Arsenal 4 – 4 Tottenham Hotspurs
29 October 2008
Tonight Arsenal grabbed a draw from the jaws of victory. I am not going to attempt to write about the game. Even the positive moments seem pale and insignificant after we gave up a 2 goal lead with only a few minutes remaining in the match.
I will say only this, as bad as the result is and as disappointed as everyone will be, our team needs us now. We can castigate those most culpable for the errors but it won’t change the result. So let’s dig deep and keep the faith. Win, lose or draw remember this is our team. We have to support them now and continue to believe in them. I think if we have faith it will be repaid.
It is OK to cry/swear though. Match Report, video and Photos.
FIFA World Player of the year Award
Cesc Fabregas was named in the 23 man short-list for the FIFA World player of the year award, along with Arsenal team-mate Emmanuel Adebayor. The award will be voted on by fellow professionals in 40 countries and the winner will be announced on January 12. You can see the full list of nominees here.
Related posts:
Cristiano Ronaldo
Cesc Fabregas
Fernando Torres
Lionel Messi
Wayne Rooney
Gonzalo Higuain
Sergio Ramos
Real Madrid
Arsenal
FC Barcelona
Liverpool
Manchester United
AC Milan
Spain
Portugal
England
Argentina
Brazil
Italy
France
USA
Holland
Germany
Daniel Bergstrom
Isaac Asante
Angela Asante
Anita
Priya
kyle
Rukhsana
Derbyanabella
funKy_gaL
Fati
zicha
netta4
Ali
ilycf4
jerrys
robbie96
sisi
Elle
Moya
emee
meme
mrscesc
lilaenfleur
dennisg
loveballack
megh
adekfab
shimearsen
Ari
Ellie
Petra
rival
dewaya
Chris
hossein
hesam
danielle
javad
Serafino
tomyson
marianna
sobhan
mimi
You win the prize for being psychic Rose
It went down exactly as you predicted. Loaded magazine asked him point blank how Arsenal Ladies would do against Spurs Men and he just said, they’d do well, I’m sure they’d get a point.
better luck today!!!!
Have to completely disagree with you Kate. Under the circumstances there is no excuse for shipping 2 goals and giving up 2 points at home. The worst substitutions in the world should not have produced this result and these were not the worst in the world.
What happened defies a simplistic explanation of poor subs. How hard is it to run down 2 minutes. Yes we gave up 2 goals in 4 but after giving up the first and going to 4-3 we actually didn’t have to hang on for very long. We didn’t have to run down much time. We could have put 10 men behind the ball, hell 11 men, 2 minutes of kick about in your own half, hell next to the corner flag, it wasn’t a big ask – and the subs don’t get within a mile of explaining this level of dumb. Sorry.
This one is square on the squad. It’s on every single player on that pitch. It is on Cesc as much as I admire him, as much as anyone else. It’s on them all. Let’s see who stands up and responds to that and who tries to duck it. They effed up, royally, all they can do is admit it, accept it and learn from it.
You are advocating a complete lack of responsibility on the part of the men on the pitch to actually play, to actually do their jobs, to stay calm, to stay concentrated and to secure the points. You can’t blame the manager for that.
There’s plenty Arsene needs to look at but the players failure to play to the final whistle, that’s not on him.
Of course I would love the company Rosie haha I think we should all just live in denial until the team comes good
It works for me
Hi jaya, fifi
glad you like it!
Thank you George! When you get a chance to look at the magazine can you tell me what led to the Arsenal Ladies-Spurs comment – I am thinking he was prompted. It sounded to me like the interviewer said “Do you think the womens team could beat the bottom team in the Premiership?” or something like that, and he just said “they are really good, I’m sure they’d get a point”. So let me know ok
Cos nowhere in the quote does he actually name Spurs and I have a feeling he was led in to that. I find it hard to believe he just took a random pop at them when the interview would have been done weeks ago. It’s not that big of a deal but I’m curious 
lol @ bri I might move out there and live in denial too
If you wouldn’t mind the company!
happy halloween to you too! I’m just going to put the game down to a disrupt in the time space continuum and pretend it happened in a parallel universe. Denial is a nice place to live. Really I have nice neighbors and a great garden here
such a great banner really!! love this site btw its awesum
haha well George that should give you an excuse to buy a mag full of naked girlie pics and you can really say you bought it to read the interview LOL
hi hi Rosie just thought I’d let you know that Cesc is in loaded mag like The Sun said. I saw a mag this morning on my way in to the early shift. On the cover there is a bit that says Cesc Fabregas: I fear the credit crunch,,, so there must be an interview in there. I was running late so I didn’t hang around to read it but will have a look at it later for you. Better get back to work now
Brilliant banner!!!!!!!!!
Sam – This was not the most “embarrassing capitulation” there have been tonnes of these kinds of endings to matches over the years. There will be more in the future. Life goes on.
I’ve added the halloween banner. Full credits to nico21horia for the artwork we are using. He does amazing work and I wanted to feature some of it on here.
Hi Kate
Arsene wasn’t on the field when we gave up 2 goals in 4 minutes.
Perhaps they weren’t great substitutions, perhaps they are not great players, but any team, with a lot less quality than ours, playing any formation, should not have drawn the game from there. So I don’t think you can single out Arsene for blame. It is a standard tactic to put on defensive players in place of attacking players when you have a 2 goal margin and 10 minutes remaining.
The team as a whole must take responsibility. They defend as a team, there were many mistakes. This is not all on Arsene. If his players all had his intelligence, we would all be laughing about what a great win we had. Instead of trying desperately to forget one of the most embarrassing capitulations ever witnessed in pro-level football.
Now, I say let’s get behind the team, including Wenger. They deserved criticism as a team I can understand why many gooners are upset, but what’s done is done and now we will go forward and support them as a team. Wenger certainly is no more deserving of blame than anyone else.
embarassing way to lose game!! make us gunners laughin stocks!!
hi guys . i watched the game and to be honest i am happy with the squad . may be arsene should work a little bit on the defence but dont get hard on them . the first goal was amazing not even van der sar could have done anything about it . the squad was fine we took cntrol of the game most of the time we scored four goals . fabregas was shining yesterday his passes were superb and van persie was abslutely outstanding .
frankly speaking it was arsene mistake . we were fine and doing great before the end with ten minutes and arsene made really really stupid changes he replacd van persie ( striker ) , walcott and nasri who are attacking midfielders with defendig midfielders . he simply killed the game . i dont know but maybe he got confident too early . and when we conceded the third goal and wanted to score the fifth we couldnt find anyone to score but ade who lost comuninications with midfield . i dont think we should blame the squad as much as we should blame arsene .
one more thing , with watching this game , i dont think we need a new midfielder ( dont forget rosicky ) , but the defence needs some work.
Hi leece
– just click on the ‘video’ link above and you can see the highlights from MOTD
Harsh nzgooner but sadly I have no real defense to offer – except to say hindsight is always 20/20 and if we had continued to play positive and scored a goal from it, then no one would be calling the team “stupid” for not playing keep ball. Still hardly our finest hour
do you kno where i can see hilites??
feck. fecking hell.
I have the utmost respect for Arsene Wenger but “naivety” is that what we’re calling it now. So what exactly would the players need to do for it to be called stupidity? Pick up the ball with their hands and begin running with it? Knock it directly into the opponents goal themselves after a lovely passing move to do so? I mean really. I have coached school boy teams that would have known that keeping the ball at that stage of the game was a good idea.
Ah well, to finish on a positive and supportive note. It is extremely difficult to imagine that we could cock any game up worse than this! That’s about the only silver-lining for me.
Roll on Stoke City, the sooner this match is forgotten the better!
The team does have potential Wenger is right but where he has a problem is the fans are running out of patience they don’t want to hear about potential they want to see results.
Still there’s no point whinging, it’s not like anything can be changed until January at the earliest.
Hi …I was even shocked by da results but after watching da match i think it was tough but a sensational game… GOOD LUCK ARSENAL…MAY YOU ALWAYS WIN
Well TA if those comments annoyed you don’t go and read his full comments on Arsenal.com whatever you do because he said the players lacked maturity and they were naieve BUT that it wasn’t in anyway due to inexperience LOL So older experienced players would have been just as naieve, immature and unable to close up shop. Yeah right.
The thing is no one is opposed to the youth policy in balance but hes taken it to an extreme, if he wanted to be a school teacher he should have opted for that but in a football club not a comprehensive we need a bit more balance in this team. Everyone will say we missed Flamini but you know I’d bet you a million that it would have ended differently if Gilberto had been out there wearing the armband for us last night. A solid, calming mature head.
I can’t believe those comments from Wenger. We’ve been hearing the same thing for 3 years now. Whistle another tune.
Disappointing.
On the positive side, van Persie was excellent. Walcott had bright moments. Fab’s passing and movement was excellent and he orchestrated the period of domination prior to our first equaliser. Gallas has also been better these last two matches.
On the negative side, we showed our inexperience, we made unforgiveable mistakes that you simply can’t make at this level, we continue to have the talent but not the mental strength or maturity to harness it correctly.
Everyone will now proceed to write Arsenal off but I think we are actually at a cross-roads. There are two equal possibilities – the boys become men or we have the worst season in years. Obviously I hope it’s the former.
Here’s what le boss said:
“Well I am angry,” he told Sky Sports.
“I believe we produced an outstanding game and got the minimum result. We wanted to win and we were a level above Tottenham but we didn’t get the three points,” he said.
On how they allowed Spurs back into the game, with only a few minutes left of added time, Wenger continued: “We didn’t keep the ball. We were there for the taking. We should have had a negative passing game but instead we exposed ourselves by trying to go five or six up.”
“It was naivety,” Wenger declared. “The team has outstanding potential. They learn from moments like that tonight.
“It is damaging but it was that kind of derby and in football it sometimes happens. Tottenham were very well rewarded for their shots on targets and their goals,” he concluded.
Hiya Mila
Third is good! let’s stay positive.
Agree Rosie, we are so ‘nearly’ there. I just hope we can get beyond ‘nearly’ this season.
Yeah there’s a long way to go in the season yet. I’m trying not to over-react. Throwing myself under a bus may not be the answer
The other thing is that we did actually play well for solid spells. It will get lost, naturally, under the circumstances as we’re all too gutted to really care about it but, although tonight was a kick in the teeth, we are playing some good football. There’s hope yet.
I know what you mean mj but it seems a hallmark of inexperience not to shut out a game properly. Not to maintain concentration and discipline till the final whistle.
Hi Mila
Yeah we’re 3rd because Hull lost but it’s not much consolation because we are now 6 points off the lead and 3 points behind Chelsea and just a few hours ago we were 4 points off the lead and 1 point behind Chelsea. So it’s not progress. We’ve dropped two points that we could not afford to drop against a team that we had beaten.
Hi Jaya
I’m not sure. I know Kolo was injured and I think Arsene said he was a maybe for tonight… so perhaps he just wasn’t ready?
We, I guess understandably in a way, thought the job was done. You could see the collective foot go off the pedal. Still you’ve got to do enough to play “pass it around keep ball” while the clock runs down and we didn’t. No one was moving to make sure the person with the ball had a safe place to make the next pass, people will blame the person who lost the ball but they should blame the whole team equally, if they are handing out blame, because no one was doing enough to get open. imho.
This really really sucks. But we will bounce back, it’s a long season there are 4 competitions and though it doesn’t feel like it right now, it was just one game.
one f**king bad game. BUT. just one game.
just a word or two to make everyone feel a lil’ bit better; we’re 3rd in da Premier League table so, it wasnt so bad..
look at da bright side guys!! we cant give up on da boys now; can we??
i was shocked by da results!! :O
da boys can easily wrapped up da game when they’re up by 4-2.. but da ball is round; anything can happen & true enough Spurs came behind to draw against our boys..
i hope this draw wouldnt cause our boys’ confidence level to dip.. but da boys played well during da 2nd half; just dat our defence was a lil’ bit s**t today..
anyway; i dun wanna comment about tis match.. it’s kinda devastating..
I don’t think people should point fingers at individual players tho undoubtedly they will. I think the team must take responsibility and step up as a whole. I also think Arsene has a lot of soul searching to do.
why didnt kolo toure start or even used??????? :/
Yeah Sambo, it would have been better if that comment hadn’t done the rounds, true or not, but in the scheme of things it is just a joke. It was meant as a bit of banter at the end of the day. The big problem is that we defended like a joke and that’s a much more serious issue than who wound up who before the match.
The thing that kills me is that we dominated what 75/80% of the game. They played like s**t mostly. But we find a way to concede 4 goals and gift them a point. We should have effing wrapped it up in Arsenal wrapping paper and put a bow on it ffs.
Rose you were rite about the trash talking and I was wrong, cos it seems a bloody stupid thing to have said now IF he did say it that is (I don’t really trust the Sun). Cos by Cesc’s own reckoning our men’s first team are no better than our ladies?
Great.
sob. this is just the worst feeling. Poor Al and poor Gael they are going to be so upset with themselves and they will cop a lot of flack. Poor Cesc he will be devastated, the whole team will be. I worry about their confidence. Most of the team is so young and inexperienced and this was a very painful, public lesson. A humiliating one. I hope they can pick themselves back up off the floor, they have to use these things to become better.
You know what they say, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.
next.
wtf? I mean seriously,,, wtf? Don’t even know where to begin. Gutted just doesn’t cover it.
yes it’s ok to cry, im still crying but remember every cloud has a silver lining at least the scum didnt beat us and we got a point…*keeping positive* very hard though
unbelievable. I couldn’t give the team a hard time right now if I wanted too I’m too in shock. I’m waiting for someone to wake me up and tell me it was only a nightmare