Missing

By Boris Mellor
May 2 2010

Cesc Fabregas has told his team mates that Arsenal's championship hopes died at Tottenham, but that it was made even worse at Wigan as the team took the opposition for granted. Fabregas believes that the team thought it was going to be easy at 2-0 and then eased up. He then goes on to say that "it's not the Arsenal way". Clearly Cesc is not happy with his team mates.

With the Blackburn game coming up and a point essential to guarantee third place it's good to hear that the Arsenal captain shares the fans disappointment at the way eight months hard work was thrown away in the course of a few days and two matches.

Remember the shirt

With only a couple of games left Cesc has called on his team mates to remember what shirt they are wearing and win the remaining games for the honour of the club.

Arsenal have a good record against Blackburn, and has scored 14 goals against them in the last 3 meetings. However, this is not a particularly high scoring Arsenal Team having struggled to score throughout April. The one time the team managed to score more than once they proceeded to ship in three losing 3-2 at Wigan.

Butterfingers

Arsenal have dropped 12 points from winning positions playing away this season, ironically more than other team apart from Wigan (13). Perhaps not so much pride in that shirt as there should be.

I can also imagine Fat Sam gleefully explaining to his team how to unsettle Flapianski. Mind you Flappers will have to concede quite a few against Blackburn to catch up with Paul Robinson who has let in 47 goals in his last 15 league games against Arsenal. There is always someone worse off than yourself and Blackburn have conceded 54 goals this season; making Arsenal's 39 conceded look almost good. So much for plan B.

This match almost borders on meaningless, an end of season stroll before the beach or World Cup calls, however third place means that Arsenal will not need to go through the qualifiers for the CL, and for big Sam a victory would be his World Cup.

A draw by any means will do, and would ensure that team and fans alike could relax against Fulham next week. Wenger expects a good game, but what you expect and what you get are often very different.

Injury List

Almunia is not expected back for this game, but there is a slight chance that Arshavin will play some role. The team should be similar to the one that started against Man City. A possible difference could be Eboue possibly starts and Walcott is on the bench.