No way back for Szczesny

For a while, I've been waiting for us to have a keeper good enough to seriously challenge Wojciech Szczesny for the starting spot. This keeper would need poise, agility, the ability to command, international level experience, and above all, a reason for Szczesny to be dropped. I believe David Ospina might just be my answered prayer.

Maybe.

I don't want to oversell the man just yet. We all saw him in the World Cup, and he's had a few games for us - some of them big - in which he's not had too much to do, but crucially, has yet to do anything wrong. With every game that goes by with Ospina starting, I feel more like it will take more than a simple mistake for Szczesny to get back in contention. Ospina has started the last three league games and kept clean sheets in all of them, including City away. By contrast, that's as many as Szczesny has kept in 17 games. Even Martinez kept two clean sheets in Szczesny's absence, one of which was against Southampton. So our two backup keepers have almost doubled Szczesny's tally in a third of the number of games he's had, and more importantly, against teams who we needed to shut out.

I'll be hauled over the coals for saying this, but Szczesny reminds me a lot of Almunia - a generally decent keeper who makes bizarre mistakes often enough for it to be an issue, but whereas Almunia made them due to nerves, Szczesny was always seen to do them because of youthful rashness. Unfortunately for him, he's 24 now, not the 19 year old who was promoted to the first team, so just like Wayne Rooney and his temper, "he's just young and impetuous" doesn't cut it anymore, and no amount of his dad (embarrassingly) weighing in every time he gets dropped will help either.

This weekend is huge. Everyone hates derby day chokers so the pressure is on Ospina, but he has a few good games of form for leniency. If he fails massively, it would be a huge boost for Szczesny, but having said that, I'd feel badly for him to be dropped so swiftly when it took ages for Wenger to do the same to Szczesny. We haven't kept a NLD clean sheet in a long time, so I'll gamble on Ospina doing just that, but whether he does or not, I still believe that the way things are going, it's a long way back for Szczesny now - if there's any way back at all.