Back to winning ways but far from pretty

I NEVER thought I’d be so relieved to see Nicholas Bendtner back fit and in the squad, but along with Theo Walcott, it was great to see the return of some genuine firepower on the bench for the game against Birmingham.

The scent of imminent competition certainly didn’t seem to harm Marouane Chamakh, as the Moroccan lad had one of his most effective games in an Arsenal shirt to date. OK so the replays of the penalty incident left his tumble in the box looking just a little iffy, but it appeared to me at the time as if there was contact.

I’m usually the first to complain about players going down too easily, but I want to see strikers playing in red & white with such a poacher’s appetite that the thought of passing up a genuine goal scoring opportunity, in the hope of the ref awarding a penalty, simply wouldn’t occur to them.

It’s the absence of this sort of blinkered hunger for putting the ball in the back of the net that left us on the edge of our seats for the remainder of the afternoon. After Marouane began to make a name for himself, with the sort of goal that demonstrated the very best of his goal scoring talents, we really should’ve gone on to put the result to bed, by going for the visitors throat and proving the overall gulf in class between the two sides. When Rosicky replaced Arshavin in the latter stages, he had more efforts on goal in five minutes than the little Ruski had the entire time he’d been on the pitch and Tommie’s shoot on sight policy was a welcome change from the Gunners customary “after you Claude” habit of always looking to a team mate. In fact Shava seems to have taken to Arsène’s Zen philosophy just a little too enthusiastically, with an economy of movement which appears to have restricted the Russian to plotting up like a little Buddha, in one particular spot the entire afternoon, contributing merely with the occasional wayward backheel should the ball ever come within range of his diminutive legs.

With the tendency of opposition teams to work their socks off when they come to our place, we just can’t afford to carry any such passengers. But the problem is that Shava is one of the few (fit!) players with the natural ability to unlock the tightest of defences that you always want him out on the park, in the hope he might conjure up that one single moment of breathtakingly inspirational genius. Sadly such hopes went unrequited on Saturday, as the lazy little bugger left the pitch, having hardly broken sweat.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about Wilshere’s red card was that his OTT tackle became the focus, instead of a display where Jack was both nimble, quick and constantly making mugs of Blue-shirted candlesticks.

In an age where we’re always complaining about the lack of commitment of many of football’s modern day mercenaries, I find it just a little perverse that we’ve managed to start a witch-hunt that’s invariably going to end up punishing any evidence of over-enthusiasm.

Give me this manifestation of how much it means to them, any day, over the sort of laidback indifference that really leaves devotees like me losing their rag. And if the price we have to pay for such an intense brand of football is the occasional broken limb, as far as I’m concerned this is far preferable to seeing our frenetic version of the beautiful game over-officiated, to the point where it’s unrecogniseable from the sedate, quite frankly, boring version of the sport played elsewhere.