No La Sagna, but food’s on the last-day menu for Arsenal

It’s all about food as we go into the last weekend of the Premier League season. Laurent Koscielny has been a little bit too vocal for my liking recently, but I shouldn’t complain as it’s always nice to read, watch and hear Arsenal news. Providing it’s not about a defeat!

I’ve always maintained that: ‘Kos is no lettuce’. His form this season has been impressive in what has been an ‘iffy’ defence at times. Obviously the 8-2 hammering at Old Trafford sticks in the craw and was indigestible for us fans, but unlike Kos I don’t put it down to ‘mayonnaise’. I kid you not, that’s the food metaphor that Kos comes out with in The Sun. It takes me back to the ‘sausages and caviar’ comment made by Arsene Wenger, which along with Pizzagate and Tottenham’s alleged lasagne poisoning, is one of my favourite food moments in football.

On the latter incident, I saw Anthony Gardner on Sky Sports News deny that lasagna was the cause of Tottenham’s demise, when they needed a result at West Ham to finish above us in the league. Needless to say, they didn’t get it! All they got were songs like: ‘Lasagne, woah oh, lasagne woah oh oh oh, we laughed ourselves to bits, when Tottenham got the sh*ts’. It was a ‘virus’, according to Gardner, who was playing for Spurs at the time when Martin Jol was manager and blew it on the last day of the season in 2006. You can re-live it in The Telegraph.

But why have we had to wait so long to celebrate St Totteringham’s Day, the day when Arsenal fans celebrate finishing above Spurs in the league, this year? Well, first of all, as Arsene Wenger has pointed out, we’re lucky to have our destiny in our hands at all given the points deficit we had to make up on our London rivals. There was to be no St Totteringham’s Day this season announced The London Evening Standard back in February. So all in all, we’ve done well to claw our way back into the race for the top four, let alone be sitting in third with just one game to go.
The only thing that worries me going into our last game is nerves. I’ve no doubt we have the ability to get a win at West Bromwich Albion and secure third spot, but will our defence be able to keep a clean sheet? Wojciech Szczesny owes us a good game after his mistakes against Norwich and I still have faith in his ability so perhaps it will be a shut-out, especially if Thomas Vermaelen can up his game as well. The ever-reliable and versatile Francis Coquelin (or Coq Au Vin) can fill in for the injured Bacary Sagna (no, not lasagna!) and our fate all hinges on our defence. Let’s hope in Kos-speak that our make-shift defence has had enough time to ‘take’ . . . erm, just like mayonnaise!

Joe Broadfoot

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