Time for a goal?

By Boris Mellor
November 23 2009

Wenger had a pleasant surprise for Arsenal fans at his pre Liege press conference today - Kieran Gibbs is back in the squad and ready to play. Wenger had not expected that to be the case when he got the phone call immediately after the injury.

There were no new injuries at Sunderland; RvP and Nik remain injured, Clichy is not far off, Fabianski will play in the reserves on Wednesday.

Diaby is still 3 weeks off, but Vela, Walcott and Arshavin could all play some kind of role on Tuesday. Wenger is keen to finish top of the group and respond to the disappointment of Saturday. Asked how many times you can afford to lose Wenger intimated that you can't afford to lose any. He implied that it is not what fans and directors want.

Those who say Wenger is not lucid after matches were shown to be wrong on this occasion. "We didn't win enough duels in the final part of the pitch - Sunderland played well". He was also critical of Wiley saying it was a 100% a penalty and Wiley was, "in a strong position". He went on to say that "the team lacked fluency to force the issue in the final third". "Sunderland had one shot on target in the whole game."

He was not underplaying how good RvP was but the squad had enough offensive cover. He was not tempted to defend against Liege even though one point would see Arsenal through.

Working for the Man

Arsene gave short shrift to a reporter who wanted to stress the importance of the World Cup and Theo. "The big season is Arsenal not the World Cup" -  First pride is to work for the guy who pays you". Great stuff - it can't be repeated enough for me.

Not worried about Eddy

He was not worried about Eduardo not scoring; he was more interested in assists.

On Liege

If you watched them in the championship they might not impress, but he now realised they can raise their game for the CL. Meanwhile Captain Cesc blamed jet lag, these things are likely to happen, but they need a good win against Liege to get over it. Fab admitted they had lacked freshness going forward, but he stressed the importance of not conceding.

Yes indeed.