Goonersphere's match review page covering all first team matches. Reviews include scores, injury updates, match stats, and player ratings.
Sam Stubbs-Benbow, known on Twitter as @sambangsdrums, is a student in Sound for television and is a keen musician. He has been following the Arsenal all his life and more widely, is a football nut, keen on anything to do with the beautiful game. You will find him at most home games and a few away ones and will be providing match reviews for Arsenal first team games this season.
Arsenal moved into the top three, as Saturday proved very fruitful for the Gunners. A gritty away win at Palace, was made sweeter by Man United’s defeat at Swansea which sees us leapfrog them into the Champions League places. With Sp*rs also dropping points and Southampton’s defeat to Liverpool, it’s been a near perfect weekend for us.
Arsenal cruised into the quarter-finals of the FA Cup with an extremely comfortable win against Middlesbrough. The Championship side have been in excellent form this season and having knocked out Man City at the Etihad in the last round, many were expecting them to give us a rough time. But in truth, Middlesbrough never came close to worrying us and we won with plenty to spare.
Leicester at home was supposed to be a nice easy game for us to shake off the disappointment of the defeat to Sp*rs and get our season back on track. But in a very Arsenal way, we made life difficult for ourselves and only just scraped through with the points. In the grand scheme of things, all that matters is that we got the three points, but the performance was a concern. Perhaps the derby defeat has sapped some confidence out of a side that had previously been looking very solid. The next six games are very important for our season, with ties across three different competitions and whilst we did enough against Leicester, we will definitely need to raise our game for the challenges ahead.
