Good morning, a very quick summary of Saturday for you.
Well that’s it. Thanks, as always.
See you tomorrow.
I’m not even kidding. Even though we have a match tomorrow, nothing happens. No news. There are no pre-Forest comments yet. I could wait until something drops I guess, but then I’m not aware of when that might be, or if that’s happening.
I can’t sit here. Well, I guess I could. I could repeatedly see the TikTok of the dog coming out of a pond and gulping/gargling a large amount of water and the woman saying ‘Oh my gosh are you okay?’ and the dog makes a sound like Godzilla, but I have other things to do today.
I could talk a bit about Albert Sambi Lokonga, whose name I have seen mentioned in many discussions on the website where someone spent $44 billion. That’s the kind of transfer fee that makes what Barcelona paid Liverpool for Philippe Coutinho look like a big deal. Imagine you have so much money at your disposal and all you can think of to do with it is buy fucking Twitter. Annoyed.
Anyway, Sambi. It wasn’t good against PSV, but it’s fair to say that’s true for all the players who started on Thursday night. However, the point is that most of them know what it is and where it stands in our pecking order. Perhaps more than anyone, including Eddie Nketiah, who still has a lot to prove after signing his new deal, games like this will go a long way towards defining Sambi’s future at the club.
Before PSV scored their first goal, Mikel Arteta was already preparing Thomas Partey to come on. He suspects that if it hadn’t been, the way Veerman ran from Lokonga to score would have prompted that change immediately. I said this on the live blog, but Sambi reminded me of early Alex Song at times and, to me at least, that’s not much of a comparison. I know that he became a halfway decent player over time, but when he started, he often took positions that saw him too close to his teammates (often Cesc), basically looking to receive the ball in the same area of ​​the countryside. they were inside, which is kind of useless.
Sambi is still quite young, and he is being asked to play the role of Partey, something that took an experienced player like the Ghanaian a while to get used to after his arrival from Atlético. There is talent there, he could be finding this position difficult to handle. However, even with that, you get the feeling that the manager is expecting more from him. When asked about his recent comments about not playing, Arteta said:
He has to show that what he asks for he can give on the field. We look for all players to raise their level and get the right competition on the team, and when they play and perform in a way that we win and we play well enough to win games.
It would be unfair to expect him to be a one-man band, someone who can shine on a night when everyone else, including the best and most experienced players, also failed to catch up. However, I think it was instructive that we tried to buy a midfielder at the end of the transfer window, and I hope that if we can find the right player in January, we will bring someone. And where that leaves Sambi an argument in her own right.
When the Europa League games get bigger, harder and more important, he won’t play if everyone is fit. Cameos in the Premier League, maybe a few cup games, but beyond that it’s hard to see any kind of regular football. And if he was considering his options at the end of his first season, when he actually played a reasonable amount, he would surely do the same thing again.
Still, football can be strange and things you thought impossible happen with some frequency. Sometimes an opportunity presents itself and the player seizes it. you never know But it won’t happen without real focus on his part, less talking and more acting when he gets his chances, so let’s see.
Right, that’s definitely it. We’ll have a Forest preview podcast for you a little later today on Patreon, and if any news breaks, we’ll cover it on Arseblog News.
