2010/11 Arsenal's Attacking Options Analysed

Tonight sees more or less the official end to the international break as the players play for their countries before returning to the club tomorrow and/or Thursday to prepare for Saturday's home game against Bolton.

Of course not all the players have been with their countries and both Koscielny and Squillaci, among others, have had over a week training with the club which will hopefully have done them some good. My season preview is almost complete and I'll concentrate on our attacking options today before looking at the overall picture tomorrow.

For me our most important attacking player is RVP and if we can keep him fit he is a very real threat against absolutely any team in the world. However, the biggest challenge is keeping him fit as he suffered an ankle injury after only half an hour into his first start of the season against Blackburn in a fairly innocuous looking challenge.

As it stands the boss said he would probably be out for 10 days when he received the injury and as far as I know we have heard nothing since so he should be available for Saturday although I doubt it very much.

When we switched to our new formation last season I had my doubts whether it would suit him or not but he played fantastically well up until his injury which he got on international duty. We were playing free flowing attacking football and both he and Cesc were terrorising defences but our rate of goal scoring decreased rapidly after RVPs injury. At one stage it looked like we were going to be the first Premier League team ever to break the 100 goal barrier but with RVP out it wasn't to be.

He showed an ability to hold the ball up and bring other players into play that I didn't think was in his game as well as the ability to take on defenders and beat them. He has one of the sweetest left feet in the game and his set pieces are a constant threat to any opposing team. Along with all of that last season he showed he could be a bit of a poacher with goals like the first one against the Spuds in our 3-0 home victory. 

At the start of the transfer window the boss brought Chamakh in from Bordeaux on a free transfer and he has already settled nicely into the team. With RVP returning late to training after reaching the World Cup final he started our first two games and was instrumental in gaining us a last minute point at Liverpool before going on to bag his first competitive goal for us against Blackpool. He missed a few very good chances in that Blackpool game too so it was very important that he got that late goal as it's always great for a striker to get off the mark.

We could have signed him last summer but the boss decided to wait until we could get him on a free transfer although if he knew the injury problems we were going to have I'm sure he would have tied the deal up there and then. In the last two years he has scored more headed goals than any player in the top five leagues in Europe and that's a part of our game where our strikers have struggled in recent seasons. 

As it stands he's seen as a direct replacement for RVP which probably means he won't start when RVP does but his chances will be far from limited as it would seem that RVP's injury problems just will not go away. I like the look of him and he certainly works very hard for the team, holds the ball up very well and brings other players into play. He could probably do with being a better finisher with his feet but he certainly offers us options from set pieces as well as open play with his top class heading ability. Without being too harsh I hope we don't see too much of him this season as that will mean that RVP has managed to stay fit.

The next in line for that striking role is Bendtner and opinions on him can be very divided at times but he did what was required of him when he came into the side in the second half of last season and scored plenty of important goals when they were needed. I was at the home game against Burnley last season when he missed a hat full of simple chances and I found it almost unbelievable but he bounced back a few days later with a hat trick against Porto in the last 16 of the Champions League.

He has a huge belief in his own ability and although he is very young still he is a mainstay of his national team despite the fact that he's not always first choice at Arsenal. At times his touch doesn't seem to be at the same standard as the rest of the team and it takes him three touches to do what other players can do in one but despite all of his problems he scores goals when they are needed at times and some of them can be pretty good too.

He played in the World Cup for Denmark despite carrying an injury and we're feeling the effects of that now as he is not projected to return to training until next month despite the boss thinking that he would be only a week behind the other players back in July. If he had been fit at the start of the season the chances are that he would have got a chance to start against both Liverpool and Blackpool and I'm sure he rues the missed opportunity.

If he is to play much this season it can only be as a central striker and the time he spent in a wide position at times last season was ridiculous in my opinion. He is not a wide player and never will be, he's not mobile enough to play the role and there are plenty of others who should play there ahead of him.

After those three players we have both Walcott and Vela who usually play on the wings but are ultimately seen as strikers in the long run. Up to this season Walcott has flattered to deceive but it would seem that the spur of missing out on the World Cup may have been exactly what he needed and he seems to have got off to a very promising start.

He only came on as a sub for the last half hour in the opening game but he started against Blackpool and scored a hat trick. He may not have done everything in that game perfectly but he still scored that hat trick to spite his critics. In the next game he scored an excellent goal against Blackburn and his overall play and running off the ball looked very good to me. I'm still not 100 percent sure on exactly how good he will be but at the moment he is the joint top scorer in the league and he's done it from a wide position rather than the central role that he would prefer.

His pace is electric and he can be very good on the ball at times too but the criticism of him was always that there was no end product to his game and that he ran so fast that he left the ball behind him sometimes. He's still very young but I can't say I have seen him forget the ball once so far this season and four goals is a very good return at this stage of the season. If he can be a little more consistent with his final ball he could be an absolute revelation this season.

Before I discuss Vela I have to talk about Arshavin of course. He has made the wide left position his own and although it's not his favourite position he has done very well there at times. Who can forget his four goals at Anfield in his first season or the fantastic goals he scored against both "Manure" and Liverpool last season. However he has also appeared lazy and out of sorts at times and this has angered a lot of fans.

His move to Arsenal wasn't all he thought it would be as his representative didn't look into the implications of the tax rates in England and he ended up with less money than he was getting in Russia. Added to that he was captain of the Russian team that failed to make it to the World Cup and there are plenty of reasons why his game seemed so off at times last season. It wasn't helped when he was asked to play as a central striker due to our injury woes last season despite being no more than 5'6" and probably a lot less in fact. He did well at first but as the season drew on he looked less ans less interested at times.

His start to this season hasn't been perfect but he has two goals in three games and he admits to being a little overweight and not playing as well as he would like to. If he can find that little bit extra that he has being missing he is a wonderful player who can scare any defence in the world and score fantastic goals too. I will say though that throughout his career he has always had a problem with consistency and we will probably have to take the good with the bad. That's OK with me as long as the good outweighs the bad and the bad is still a level that's better than the majority of other players.

Vela has been at the club a couple of seasons now after spending some time on loan in Spain to gain the right to play in England. There's no doubt that he's a very skillful player but the problem would seem to be that he hasn't adjusted to the game in England. It isn't helped by his many visits back to Mexico for internationals where he comes back so late that he's unavailable for the game on the weekend afterwards but hopefully that will change this season with internationals being played on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays.

At times he can look completely lost on the pitch for Arsenal but give him a chance to lob the keeper and you know he will score. However, give him any other sort of chance and it would seem that his confidence goes and he misses. It won't be easy for him to get too much game time this season and he will have to impress when he does but he certainly has the ability to do so.

As with Walcott he would ideally love to play in a central role but with the system we are currently playing he doesn't really suit that role in our team. I hope things work out for him but I can't see him having too much influence this season.

It would appear that the preferred attacking trio this season will be RVP, Arshavin, and Walcott but we have plenty of other options too. Besides the players I have named we also have Eboue, Rosicky, Nasri, and Wilshere who can play in wide attacking roles despite being midfielders and I'm sure they will all be used in those positions when the need arises or tactics require it. I can see Arsenal scoring an awful lot of goals again this season and if RVP can stay fit I think he will be our top scorer.

In other news Walcott's goal against Blackburn was voted the Arsenal goal of the month for August and of the nine goals we scored in our three league games it certainly deserved that accolade. We are linked with a young Japenese player called Ryo Miyaichi as well as a Barcelona youngster called Romeu and we could well add both of them to our squad of 56 players under the age of 21 who are listed as in our Premier League squad. The most important thing today though is that all of our players make it through tonight's games for their countries unscathed.

Here's a look at how Arshavin played in that 2-1 defeat away to "Maure" last season when he scored a cracker and should have had a penalty.

See You Tomorrow.