Down....but certainly never out

The Stadium of Light is a long old schlep and after an exhausting week, if I’m entirely honest, if Saturday’s game had been live on the box, I might’ve been sorely tempted to stop at home with my feet up, instead of spending a gruelling 12–hours at the wheel of my motor, only to endure 90 minutes in the wind and rain at a North-East encounter, which hardly held the promise of being a particularly scintillating affair.

But then until such time as the Irish Examiner feature is renamed “Recliner Armchair Rabbit”, instead of “Terrace Talk”, I’d feel too much of a fraud if I didn’t make the effort and as every travelling fan knows, a failure to ‘pay one’s dues’ at the Premiership’s least tempting profferings, can often prove the sort of fatal mistake that will inevitably guarantee one misses out on the game of the season.

I would’ve also thought that most travelling Gooners would know better than to give up the ghost on this Arsenal side. After making the 500-mile round trip trek, I pity the many poor souls who made a disconsolate dash for the exits on 85 minutes, the moment Leadbitter’s speculative shot nestled in the back of Almunia’s net. I know it’s an almost instinctive, ‘not our day’ type reaction to want to escape the scene of one’s misery, after having the rug pulled from beneath our feet, with what was the epitome of a smash & grab, 3-point robbery (considering our almost total domination of possession).

However after travelling all that way, how gutted must these Gooners have been to have missed out on the highlight of our afternoon and the gleeful celebrations that greeted Cesc Fabregas’ equaliser, as the young Spaniard salvaged not just a point, but some self-respect, by avoiding our worse start to a season in umpteen years. I imagine most will be too embarrassed to admit it, but I simply can’t imagine my last Arsenal memory, before a six hour return trip in the pouring rain (and a two week International break) being the sound of the eruption in the stadium behind me, which would’ve been loud enough to indicate a goal, but not sufficiently sonorous to suggest a second for the home side. What a sickener!

Sadly by and large, the game itself lived up to its unappetising billing. Although I doubt it’s a paucity of entertainment that’s responsible for the large swathes of empty seats at the Stadium of Light, as the pictures on MOTD of sparsely populated terraces elsewhere and the perimeter advertising, offering reduced price season tickets would suggest that Premiership football is fortunate to have obscene amounts of TV money, to cushion the adverse effects of the credit crunch.

Still the recent proliferation of the Irish tri-colour on scarves and flags around the ground would suggest there’s no shortage of punters willing to travel from the Emerald Isle to support the Quinn/Keane revolution on Wearside – who could’ve possibly predicted that such a hostile relationship would eventually develop into wedded bliss (although the cynic in me might conclude that it’s only a matter of time before this analogy arrives at its inexorable conclusion, involving deceit, divorce and customary disputes over illegitimate offspring!).

Saturday’s match was evidence of the contrasting levels of expectations between the two sets of supporters. As with most clubs who’ve endured yo-yoing between the top division and the various incarnations of the far less glamorous lower league, you get the distinct sense that Sunderland fans are simply grateful to retain their invitation to the Premiership party. Whereas an Arsenal home crowd would scream their disgust, if Wenger dared to employ Roy Keane’s negative tactics, getting ten men behind the ball for the entire 90. Nevertheless, Arsène should be more than used to opposing managers paying us this sort of respect and he should be aware that any sort of “park the bus” griping is likely to sound like sour grapes.

No, Sunderland must be commended for the well drilled way in which they stuck to their manager’s gameplan and as frustrating as it proved for anyone associated with an Arsenal side, tasked with breaking down what basically resembled an attack v defence training ground exercise, if any criticism is due, it should be directed at our own lack of dynamism.

Mercifully the miserable weather abated during the second half, just long enough for a football match to break out. It’s all well and good for the best teams to be patient, but when all efforts fail to pick a path through the ten bodies blocking ones route to goal, the obvious answer is to employ a sufficient burst of pace to deny the opposition time to get back into position, facing the ball in two impenetrable banks of four, lined neatly across their area.

I can only recall two instances where the Gunners managed to change down a gear, to attack at sufficient speed for Sunderland to have only five men tracking back into their box, still facing their own goal. One resulted in Van Persie forcing a decent save from Gordon and the other resulted in the ref disallowing a perfectly good goal (at least from my close proximity Walcott prevented the whole of the ball from going out of play). Whereas for the majority of the rest of the match, for all our possession, it was the home side’s rare forays forward which proved more threatening, as our attack lacked the necessary incisiveness.

To my mind, considering Sunderland’s lack of ambition, Alex Song was superfluous as a midfield enforcer. In a contest with the obese and the infirm (an overweight Andy Reid and a positively pensionable Dwight Yorke) which wasn’t particularly physical, the more cerebral ball skills of Samir Nasri might’ve proved more successful in picking the Black Cats lock.

At least Cesc’s determination to get his head on the ball at the death meant that we didn’t head home feeling too deflated. But having blown 8 of 21 points to date, to continue with the feline analogy, I can’t help but feel that it is a bit early to have already nixed the majority of our nine lives. Although I guess we must be grateful to our North London neighbours, as by joining Newcastle as the Premiership laughing stock, Spurs have ensured that all such trivial setbacks are put into proper perspective.

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