Arsenal-Mania

The Arsenal-Mania Player of the Month: February

By Rachel Rodrigues on Monday, March 6, 2006

What a bad season we are having. Bad form, injuries and defeats sum up the 2005/06 season so far and all those features were all present in another bad month for our club. We started off on bad note with a second home defeat and ended the month with yet another away loss.

Newly promoted West Ham made to trip to Highbury and came away with all three points in a bad match that saw us fall further behind in the race for the 4th Champions League spot. Goals from Robért Píres and Thierry Henry gave us hope but West Ham held on to take a 3-2 victory and become only the second team to beat us at Highbury this season.

Our spirits were lifted when we came back to Highbury with all three points with victory over Birmingham. The win was secured thanks to a goal each from Thierry Henry and Emmanuel Adebayor, which were both very special in different ways. Thierry's goal took his Arsenal goal tally up to 200 at the ground where he scored his 100th and Adebayor scored his first goal for the club, hopefully the first of many.

Bolton came to Highbury in high spirits after beating us in our last two meetings and it looked as if they would be celebrating another victory however in the 3rd of stoppage time Gilberto slotted an equaliser past the keeper to claim a deserved point for the home team.

We played really well in the second half against Bolton and throughout the game against Birmingham and therefore felt quite confident going into the game against Liverpool despite our long injury list. However Liverpool's strength at home seemed to work in their favour when in the 87th minute they scored the winner off the rebound from the original shot.

Next up we faced Real Madrid for the first time in our history, we travelled to Madrid as the underdogs and managed much to our delight to turn a few heads. We played brilliantly, we were in control of the match and looked the most likely to score and we did on 47 minutes when Cesc Fabregas set up Thierry Henry who put us in the lead with a valuable away goal. We held on and should have punished Real on quite a few occasions. The next leg will be played at Highbury on the 8th of March.

We were brought back down to Earth days later with another defeat this time at the hands of Blackburn who are a team we shouldn't really be losing to. The reverse score line from midweek handed us our 10th defeat of the season, just terrible. It meant that the Rovers leapfrogged us into 5th spot and left us in lowly 7th, 5 points behind Tottenham, who are 4th.

And that is the way the month ended, 2 victories, 1 draw and 3 defeats. What a disappointing month that had its share of highs and lows. Next month we can look forward to the second leg of our Champions League tie with Real Madrid and Premiership action.

After thinking and discussing about all that has happened during the month the Arsenal-Mania Forum users have decided that the Arsenal-Mania Player of the Month for February is Jens Lehmann.

Jens Lehmann has been solid between the sticks for us so far this season and this month was no different. He was commanding at the back for us throughout the month and without him our results could have been a lot worst. His best match of the month came against Liverpool at Anfield where he also won the Arsenal-Mania Man of the Match award for his performance. This is Jens' first Player of the Month award and hopefully it's the first of many.

Jens won the award with 67% of the votes followed by Cesc Fabregas who had 24% of the votes and our summer signing Alexander Hleb who had 3%.

Jens Lehmann's stats for February:
Appearances: 6
Goals: 0
A-M Man of the Match awards: Liverpool

Best quotes from the POTM voters on the forum.

Jens has held the whole thing together over the last month.
ExiledInNewcastle

Mad Jens for me. He looked like the only one who came to win each and every match we played.
DC Gunner