Prosaic Pompey Preview

Arsenal vs. Portsmouth - Premiership

By Rachid Parchment

Hi everyone. I know the title of this blog isn’t that appealing but really, can you blame me today? We travel to Fratton Park to take on Portsmouth in what is really a game of nothingness. If we win today we’ll have wrapped up 4th place. Pompey are mathematically in the relegation dog fight in 14th place but as it stands the teams below them are playing much worse than they are and it would take a mass improvement from all of them in order for Portsmouth to go down and I just can’t see it happening.

Arsene Wenger says he plans to do a bit of rotating today:

“I will build a strong team at Portsmouth. I will try to accommodate both. I will try to give the players who need a breather, a rest but also put out a strong team.

“Sometimes it’s good to play players, sometimes it’s good to rest players but we will have a strong team and we want to win the game.”

So I think if we’re to go by what Monsieur Wenger has to say then it’s more of the same that we saw against Boro last Sunday. We’ll see a strong start to the match then after scoring the necessary goals we’ll just shut off and have a barbecue on the pitch, especially since everyone will have the return leg in the Champions League Semi Final against Manchester United at the back of their minds. It doesn’t please me though. It’s caused Adebayor’s lazy half assed attitude to creep back into his game and we saw how useless it made him at Old Trafford last Wednesday.

Arsenal have more injuries to deal with as Robin van Persie, Eduardo and Mikael Silvestre will all miss the game with groin injuries. Gael Clichy, William Gallas and Tomas Rosicky are all still injured, as I’m sure you know, so no need to go over their unavailability for today’s game.

Portsmouth on the other hand will be without Niko Kranjcar, who has an ankle injury and [Arsenal owned] Armand Traore as well. Traore misses this game as he is ineligible to play due to the terms of his loan contract. Jermaine Pennant and Younes Kaboul are set to return to the Portsmouth line up.

Expected Line Up:

Almunia

Sagna Toure Djourou Gibbs

Eboue Denilson Song Arshavin

Diaby

Bendtner

Prediction: Portsmouth 0-1 Arsenal. Drab performance as Arsenal will be too focused on Manchester United in the Champions League. They’ll do just enough for an early goal then shut up shop.

That’s all for now. Take care and enjoy the game. Come on Arsenal, lets secure European football today!!!

Oh! For all you science fiction aficionados out there, you might want to have a look at this and leave your thoughts on it as well. It makes for a very interesting read.