hopefully be a dazzling study in complex, nonlinear football meta theory and the wonderful spectacle of all action sports drama encased within, but a show of personal growth to quell the doubts I see mounting in my new wife’s head, as well.  With this new outlet for all things football and Arsenal, no longer will she have to suffer the ages long back stories about the fan’s sentiment towards a former player who now plays at a different club but he’s not very good anymore and he should’ve never left the Arsenal for bigger wages and it serves him right the son of a bitch and that’s why when that song played in the shop and the girl who worked there dropped the box it was so funny, because that’s the song we used to sing for Freddy Ljunberg and when Petit fell over when we played Chelsea it was hilarious. 

We all have it, that absurd, Walter Sobchak mechanism that triggers an army of thoughts that lurk around every corner of your brain, just waiting to jump out and latch onto something, their only purpose to spread the Arsenal supporting virus as far and wide as possible.  “That’s like when Wenger said ‘we played a little bit with the handbrake on’” or “Typical, I knew he wouldn’t show up, he’s just like Nelson Vivas against Leeds, thought that from the second I met him”.  I now have a lounge bar style, free passed appetizers, drinks on the house mixer convention where all of the Arsenal and football thoughts and ideas can mingle.  I doubt anybody will read this, not many people will be privy to the synergy and behind the scenes deals being done among all these observations, but I don’t think they care too much.  They’re pretty happy in their insular world, perpetually in motion in one place, always now and never later and there’s no over there.  And as long as they have a place to go, whether or not anyone sees, they won’t take up so much space in my brain and will hopefully be kept away from my great sport of a wife.

So, there it is, a reason to start writing.  Why you would start reading, god only knows.  And now, here we are, no segue to the football so we’re just going to do the football.  It’s the day before we play Ludogorets and a few days after we played Swansea.  I don’t know anything about Ludogorets, other than they’re a small club from eastern Europe somewhere and I’m not gonna bother with the research.  I think we might rotate the team but then again, we’re on a good run, 6 bouncing wins, a very good run, and Wenger likes to keeps his bands together when we’re winning like this, so who knows.  I’m not gonna speculate. 

The Swansea game was sort of crazy, great fun to watch at times and so unnecessarily stressful at others.  During the game I thought that we were obviously the far better side, but Swansea have a few capable players and are probably a pretty decent team.  I hadn’t seen the table or their form, which makes this game a lot messier in retrospect.  Theo’s goals were basically gifted to us, which was kind and preemptive of Swansea in anticipation of our gifting them a couple of goals back.  It was like a Korean business meeting with a group of executives politely exchanging gifts over a conference table.  We tried to give them more goals but they weren’t all that polite back and did not accept.  Maybe because Granit Xhaka had been very impolite not long before, tripping up poor old, speedy Barrow on half way. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy with the win.  We looked really good at times and we were pretty strong with 10 men, we really should’ve got a couple more goals.  But blam, there it is, why didn’t we get those goals.  And why did they get so many clear chances after we had been so dominant.  Hopefully the momentum we perpetuate from this outweighs the negatives we can gather and we do start finishing more chances, putting games to bed, not letting teams back in when we’ve been so dominant and not getting men sent off when we should be cruising, harsh as that Xhaka red was. Anyway, I’m liking this top of the table proximity and the league will really begin to take shape over the course of the next 5 or 6 games, so let’s hope for a win tomorrow in Europe and that our momentum continues into the weekend. 

Bye for now.