AwayGoalsRule.com - Football Forum

The most important thing learnt over the past eight days is that Arsenal are continuing to commit a terrible crime: the failure to learn.

* They've sat the same examination time after time against Manchester United and Chelsea over the past year and failed it every time with the same wrong answers and the same errors. The components of the checklist are ticked off with barely a single deviation from the familiar script: a bright start followed by the concession of a soft goal from their opponents' first shot, a succession of missed chances, errant shooting, inept crosses, a devastating counter-attack, admirable heart, the end of another dream. It's perhaps as much a pity as it is pitiable.

* In brief mitigation, at least they improved on their no-show against Manchester United. But the observation that they outplayed Chelsea for vast swathes of the match is, whilst accurate, completely meaningless. Because Arsenal are the world champions at playing well where it does not really matter, because passing the ball around in midfield, creating chances and dominating possession means nothing if there is no end product to follow. What matters most in any game of football is a team's ability to score goals and then prevent them at the other end. And that is Arsenal's chief failing: in fundamental terms, they still can't save and they still can't (and don't) shoot.

* That said, their cardinal sin this Sunday was the failure to mark either John Terry or Didier Drogba at Chelsea's first corner and being caught on the counter-attack for the Ivorian's second goal. It wasn't as if they weren't forewarned last Sunday to the dangers of being caught upfield, and it wasn't as if Chelsea had to do much to engineer the four-on-four that resulted in Didier Drogba effectively closing out the game. With three of their last five goals conceded to the counter-attack, it's clear that they just aren't learning.

* Arsene Wenger has to take plenty of blame. He has to accept culpability for his side's inability to shoot and cross - there's a myth that Arsenal do not score headers because they are too small, but they scored plenty of headers when Robin van Persie was playing at the start of the season because the Dutchman is the only player at Arsenal, other than Armand Traore, who can actually cross a ball - but he should be blamed mostly for the presence of Manuel Almunia in goal. Wenger, it seems, has finally realised that time should be up for the goalkeeper who was ranked, in terms of shots to saves, 19th in the league even before Sunday's double concession from the two shots he faced. Alas, it would also seem as if the Arsenal manager only realised what F365 has been arguing for many months on the final day of the transfer window despite being given plenty of notice about the date of its closure.

* Arsenal should consider loaning out Theo Walcott for the entirety of next season: he needs games and there is no chance he will ever be good enough to play for a team with title ambitions until he plays a lot of games. A shock to the system might also do him the world of good: complacency and a sense of entitlement born of being taken to the World Cup at the age of 17 is the most plausible explanation for why his game has not improved one iota since 2006.

* Ashley Cole looks to be back to his best. His form in the past 18 months has been locked in the oppostie direction to Gael Clichy's.

* The Chelsea fans supporting John Terry with the banner of 'JT: England's Best Captain' still don't get it. The quality of his captaincy is not the issue. It's his redundancy as the best man to lead England that has resulted in his ousting.

* As Mr Justice Tugendhat declared when he lifted Terry's super-injunction, he has a "very robust personality".

* Drogba would be the best player in the history of the game if Chelsea played Arsenal every week: in his last ten games against the Gunners, he has scored 12 goals.

* Chelsea won because they had a goalkeeper and a centre-forward. Swap Almunia for Petr Cech and Andrei Arshavin for Didier Drogba and the scoreline might indeed have been reversed. But it's utterly absurd to defend Arsenal on the grounds that Chelsea wouldn't have won without Drogba. It's like saying a car would be useless without wheels - they're both there for precisely the reason they serve.

* And no doubt a second 'defence' of Arsenal will be that they might have won had Robin van Persie been available. They did, after all, win at the Bridge last season when Van Persie scored both their goals and Drogba was absent. But one salient difference between Chelsea and Arsenal is that the Blues have a quality back-up striker in Nicolas Anelka whereas the Gunners have put all their eggs in one injury-prone basket. As a result, just one injury has wrecked their season. It's another damning indictment of Wenger's management and his reputation as a squad builder.

* It's a suspicion rather than a conclusion but Chelsea would not have minded in the slightest about Arsenal seeming to be the better team. Chelsea only care about winning and they would have realised very early on that they did not need to be the best team to win on Sunday. If it is true that Carlo Ancelotti pinpointed Arsenal's vulnerability to the counter-attack in midweek as their main weakness then Chelsea may well have been 'inferior' by design.

* Chelsea are reserving their best performances this term for the big matches: they've won all four of their games against a fellow member of the Big Four so far and have done so without conceding a goal in the process.

* It is just as well for Joe Cole that Walcott and Michael Owen are stagnating because he is making only a limited claim for a World Cup spot. Trouble is, he is likely to find it even more difficult to become a regular fixture in the team if Ancelotti permanently reverts to a 4-3-3.

* Michael Ballack really doesn't do much. At all.

* Gutless? Spineless? Arsenal deserve criticism but it cannot be said that they lacked heart or bottle at the Bridge. Unfortunately, that will not stop people from saying it. The realisation that a significant percentage of the world's population just see what they want to see and read what they want to read is perhaps the greatest disillusionment of the internet age.

I've thought that since he first came to England, I really don't see any evidence of why everyone raved about him before.

Frenchman fed up with negative spin...

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has responded angrily to suggestions that he was negative about Chelsea's style of play following the Gunners' defeat by their London rivals at the weekend.

Blues midfielder Michael Ballack was angry that Wenger implied that Chelsea were merely a very efficient outfit whose style of football was limited and uninspiring.

The Frenchman feels that the English media have once again wilfully misinterpreted his post-match comments for their own ends.

"I just would like to say that I was full of compliments and praise for Chelsea after the game and I find it completely unfair from the press that you take one word of my press conference to turn it every time," he told reporters at another press conference today.

"You did that at Villa, you did that at Chelsea and every time if you look at the intent of my press conference it was positive towards the opponent.

"If you want, I can say nothing in my press conferences as well, don't worry. As for the rest, I've been long enough in England to know that the team who wins can say what they want - they are right.

"It's my job to take a distance from that and analyse the game in a calm way with a cold head and to analyse what is right and wrong."

One problem that many Gunners fans are crying out for Wenger to solve is the lack of a target man up front who can hold play up and won't be out-muscled by opposing centre-backs.

Wenger admits that his club did try to sign strikers but failed in their attempts. Now they must live with that and keep battling until the end of the campaign.

"You know that we try to sign players but it didn't work and you have to accept that we lost strikers," he added.

"Unfortunately we've got three strikers out with [Nicklas] Bendtner just coming back, Eduardo out and [Robin] van Persie out.

"The coincidence of the fixtures is that you lose one player he loses three big games. You have to accept that as well. I believe that we promised ourselves to fight until the last game of the season. There are as well a lot of positives in the last game that we have to take out of that and to continue to fight until the last second of this season.

"That is what I will do and what my players will do. But at the moment again everyone is negative with Arsenal, we have to live with that and we have to prove them wrong."

One player who has been linked repeatedly with the Gunners in recent times is Bordeaux striker Marouane Chamakh.

Wenger would neither confirm nor deny whether his club were still talking to the forward, who is free to discuss summer moves as his contract has entered its last six months.

"I believe he talks to too many clubs, but he's entitled to," he grinned.

"We are talking to nobody, we are focusing on tomorrow's game [at home to Liverpool]. He is free to sign where he wants. I cannot interfere in that.

"What is important is that we win tomorrow and that we focus on that. We'll see who wins the title.

"I believe that there is a long way to go. We still have 13 games to play and 39 points to take, and tomorrow's three of them, so let's try to win tomorrow."

Meanwhile, Wenger also revealed that the Gunners, now third in the Premier League, had not been hit by any more injuries ahead of Wednesday night's visit of fourth-placed Liverpool.

"We will check that this morning before training but we have no big injury," he explained.