Premier League football has returned to the Emirates, with everyone involved with the club more optimistic than ever that perhaps this could be Arsenal’s season for the title. With Petr Cech now in the Arsenal ranks after signing from Chelsea, Wenger has added a new backbone to Arsenal with the ability and experience that Cech has.
Arsenal’s opening day fixture was against a new look West Ham side, under the guidance of Slaven Bilic. West Ham have spent well, bringing in the likes of Angelo Ogbonna and Dimitri Payet. They had a much more hectic pre-season schedule than ours due to their Europa League participation.
Arsenal were dealt with a 2-0 defeat to Bilic’s West Ham side. An agonising opening day loss to a team far less superior to Arsenal’s. West Ham capitalised on two Cech errors and sealed an impressive victory at The Emirates. The players played well below par, and this sense of arrogance was apparent in the players body language. Cech had a debut to forget as his disastrous errors caught the eyes of many.
1. We Need A World Class Centre Forward
Wenger named Giroud to spearhead Arsenal’s attack for this game, in which he has an impressive goal scoring record against the Hammers. Arsenal’s fans around love a scapegoat, and once again Giroud was that man. Although the Frenchman was arguably poor and ‘unfit’, Arsenal didn’t really create many goal scoring opportunities for Giroud to take. However, when Giroud was given the ball, he rarely looked a threat, messing up chances for others. His renowned trait of holding up play to get others involved was pretty poor. He failed to successfully link up with the other players, whilst the whole team were on a different wavelength to each other.
Giroud’s performance understandably brought questions to the table about whether he can fire us to the title. I for one think he doesn’t have the World Class ability to do so, and we need a striker of real world class calibre. A player we have been prominently linked with is Karim Benzema. The Frenchman would offer Arsenal something new, and would certainly put Arsenal on the map of serious title contenders. Acquiring Benzema from Real Madrid would be a real coup, but it’s highly unlikely that Madrid would want to sell their Number ‘9’ to Arsenal. We all know that money talks and Madrid may be willing to do business late on in the transfer window. We’ll have to see.