Per Mertesacker was speaking this week about the Arsenal players needing a rest in order to gather themselves for the last 10 games in the Premier League. I don’t understand this. Is he tired? The way he strolls around the pitch he shouldn’t be, and modern footballers have all the advantages of sports science and nutrition and everything is designed for them to be as fit as possible.

Week in, week out you see players like Messi and Ronaldo running all over the pitch, usually for the full 90 minutes and they hardly ever have a game off, so I don’t buy the `tired and jaded` excuse, although you should consider how tired players are before betting on football games. To find out more about other things that influence handicappers, you check out The Sports Geek updates on Google.

I do wonder sometimes why Wenger doesn’t rotate his centre backs more. It may be good to have a pairing who have built an understanding, but what happens when one is injured or suspended? The player coming in will not be match fit or have the same sort of understanding.

Maybe Mertesacker was really talking about the Arsenal players having a chance to regroup and get ready mentally for the rest of the season. I don’t agree with this either, because the last thing on their minds was defeat by Tottenham. Surely it would be better to play again quickly to put that behind you. I wish we were playing this weekend, but the Everton game is postponed because they are still in the FA cup(another little reminder of a bad game).

With all this time between games, it might have been better to just take everyone away for a few days and have a proper break. That way they might actually have been able to relax and stop worrying. They didn’t, so I hope that they are using this time wisely and practising their defending, because we cannot afford to give more cheap goals away in Munich or in the rest of the Premier league games.

1 thought on “Arsenal should have taken a proper break?

  1. Arsenal should have allowed Bould to continue coaching beyond the mid Autumn – while Wenger took a back seat !!

Leave a Reply to chris from Cambridge Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.