'Arsenal must put United and Chelsea under pressure - starting on Saturday'

04 March 2010

Nigel Winterburn: Arsenal have a great chance of the title now

THERE is nothing worse for a professional footballer than being struck down by the kind of terrible injury that Aaron Ramsey suffered on Saturday.

Every football fan and every football player in the country hates to see it, and it is depressing for Arsenal fans to have to see those scenes again with the Eduardo incident still in their memories.

All you can hope is that Ramsey recovers as quickly as possible, and you know he is in the best possible hands at Arsenal.

Having seen the tackle countless times I still haven't made my mind up about it, in some ways it looked like Ryan Shawcross was trying to clear the ball into the stand rather than make a challenge.

The end result was that he had lost control by the time he made contact and Ramsey took the full force of it on his shin - but I don't think you can pin too much blame on the Stoke player.

I am a staunch believer that tackling is still a big part of the game and while of course I don't condone these type of injuries, it is part and parcel of football that you are going to get these incidents in the game.

Are teams going out to hurt Arsenal like Arsene Wenger says? There is probably some truth in that they are going out to stop Arsenal playing football, but that has always been the way in the game, lesser teams will always try to stop better teams from playing. I should know from my Wimbledon days.

As I said earlier, all you can hope for now is a speedy recovery for the player, and there could be no better homage to him than Arsenal going on and winnning the title.

They have a great chance now, they are right in there after Chelsea's defeat on Saturday, and they have to feel they can win most of these last 10 games and push United and Chelsea all the way.

The key is to put pressure on them, like by winning on Saturday before United play and send them out at Wolves knowing they can't afford to slip up.

I really hope Arsenal can go on and win the title or the Champions League this season, because a lot of people disrespected the club at the start of the season, saying they wouldn't even be contenders.

They have already proved a lot of them wrong, but winning something is the only real way to do it.