Gomez is going to get his own thread at this rate. I just replied to a post about him in another thread. That was disorientating.
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I think last night broke the Arsenal fans.
For once I'm not actually laughing at Arsenal. It seems a lot of them thought they would win and are highly disappointed... I can't feel anything but pity. In their heads, was it a fair contest? One of the major favourites for the competition vs them? I can't even describe them in a way that illustrates exactly how far everyone knew they were away from Bayern on paper.
It was sad listening to their points this morning, some were "why didn't X play?" and "why did X play?"... If Liverpool played Dortmund, lost 3-1 and made arguments asking why a player didn't play and asking why one did, we'd all look at them with an expression that says "in what bizarre world do you live in to think that you could somehow have played a different combination of players and somehow won the game, dominating possession and thoroughly outplaying a team that's far far far far better than you"... That is the slightly unfortunate situation I find myself in today.
The really stupid thing is, everyone can see what Wenger was thinking.
Before the game, you put the expected line up against the Bayern lineup and you had a basic idea of how the match was going to go. Wenger to his credit accepted Bayern were the better team before kick off and made 1 change that in his mind helped with at least 4 major problems.
Bayern had injury problems, they had to play their 4th choice CB alongside Dante, the result is that they'd have 2 giants.
Arsenal had Vermaelen playing lb and their left wide forward is Podolski.
Bayern's midfield trio was better than Arsenal's midfield trio.
Bayern's lb is very very very fast.
The first point obviously meant that Giroud's height would not be that much of an advantage. Bayern's 4th choice CB is basically a good version of Mertesacker. However, like Mertesacker, he isn't very quick.
The second point meant that Bayern's right side which is one of the best right sides in world football would be against a wide forward not known for his tracking back and a CB that has had a nightmare whenever he has played lb before in big games. (And in most small games.)
As things stood, Arsenal were going to lose the midfield battle badly. They were against a better passing trio, a better tackling trio, a more tactically aware trio, a better trio at just about everything.
Walcott has always been fast, the problem with always being fast is that fast people don't have much experience not having a huge speed advantage. Danny Graham is slow as fudge and therefore has spent his career learning how to play against people that are faster than him, Walcott has not had this learning experience.
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The problem between Wenger's solution and the way we see Wenger's solution is we all know that even if Arsenal had put 4 men on top of each other in the middle of midfield they still would have struggled to deal with Bayern's 3, that's ignoring the difficulties Cazorla would have trying to play wonky. (Plus, we had many matches of watching Modric play wide and thus had match experience to back up what logic would have suggested... Arsenal have played Cazorla on the wing before, but obviously not enough for Wenger to notice the dip in his influence there.)
Wenger's solution was simple, Ramsey... This is Wenger's 2nd mistake when it came to this solution, he gave his team too much credit at first but in Ramsey he has the personification of giving someone too much credit. To Wenger, Ramsey is something completely different than he is to us. To us he is an accident waiting to happen, an accident that can be relied upon to happen in most games.
In fairness to Ramsey he did play one of his best games in the past couple of years since he came back from that leg break.
So, if Wenger wasn't such an asshole, I might feel sorry for him. But getting back to my original point, how fudging deluded can Arsenal fans be if they thought one change would have seen the game won? Hell, they could play the same match 100 times and use different combinations of players each time and the same pattern of play would happen.
Bayern have fresh memories of playing a brick English side and it not working out, I struggle to see what Arsenal fans could possibly hope for. They know they gave Chelsea no hope in hell and then saw a game in which a weaker Bayern side than now missed a penalty, lost a penalty shootout and missed a fudgeton of chances.
They should consider themselves lucky that they got a corner that wasn't a corner and scored the strangest goal from a corner that Bayern will concede for many many years.
5 minutes before that, their goalkeeper had his back to play while he did GK warm ups.
Finally... Andy Townsend's "take off Arteta for Giroud" deserves an honourable mention.
Southgate actually spoke sense after the match when he said Wheelchair probably wouldn't make Bayern's team, let alone anyone else from Arsenal.
I do feel sorry for the supremely deluded ones, they make Liverpool fans look down to earth. But the rest of them are pretty tinkled too, so that's quite funny.
If someone has the version of this from last night, I'd appreciate it.
