Newcastle 0 - Arsenal 0
So no fourth defeat in a row. Normally a good result to go up north and get a point, but given that we needed 3 points and the way we played, it was not a very good game to put it mildly.
The players seem to be more afraid of losing the ball, than to actually do something with it. This is perfectly understandable though, due to our habit of allowing the opposition one chance => one goal - nobody wants to be the person to lose the ball and cause us to be one goal down (that is, nobody wants to be another Hleb).
It certainly was interesting to have Diaby play up front. And by interesting, I mean desperate. I feel for Arsene at the moment. Clearly he has a talented squad, and we did play some blinding stuff this season with some very memorable wins, and then everything collapsed. It must be hard for someone so scientific and precise to see well made plans fall apart, partly due to bad luck. It used to be that creating chances was the hardest thing about attacking football, but with us, it’s finishing off the easy chances that seems the hardest. This must make no sense to Arsene, and I can understand his frustration and desperation. Now is not the time to second guess yourself though, because second guessing is when you can turn a bad situation into a much worse one.
I watched last night’s match (I’m in Australia, so the match lasted from midnight to 2am) on the Internet using one of those P2P video streaming services (TVAnts to be precise). These tools stream Chinese TV stations, including sports stations, and they use P2P/bittorrent technology to do so. You know how bittorrent allows you to download files really quickly because you are downloading from hundreds of other users at the same time (while uploading the parts you have downloaded to others)? Well, P2P video streaming works the same way. There is a delay in the stream as you wait for available parts, but the quality is great, and unlike traditional streaming, the more people watch, the faster the stream. The only real problem is that it saturates your net connection due to the massive number of connections, so you can’t do much else at the same time.