Arsenal lost to Watford on Tuesday night, but many of their rivals failed to win also, and we could have reason to not be overly pained by the results as a whole.
The Gunners were supposed to be licking their lips at the prospect of gaining an advantage over one or both of Liverpool and Chelsea, with the pair going head-to-head on Tuesday. The pair of course ended up sharing the spoils, and due to our loss, both gained a point on us!
Tottenham should also have been excited at the prospect of closing the gap on the league leaders Chelsea, but they also couldn’t bring the required game needed to beat, or even score against relegation-threatened Sunderland, and they will also have to lick their wounds at such a missed opportunity.
All eyes then turned to the Manchester Clubs, who had the joy of watching all of our sides fail to win their matches, and only one of them had the bottle to take advantage.
Manchester City came running out the gates, and stormed into a 3-0 lead in the opening half before going onto win 4-0. They had the toughest game on paper having travelled to a coming-into form side West Ham, but they discarded their challenge with ease, and have now joined Liverpool on 46 points, only one point behind second and third in the table.
Manchester United will be the most frustrated of all the top sides, having left themselves trailing the Champions League places by four points, when they should have been showing their rivals that they are in this race for the top four, and could have bridged the gap between second and sixth to only three points.
Chelsea and City will be laughing at the string of surprise failures inside the top six this week, and considering that Arsenal were the only side to actually lose, we will have to consider ourselves lucky not to have lost much in the race for the title or the top four.
Watching our team lose a game we would win 99 times out of 100 was painful, but the whole run of fixtures as a whole was simply so-so. Yes City closed our lead over fifth place to only one point, but I’m not concerned with the possibility of dropping out the top four come the end of the season.
The worry has to be that our next game however is a trip to Stamford Bridge, where we have conceded 10 goals without reply in recent years, and we now have to go there and target all three points, otherwise any hopes of winning that illustrious fourth Premier League title will be gone for another season.
What was worse? The loss or the full list of results? Can we pick ourselves up for a big performance against Chelsea on Saturday?
Pat J
What’s worse? ?
Nothing can be worse than having a delusional manager in charge who still believes that his squad is good enough with Ramsey in the lineup,
Wenger has gone waaaay past his sell by date and Surely,Losing at home to Watford has to be the final nail in his coffiin (Arsenal career).
Wait… Maybe there is something worse ?
Yes, It’s the fans that still believe we can still win the Premier league under Wenger.??
It’s not great by any stretch of the imagination but it could be worse, all but one of our rivals (Liverpool) could have won, putting us 12 points behind them, and 2 behind Spuds.
The Spuds and United results tell you that no game can be taken for granted. As Cech said you can’t be switched on for 80 minutes.
The Hull game now takes a bigger significance given how Silva got them to bully United. Yes Maureen’s moans were amusing afterwards but I fully expect Hull to attempt a Watford.
With all due respect to the unrelenting slugfest that is the Championship, the PL is actually more difficult because it is more punishing. You are not allowed an off day for whatever excuse, you will be punished.
just give the title to chelsea already.
If you believe you can win with ramsey giroud and gabriel the i dont know what to say about you.
I reckon we will get well beaten at the Sh*tford Bridge. This will catalyze an astonishing run of games in order to secure Champions League spot.
We will finish 8-12 points behind the champions, may that be 2nd, 3rd or 4th. Wenger will sign an extension in April/May after this “great run of games”, possibly including a spot on the Wembley.
Summer comes, this forum will be filled with rumors and comments about who we need of buying. We will buy one good/great player and neglect all the other areas (including the most urgent, the manager). And as we are a charity club, we will give unnecessarily long and lucrative contract extensions to players who absolutely don’t deserve them.
New season starts with a defeat -> already trailing by 3 points -> and thus the cycle has begun.
@ juhi, you have nailed it sir !. my thoughts exactly, and i suspect the thoughts of the majority of arsenal fans today . we are always playing catch up for some reason or other . the only time we can be genuinely optimistic is pre-season before a ball has been kicked in anger. suddenly after a couple of games into the new season we , the fans , begin to talk about next season and what we will be able to achieve with the world class signings we are promised.we should change our club motto to “theres always next season “.we have put up with excuses now for many years, the best excuse of them all was the new stadium and the fact that we had no money to spend on players. well who asked for a new stadium !?, was it the fans , i doubt it very much.the greed of the board and the management team is now there for everybody to see , put as little as possible back into the club , and pocket the profits and dividents .as usual, we fans are being treated with contempt, we are lied to all the time , it is as if the board and manager dismiss us as not being very important.sad days indeed for us gunners fans.
Pat, you should wake up and smell the coffee if you are truly not concerned with dropping out of the top 4.
We have not been able to win three games in a row even against mid-table teams. We consistently perform below our potential and we fail to address our problems. Evidence of this is that we continue to start or end games poorly.
This means the team is no longer responding to Wenger’s coaching or Wenger is not aware of the importance of starting games well and playing with high intensity for the full 90 minutes (which I doubt). Either way, our inconsistency means anything can happen including quite possibly finishing in 5th place.
Watford (A) Win
Southampton (H) Win
Hull (A) Win
Chelsea (H) Win
Burnley (A) Win
Swansea (H) Win
Bournemouth (H) Win
WHam (A) Win
Stoke (H) Win
exactly. The first streak started in August 2016 and the second in Nov 2016. Hardly the type of momentum building or consistency you expect from a team that wants to win the PL.
After the two losses to Everton and City many were saying we had 6 winnable games in a row yet we failed again to even 3 in a row.
It is silly to think about winning the PL if you can’t beat Watford or mid table teams in must win situations.
I was hoping for a liv win along with us closing the gap to five points, obv, and then I was thinking a draw away at the bridge would not be a bad result. We’d be in the race is the way I looked at it. So che drew with pool, which meant instead of five points we could have got it to six. Now the only way to rectify that is to go there and beat Chelsea, if this happens well then we’ll be in the position I was hoping for. Of course like allot of fans I’m not feeling very confident, even without the latest casualties I would still not be too confident, I can only hope we manage to pull it off some how.
Are the other coaches whose teams are behind us also delusional?. No matter how painful it is when we loss, we must face the reality about football. It is always a win, draw or lose.