The Diary Of A Travelling Gooner – Part 4 (The Stadium of Sh*te)

The dream is over!

Arsenal are almost certain to finish another season without any silverware. If you still think we will 5-0 against Milan, you deserve to be shot for being a waste of space. Yes shot! Just like the six shots we allowed the opposition on target this week (Milan five, Sunderland one) which all resulted in goals.

By the way, who was the dude who took his shirt off during the first half to reveal five or six Arsenal tattoos on his body in the cold. Hat doffed to you my man!

Someone should really own up as to who has jinxed this Arsenal team, my colleague claims Arsenal lose anytime I go to see them play…well that’s not exactly true.

It’s only been Aston Villa (0-2), Chelsea (1-4), Aston Villa (0-1), Fulham (1-2). Ok, too much information there.

Personally I blame it on Ben…did anyone notice him at the game?

You see there was so much more going on yesterday that was more exciting than the game like the Sunderland fans who only showed up after Kieran Richardson put them one-nil up and the rest that found their voices after the Oxlade-Chamberlain own goal. They deserve all the horrible songs we dished out to them yesterday as in my brother-in-laws words “the stadium really is a dump.”

I’ve been to a number of football grounds around England this truly is one of the worst I’ve visited, at least for the away fans. Small concourses and drab and disgusting toilets all contrive to give visiting fans the most miserable of experiences at the Stadium of Light or should I say sh*te? So bad the travelling Gooners all burst into song during the game.

We wanna go home; We wanna go home!
This place is a sh*te hole; We wanna go home

And home it was we went, with our tails between our legs after losing 2-0 to a team we beat last weekend albeit in a different competition. If we were looking at the bigger picture, we can say we got the points we needed in the league and need to sacrifice our cup competitions if we are to save our season and secure another season of Champions’ League football. However, we all know that painful cup exits often mark the start of miserable runs for Arsenal.

To say that the loss wasn’t unexpected would not be entirely far from the truth if we’re being honest with ourselves. It was a poor game riddled with miscommunication, and an apparent lack of conviction going forward especially in the final third. Where was the midfield for crying out loud? I watched the game with my sister, her husband and my significant other, all three who had never been to a football stadium and at best are armchair tacticians. However, even they could see the glaring lack of contribution and the anonymity of Messrs van Persie and Chamberlain in the game. Ok, young Alex popped up late on with an own goal but the game got clumsier by the minute and the fact that Johann Djourou was our most visible player proves a point as to where the real pressure came from.

The first goal was a nothing goal. Djourou gave away a cheap free kick after Alex Song escaped getting penalised for a handball in the box which I saw ever so clearly. Immediately I whispered to my companions that we would concede from the free kick. We were right behind the goal and I could already see that the defensive positioning on the set piece was poor. We failed to deal with the cross and the second ball found Kieran Richardson free on the left. He wasted no time in burying it into the corner of the net. Top marks to him for his celebration too! He ran towards the sideline and was handed a bottle. He threw it up and ran forward towards the corner flag with Cattermole catching the bottle and gulping down its contents. He then proceeded to remove the corner flag and should have been booked for that too. Webb boy let him get away with it. Do you wanna hear what we sung about him? Maybe another day.

The game went downhill from there and I can tell you that most of us Gooners were more focussed on keeping warm than keeping up with the game so much so that all my three companions missed Sunderland’s second goal. How I saw it happen was Chamberlain attempt a dribble and lose the ball just outside the Sunderland box to  Stephane Sessegnon who made a marauding run across the field and fed former Gunner Larsson whose shot came off the bar and went in off Chamberlain. Game over!

I had more worries about Coquelin going off early in the first half after being crocked by the Sunderland thugs than the scoreline of the day’s game. In all, it was a poor performance deserving of a loss.

What more can I say? We better get our act together before the North London derby next weekend. We have a string of important games coming up and it is essential that the right Arsenal team shows up. We are level on points with Chelsea and are 10 points behind 3rd placed Spurs with 13 games to go. We really need to give it a go in the final few games of the season if we are to finish safely in fourth and the onus lies with the Manager and the team to perform at their peak and close out the season well.

The shambles of last summer and the January transfer window are another day’s discussion and I hope we won’t suffer too much for our foot-dragging come May.

Till next time…Victoria Concordia Crescit.