(I’d like to start this blog off with a disclaimer that I vehemently disagreed with the North London Derby being postponed tomorrow due to Arsenal being short on players due to COVID-19, injuries, and AFCON.)
With all that being said, I find it hilarious how every other club’s fanbase who have had their games canceled due to COVID-19, injuries, etc. is coming at a club (Arsenal) who are only using the Premier League’s weak stance on the matter for our favor for the first time this season. Oh, the irony. Take Gary Neville who spends a good amount of time spewing wrong takes about football on live television but probably gets paid handsomely so can’t hate, get all riled up and to his credit, get a good amount of football twitter on his side based on the reactions:
It’s just crazy that when United was going through similar issues in late December and early January, this type of sentiment and energy wasn’t there. I do agree with the above tweet by the way but Arsenal were only doing what basically every other club has been able to do and that is to put in a request to the league about shortage of players whether it be do to COVID-19, injuries, etc. and get their game postponed. Literally the first game of our season against Brentford, Auba and Laca were out due to COVID-19 and we had to start Flo Balogun up top. Earlier this month, we had Tomiyasu, AMN, and Cédric out due to COVID-19 and we still subsequently played our match with Norwich. Eddie, Sambi, Calum and Pablo Mari have all tested positive before games and we have had our games played out fine as well (and they should have as well). Teams have had a little under two years to deal with this pandemic and if they are ill-equipped to do so, then so be it, anything outside of a COVID-19 positive tests should have games played out.
The real issue is the Premier League’s weak stance on the issue and no clear guidelines on specifically why games were being postponed. Especially with the omicron variant ramping up globally, many PL sides have had their games postponed due to various reasons in the past month (I forgot Burnley existed as a club at one point). Liverpool, for god’s sake, postponed the first leg of our Carabao Semi-Final cup tie due to COVID-19 false positives that everybody with a brain saw coming from a mile away, so as far as I’m concerned, Arsenal were only doing what is in their best interests which is, trying playing a PL football match with more than 13 healthy active capable players and simply request it being postponed to a later day.
Now onto talking about the North London Derby:
If I had to rank all 38 Arsenal match fixtures going into any Premier League season, my most important game going into every season is Spurs away. Easy answer, end of story. There is nothing like beating them up and down the Emirates but the greatest victories are when we do it in their backyard. What’s annoying is how poor we more or less have been at Spurs over recent years where are latest league victory was still when we had the beautiful Czech man on our team.
As much as it sucks to have the game postponed, we would have been fucked if this game played out. Literally screwed. Xhaka out due to suspension. Auba, Nico, Thomas, Elneny out due to AFCON, Tomiyasu, ESR, Tierney, Saka, and Cédric all picking up knocks. Odegaard out with COVID-19. Like what a shit show. What makes this even funnier is how we loaned out AMN and Flo Balogun, planning to loan out Pablo Mari, moving on Kolasinac all this January transfer window and we are requesting the league to postpone our match lmaooooo. Too funny. As much as I’d love to see our Academy players beating Spurs at the toilet stadium, looks like it’ll have to wait hahahahaha.
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