AFCON/Asian Cup update + Sunday not as annoying as it might have been

Soccer /

Happy Monday.

Arsenal news is still scarce, but at AFCON, Mohamed Elneny played when Egypt needed a late penalty from Mohamed Salah to rescue a 2-2 draw against Mozambique. Our Mo played 78 minutes in this game.

Meanwhile, in the Asian Cup, Japan beat Vietnam 4-2 without Takehiro Tomiyasu. He wasn’t in the team or on the bench, which makes one wonder about his fitness level. On New Year’s Day he already played in the second half against Fulham, but perhaps he still has some way to go in terms of physical preparation for the match. Let’s see if anything comes up about this. Japan’s next game is Friday morning against Iraq.

In the Premier League I saw a rather boring 0-0 between Everton and Aston Villa. The main topic of conversation was the lengthy VAR check to disallow a Villa goal in the first half. To me it looked clearly offside, but I was left wondering why the referees didn’t rule it out for the obvious foul on the Everton man in the build-up. As they pushed up to play offside, Lenglet prevented Danjuma from holding him. Surely that should have been enough to reject him out of hand? Anyway, four minutes later they realized that the player who was clearly offside was clearly offside.

Good process, well done.

Then I endured Man Utd v Sp*rs. It was a good goal from Rasmus Hojlund to open the scoring, but defensively United are an absolute disaster. Richarlison equalized, before Marcus Rashford made it 2-1. At the beginning of the second half, another goal from the Sp*rs made it 2-2, and that’s how it stayed.

This was truly a horrible football game. It was like watching a couple of homeless people drink a jug of moonshine each and run around trying to hit each other. Aaron Wan-Bissaka is to defending what Shkodran Mustafi is to defending. Little kids watching, never give up on your dreams of being a professional footballer because if these guys can do it, you can too. Yes, even with one leg 7 inches shorter than the other and the sight of a mole with retina problems. You can’t be worse.

United had a great chance to win late on, but Scott McTominay thought it was Gabriel Jesus and headed over the bar. However, a draw was probably fair, neither team deserved to win that game. I also enjoyed Roy Keane afterwards:

So what could have been an annoying Sunday wasn’t as annoying as it could have been. This gives us the opportunity to make things even less annoying when we face Crystal Palace on Saturday, but we’ll talk about that as the week progresses.

Here’s another interesting thing:

I’m curious to see how they handle these charges, or if there might be any repercussions in terms of what they have to do in January in the transfer market. Our links with Amadou Onana are, as I understand it, more speculative than concrete, at least this month, but perhaps that will change with this situation and Everton will be forced to sell. As for Forest, didn’t they bring in more than 20 players in one window? That was eye-opening at the time, so let’s see how his mitigation goes.

As always, the shadow of City’s 115 charges looms over the minor players, but I suspect the Premier League’s lawyers are tied in every way by the Abu Dhabi funded legal team. Ultimately, so many charges, and the complexity of them, will always make things more complicated, but it feels a little like the police sending all the squad cars after someone for an unpaid parking ticket while letting Charles Ponzi run wild and free. . .

Well, let’s leave it there for this morning. We’re recording an Arsecast Extra for you this morning, so keep an eye out for questions on Twitter @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog member on Patreon, leave your question. in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.

The podcast should go out around noon. Until then.

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