Arsenal Move Closer to Second Place in the Premiership Without Playing

The weekend is over and it's back to the humdrum of work this morning for those of us lucky enough to still have jobs. From my own perspective, that may not be for too much longer as the Irish economy goes from one crisis to another as our government display their complete inability to cope with the collapse of the country.

Other countries sorted their banks out as soon as they realized what was happening, but our government cannot make a decision on anything and more than 18 months later things continue to get worse. That's enough of my rant for today but before too long I may have a lot of free time on my hands to rant a lot more.

For a team who didn't play at the weekend things could hardly have gone any better for Arsenal than they did. The team directly ahead of us in the league could only draw 0-0 at Blackburn and our next opponents in the league had an energy sapping 120 minute game on a Wembley pitch that will have done them no favours.

Added to that they have lost a couple of players to injury and suspension from the game as well. It means that a win over the Spuds on Wednesday night at their ground will put us ahead of "Manure" in the league with four games to go.

That would make us favourites to finish second and all we can hope for is the Spuds to recover in time after that game to put up a fight against Chelsea next Saturday evening after Man City hand out a beating to "Manure" in the early kick off that day.

I fully expect Chelsea to thrash Bolton at home tomorrow night but we can only hope that the Spuds can get a point off them on Saturday and leave us with a chance of cutting their lead to a single point if we can beat Wigan on Sunday. 

There's a lot of "ifs" in there, I know, and we have a list of injured players that would make other teams lie down and die. But I have a feeling the players we have left will stand up and be counted. If things don't work out as I hope I at least want to see the players give it everything they have in an attempt to get those results.

We can ask no more than that but things can go wrong for various reasons such as having Howard Webb in charge of a match. He is apparently the best referee in England but from what I've seen he doesn't have a clue how the game works or what players are doing on the pitch.

There's a little bit of transfer speculation about today but the main story is absolute rubbish as it regards our captain being a target for Man City. I'm sure he is a target for them just as world peace is a target for the majority of nations but to be honest there's more chance of world peace and the hippies taking over than there is of Cesc joining Man City this summer or at any other time.

We are linked with Fiorentina's French goalkeeper Sebastien Frey, and although I don't know too much about him from what I have seen and read I think he has to be better than our current first choice. It remains to be seen if the boss will decide to replace Almunia in the summer but I hope he does. That's it for today but by tomorrow there should be a lot more to report.

Here's a good 2-1 win over the Spuds a couple of seasons ago.

See you tomorrow.