Where is the pride gone, Arsenal?

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Date	Time	C	Opponent	F	A	R	S
01 May	3:00 PM	P	Blackburn Rovers (A)	1	2	Lost

You would've thought that pride is a big thing for sportspeople, especially players at a club like Arsenal. Unfortunately, our horror run continues and with it the potential of our worst fears of Tottenham Hotspur, who have been battling to get 4th all season, possibly out jumping us into third on the final day.

I had said it after the shambolic behaviour of the players at Wigan, and although it was merely a knee-jerk reaction to what had been a desperately disappointing week, there is nothing knee-jerk about it now! Frighteningly, it now looks like a distinct possibility. Just what is the matter with these people?

Ahead again. Stopped playing. Again. The result: what now looks like a "tremendous comeback" by a Blackburn side that cannot actually play football, with Fat Sam claiming to have put one over Arsène Wenger with his tactical genius. All because we stopped playing after twenty minutes. All because we never even began defending in the first place, an absent aspect of Arsenal's game. All because these individuals just do not want to learn. Or maybe they are just too thick to learn (they are just footballers, after all).

Theo Walcott crosses; Theo Walcott can't beat the first man. Emmanuel Eboué sprinting in the middle of the park; oh, he crosses into absolute no man's land. Alternatively, Eboué sprints; I'll just cut the crap and fall over, get up gingerly, and smirk at the camera, much to my own amusement and no one else's. No foul, of course. Abu Diaby is on the ball; I WILL prove to the world that I am the new Vieira, and I WILL keep that football on me for as long as it will take. Forget passing, Theo's making a run, but forget that. I will just take it, swivel with the ball a good five or six times, turn to run and end up going sideways and just give the ball to the nearest blue and white shirt in sight. Samir Nasri receives the ball out wide. And back it goes to Blackburn.

We had nearly sixty percent of the ball against Blackburn. Three shots on target! Just one shot having gone behind in the second half; a poorly directed effort by the returning Andrey Arshavin, who, predictably, did not look one bit interested in putting a shift in those twenty minutes that he was asked to play in. Just how many shots would Chelsea and Manchester United, possibly even Tottenham, have on that Blackburn goal with minutes remaining and 2-1 down? More than Arsenal would be the correct answer!

You get my point and so I will not go into the absolute dire defending so high up the pitch that had caught us out with every home attack, or the set piece defending that every team so obviously sets out to benefit from against us every single match.

But Mr. Wenger, your goalkeepers. GET RID. The sooner the better, please. The end of this quickly turning out wretched season just cannot come soon enough for the sole reason of ridding the Club of those malingering fruitcakes we have standing between the sticks. Week in, week out, it is just becoming an absolute running joke. A very costly, embarrassing and downright depressing one, at that.

Just what is that poxy excuse of a footballer, Lukasz Fabianski, doing at my Club for heaven's sake, Arsène? This, the club that adorned the likes of Wilson and Jennings between the sticks. David Seaman, one of England's finest goalkeepers. Jens Lehmann. And now, what have we here? Howler-a-match Lukasz Fabianski, a 25 year-old nobody who Arsène Wenger still seems to think is the man for the job. You know you're in big trouble when your "goalkeeper" is the flimsiest, most horrified fellow in town. I must say, to his credit, Fabianski's little school kid getting bullied in the playground act looked pretty credible throughout at Ewood Park, culminating in that disastrous second goal. No, it was not a foul, Lukasz! You simply stood on your line, without barking orders at your centre back to piss off out of the way, thinking that you can just poke the ball out of the bloody goalmouth unchallenged! Wrong!

Or, what about Manuel Almunia? You know, Arsenal's number 1? A man who made it into professional football in his MID-TWENTIES, being brought to Arsenal Football Club from a third division side in Albacete, Spain for mere peanuts, only to faff around every penalty box in the country like a ballerina on ice! The downsides of worldwide scouting, eh?

I am sorry, but these "men" are stretching our patience to the bloody limit, and I, for one, cannot take this without voicing my anger. Not when they keep letting me down, despite my seemingly futile attempts to piece together an argument for defending them! One win in six matches is just not good enough, whatever the reasons, whenever the time, whoever the team.

What had looked like a good season with plenty of progress from the last is now becoming a pure mirage with that stinking run of form of one victory since early April. That's right, remember that 95th winner by Nicklas Bendtner at home to Wolves, because I have nearly forgotten about it, it's been that long!? A run of form that ensures that the maximum improvement we can clock up from last season will be a mere three points. And that is certainly doubtful given our seemingly never-ending run of frustration and the fact that our final-day opponents will be none other than Europa League finalists, Fulham! We can only hope that Hodgson's selection is a kind one, and his second string can play, make no mistake!

With third place very much in doubt now and a maximum of a three-point improvement on last year, lest we forget, we are now on NINE league defeats, as opposed to six last season. So, not only have we surrendered any hopes of winning the league so meekly, we have now gone five weeks without a win, threatened to bottle third place to our worst enemies, as well as make a grand mockery of our supposed "progress"; going on poorer runs, losing more games, and conceding many more goals than we have done in 2008-2009; this on the year that Wenger had targeted to concede "ten less goals". Five more goals conceded and counting boss, pick the bones out of that royal cock-up!

This is the progress that was meant to stand us in good stead for yet another "next year we will do it" prediction or whatever load of bollocks we like to optimistically come up with. This is the "strong finish" that Arsène Wenger has been calling for over weeks.

Not happy, and why should I, or any of you be? After all, we are being taken for a bunch of mugs by a group of men who think it is so easy to represent Arsenal Football Club that they have gone on to have the temerity to drop its most important cornerstone. Pride.

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