Damn you work! Yet again, work is inconveniently getting in the way of me blogging. I managed to miss the Liverpool review and the Southampton preview and review. Well, I could have done the Southampton review now, but I’m keen to just get on with the Arsenal preview.
A quick recap of what I missed out on:
Liverpool – I thought we played well in this game. I fully expected us to go and park the bus again, as we did v Man City the Wednesday before, but we actually made a game of it. We even went 2-1 ahead thanks to Fornals (still don’t know why he wasn’t starting!). An interesting fact from the game was that we had scored more goals in the game than Liverpool had conceded in their previous 11 games!
Southampton – I was hoping Bowen would have started this game having seen another glimpse of him in the Liverpool game (all 6 mins or whatever it was) and he did! Opening the scoring after 15mins. Obafemi equalised after 31 minutes but Haller put us back in front after 40 minutes before Antonio put them to bed in the 54th minute. A great performance – finally!
Now back to the Arsenal preview.
TEAM NEWS
Surprisingly Soucek could feature, he seems to have come back sooner from his injury and is just about match fit for the game.
Yarmolenko is back in training but don’t think will feature.
Fredericks still out following surgery.
Wilshere – once wore a West Ham shirt but I think it was back when he was a young child, I can’t seem to remember it happening in the recent past!
PREDICTED LINE UP
I would like to see Moyes go with the same team that played against Southampton. Hopefully he takes a leaf out of Pellegrini’s book and doesn’t change a winning side. As long as it’s the only leaf out of his book, I couldn’t cope with Haller as a lone striker again!
It has to be the following:
A special mention has to go to Ngakia, he hasn’t had it easy in the games he’s played but he hasn’t looked out of place either. He’s learning but I’d prefer to see him given the chance for the rest of the season over Zabaleta. Zaba is more than likely moving on and it will give Ngakia the chance for some first team action as no doubt we will need him in future seasons.
Fornals is another who is really impressing me. I know I bang on about how I didn’t rate him at the start, but he’s really turned into another quality player. He managed two assists against Southampton and managed to bag a goal against Liverpool recently. He is better than Lanzini (although Moyes seems to think Lanzini is the best player in our squad – strange) and been more effective than Anderson of late.
Finally, it looks like we have an attacking threat. How long have us fans been going on about how much Haller needs to play up front with someone? Last weekends game proved exactly that. He had two / three players helping him for once and look at how good he was.
Antonio, Haller, Bowen and Fornals is scary. They all seem to offer something a little different. We are giving opposition managers a headache. For too long this season we were too predictable! The opposition managers just looked at our team and said ‘Haller will try to hold the ball up, so we can get players back as West Ham will sit back and not get up to support him.’ ‘Anderson will never run at our defence so sit back and make it difficult for him to pick a pass.’ So simple and why we are in the position we are in.
However, if we do continue from last weekend’s performance it won’t be long before we are out of our position. I reckon we could snatch something this weekend but to be honest I’d settle for a point.
COYI!
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