Aliadiere, Adebayor, Flamini, Oh My!

Jereme Aliadiere scored a brace to put us over West Brom. In both goals Aliadiere showed some style and class. It’s no big surprise to then find out that he is still pushing for a first-team place. Aliadiere (pronounced Ah-lee-ah-dee-air-ee) has been with the club longer than anyone else, save for good ol’ Freddie Ljungberg. He joined the club at 16, and is now just 23. Everyone should appreciate this young man’s tenacity and love for the Arsenal. Despite being out on loan here and there, having a bad string of injuries, and never having much of a first team chance, he has stuck to it. Hopefully things will work out and he will work his way up some day.

Adebayor is out for 3 or so weeks after sustaining an injury early in the West Brom match. That’s not good, but given Theo’s progress and Baptista as an alternate, we still have a solid 3+ potential strikers to select from. One article I found on the subject had by far the worst pun on a name that I have seen. We’ve got an Adebay-sore. *cringe*

After the win we drew Everton for the fourth round of the League Cup on November 6th. We play Everton on Saturday in league play, so we’ll see more of the Blues than normal in the next month. Everton are currently 6th in the Prem and have been in good form as of late. I suspect that with Adebay-sore (Get it!!!) out and Ljungberg still recovering, I bet we’ll be seeing more of Theo Walcott than normal.

Footballing World has an interesting piece on Matty Flamini. To sum it up, he states that Flamini has doomed himself by refusing to play defense and asking to see more midfield time. Mr. Wigmore then goes on to predict that Flamini could be on his way out at the New Year or the summer. I couldn’t agree more, but I hate doing it. Flamini worked tirelessly last season, and he was key in reaching 4th and making it to the Champion’s League finals. I hope he would stick around as a couple of injuries is all it would take for him to see a solid start again, but he is probably not content with that. This is one Arsenal fan that hopes to see Flamini stay on the team.

And last, but certainly not least, Andrea Canales has written up some suggestions for MLS decision makers on how to succeed. Who gives a flying fuck? It would be one thing if she wrote some suggestions on how to turn American soccer around, but we have been reduced to the pure drivel of how to ’succeed’ in the MLS. The way I see it, there is no success in the MLS. It’s a boring league, there’s no competition, and it ultimately amounts to nothing.

She offers insightful hints like rewarding the fans with free parking. Yeah, free parking… that will get the public interested. Another completely unheard of idea is to bench players that don’t behave on the pitch. Pure genius. Oh, and make sure that you rotate your players around so that no one becomes too tired. Jesus, why haven’t MLS decision makers thought of these unheard of ideas before? Oh how it pains me to see articles like this. And it’s because of this horribly uninteresting piece that I’ll be writing an article on what I think American soccer *should* do to gain ground on the rest of the world. Any article about how to succeed in the MLS is just masturbatory.