Happy Wednesday to you good people. I hope you and yours are well. We’ve got a bit of a Christmas gathering for the Same Old Arsenal podcast this evening in which we’ll talk through some of the highs and the lows of the evening with a few of the guests we’ve had over the last year. Then we’ll do a bit of a Liverpool preview and for me my mind had already started to wander there last night. That’s because this is now a true top of the table clash because the winner takes the top spot in the league for Christmas and although that did nothing for us last season, it’s still nice to go in to Christmas as the top dog and so I’m hoping that we can get some kind of Christmas miracle at Anfield, because our record there is abysmal.

Zero wins in the league for 11 years. In that time we’ve had three draws and seven defeats and taken some absolute hammerings. I’ll save more of the gory details for when we get closer to match day, but suffice to say I’m not wholly confident, although I had a text change with my Godfather last night and he seemed rather bullish and convinced we’ll win. I don’t think i’ll ever get there until we are a few goals up with 30 seconds to play, but we’ll see what the general mood is as the week draws on.

The Arsenal news seems to be ramping up from a transfer perspective, as the click-baiter websites gear up for their own version of Christmas, which is the January transfer window. In the last 24 hours I’ve seen:

  • Ivan Toney to Arsenal
  • Eddie Nketiah sold for £40million
  • Ramsdale to exit
  • Jakub Kiwior back to Italy
  • Dominic Solanke to ArsenalnPa

And that’s without even trying to look. Of course 95% of this will be absolute tripe, but it does become difficult to wade through the constant stream of it when you’re trying to see what’s really happening at The Arsenal. Like how we’ve just poached Real Madrid’s Brazilian scout, which by all accounts appears to be somewhat of a coup. Paolo Xavier is supposedly a guy responsible for bringing a bunch of quality Brazilian’s to the Bernabeu, but given that it’s Rea; Madrid I don’t think it should be too difficult for scouts to confirm kids from Brazil to play for one of the biggest clubs in the world. Arsenal are a big name and with the Edu connection you’d expect that we’re certainly getting recognised in Brazil as a destination, but whoever replaces Xavier at Real Madrid would – you’d expect – have a bit of a leg up in terms of being able to convince parents that their boy should be enlisting in the Spanish clubs academy.

Of course the flip side to that is that unless you really are a generational talent, you probably aren’t getting close to the Real Madrid team and the pressure cooker that is that club. At The Arsenal there is a clearer path; Martin Odegaard left Madrid and now finds himself captain of one of the more exciting projects in world football right now. Of course we aren’t a destination where you’re guaranteed – or even likely – to be hitting the first team instantly any more. Gone are the days of us bloody kids because we aren’t in competition for big prizes and the fact that Arteta has shown how important the mentality has to be at the club to maintain a culture of winning (look at the lack of youth teamers not playing in the dead rubber recently against PSV), shows that just because you’re a Brazilian who signs for Arsenal and there are loads of Brazilians around, you still need to develop and work hard to get near the first team. We’ve got Marquinhos who is out on loan at Nantes and after a couple of promising early performances, it doesn’t look right now as if he’s going to burst in to the first team at The Arsenal any time soon now. He’s played a total of 149 minutes all season for Nantes and as we approach the halfway stage in the season, it doesn’t look as though he’ll get the needed minutes for us to all be clamouring for him to come back and get in to those wide forward spots currently occupied by Martinelli and Saka.

But Xavier is considered to be a well-thought of scout and if he’s able to bring the true top talent to The Arsenal in future, then maybe we’ll be blooding in superstars within the next few years, which would certainly be welcome.

There’s not a lot else going on at the moment, so inevitably the troll media aggregators are picking up on Sergio Aguero naming everyone but Arsenal as title contenders, as well as Jose Mourinho giving us a zero chance of winning the league this season. I’m kind of ok with that; those two are irrelevances in our world these days anyway and certainly Mourinho would have been quite happy to perpetuate his narrative of disliking us by dropping his predictions that we have no chance. Let them sleep on us a little while longer, please.

For us, we’ve just got to keep on doing what we’re doing; Sunday’s display against Brighton was brilliant and you could barely fault it, that one Pascal Gross attempt aside, so if you’re going to think about the best possible preparation ahead of a massive game like Anfield and Liverpool away, then playing like that is exactly what you’d want. Then, what you ideally want, is to have a full week of preparation. Arteta doesn’t have an exact week, but six days is a bit of a Christmas blessing at this stage of the season and whilst I’d much rather we go deep in all competitions and would be playing in the Carabao Cup this midweek, hopefully Liverpool’s involvement in it will also give us a bit of a marginal gain too. I don’t think they’ll play a full strength team tonight, but if one or two are playing then maybe it helps us from a fatigue point of view. We can cross our fingers on that one.

And I shall leave it there for today. You enjoy your Wednesday and I shall catch you all in the morrow.