Who you voted as our man of the match & Post match thoughts based around it

A big thank you to all who took part in the poll. I really needed your help as I couldn’t decide who our best player was. At best I could have narrowed it down to 3 but no further.

The Poll is now closed and I have the results. (I sound like an X factor presenter!). The player you voted as our man of the match is…

ALEX SONG

So are you are happy with this decision?

As you can see from the table, he won twice as many votes compared to Van Persie and Diaby put together.

Why did I include Song? He had good positional awareness, successfully completed 90% of his passes, intercepted play well and won all his tackles.

Besides he supplied the first goal. I loved how fans were shouting “Shoooot” and then Song in typical Arsenal style, promptly slipped in a Cesc-like pass, a defence splitting one, to Van Persie. Now how many defensive midfielders can do that?

Van Persie’s touch was magical and his finish, clinical – similar to the one he scored against Blackburn 2 weeks ago. His movement for the 2nd goal dragged 3 Birmingham players out of position.

And two more were dragged out just enough for Diaby to score the 2nd goal. His finish was further proof of his improvement.

Abou made no mistakes in the defensive half of pitch. Such support makes things easy for Song. No co-incidence that for once, Diaby became a more popular choice for MOTM than Fabregas who came in fourth.

If Cesc stays long enough at Arsenal he’ll be awarded the freedom of London. Yesterday, he enjoyed roaming all over the pitch. And he helped set up Arshavin who was fifth on the poll list.

Arshavin was a bit of hit and miss for me. But as world class players go, he still found time to score a goal, a low curling effort.

A select few put forward Eboue’s name for man of the match.

When my glass is half full, I recall the comment from the previous post; his off the ball movement is more expansive than Sagna in that position. And Eboue was heavily involved in our 2nd goal.

When my glass is half empty however, I see that 11 of his 12 unsuccessful passes come in the attacking third.

Was he solid defensively? Losing 8 of his 12 tackles, half of them in the defensive half would suggest not.

More number crunching tells me that Gibbs who pulled in fewer votes than Eboue, was better than him in the passing, tackling, clearances and interceptions stakes. Manu only bettered Gibbs when it came to winning free kicks.

I’ve finished my drink, satisfied with it and reckon Eboue was okay for yesterday. Wenger wouldn’t select him ahead of Sagna against more attacking minded teams though right?

I predicted that we’d demolish Birmingham inside 75 minutes. Turns out we needed around 9 minutes more to do this. I don’t know about you but it made for rather unnecessary nervous viewing.

Were my nerves unjustified? Perhaps. McLeish’s “footballers” only had 3 shots in the entire match.

But Birmingham had their big moment just moments before Arshavin’s game clinching goal. Mannone and then Gallas’ quick reflexes saved us from the farcical prospect of us snatching a 2-2 draw from a comfortable winning position.
 
It shouldn’t have come to that. Such was our domination that Birmingham were ready to forfeit in the first half itself.

And then Birmingham scored their goal. How dare they score in the 1st half?
Ferguson should have been closed down better by Fabregas and Eboue. Thus by default I refuse to blame Mannone completely.

It was a funny period, suddenly we became nervous as a team. Reminded me of the days the pre-invincible year when it was so easy sometimes, we‘d forget we had to grind out the result