Tomorrow it’s Atalanta in the new phase of the Champions League and for some reason unbeknownst to myself, I decided to watch Villa away to Young Boys and then Liverpool away to Milan. Well, the first half of that one, anyway. I say ‘unbeknownst’ mainly because watching other teams in the Champions League isn’t really my bag, but perhaps because it was on as I was cooking, it’s the first match day of the competition, plus I wanted to see how Villa would react to midweek football, I decided to put it on.
Mitigating circumstances, I suppose.
But Villa looked pretty good after they scored and Liverpool were asleep for the first few minutes before they looked like a decent team again. It’s funny because for the first 10 minutes of that game in Italy it looked as though Milan were a decent outfit and were causing Liverpool some problems, before the Scousers eventually realised who they were and how good they actually are and just turned up the heat on AC. There was a lot of noise in that stadium and I was reminded of our first away game last season when we played Lens. Their fans were bang up for it, they made a lot of noise, we scored first and then they got a couple of goals in which nine times out of ten they wouldn’t get. It was a frustrating night but as we know we got through the group and all was ok from a group stage perspective. We were able to extract some revenge by beating them 6-0 in the home leg.
Annoyingly this competition doesn’t allow for it, which does make me wonder about it, you know. You could feasibly get a really hard selection of games in which you don’t get the benefit of a revenge leg. We play Atalanta away, but won’t see them again after tomorrow night until it’s the knockout stages if they progress and we progress. I do understand the whole seeding thing, so in theory it isn’t randomised and you end up with loads of tough games against the best opponents, but there’s just something I can’t quite put my finger on with this format that I’m just not completely sold on.
There’s probably also the element of UEFA effectively building a version of their own Super League after the failed attempts of a few years back. I said it back then, that we would get a ‘Super League by stealth’ and this feels like the first iteration of it, so that UEFA can rake in more money. When you’ve got the likes of Rodri complaining about players potentially going on strike because of the volume of games, followed by De Bruyne also having previously said similar during the international break, you know that the players are starting to wonder when it’ll all end too.
Not as long as money talks. Ironic it’s City players who are being the voices for players, given their club are the very definition of ‘money talks’ as they try to lawyer their way out of 115 charges, but I’ll park that particular gripe for now.
Instead, let’s focus back on The Arsenal and I know we’re all getting worried about Odegaard and the random ball that appeared in front of his foot in the pictures of the team photo yesterday, but I can’t honestly say I am not going to get too bent out of shape on this one. Even if Odegaard can’t get his boot on, there’s been no talk of ankle breakages and by all accounts everyone seems to be pretty accepting it is a sprain. Odegaard will be out for tomorrow, plus City at the weekend, then we’ll probably miss him for Bolton in the Cup and Leicester at home. I don’t think there’s many of us that truly held up hope he’d be available for City, did we? I certainly didn’t. He’s got a sprained ankle, the club needed to take the team photo and given that photo will be in the halls at the ground and the training centre for years to come, you have to find a creative solution that makes sure that in nine months time we’re not looking at Odegaard with a boot off. It would just look a little weird. So we move one, hopefully we can see him in a couple of weeks.
At least Merino has his sling off and is wandering around. Maybe he’s doing some light work now and we can see him in October some time, perhaps?
The focus for Mikel will be on his press conference later and all eyes will be on his thoughts around the opponent and how we will line up. He’ll give them the usual platitudes, not wanting to invoke any kind of extra motivation, but given how Milan were bested by Liverpool yesterday, I have hope that even with our injury problems, we’ll be ok. They will be bang up for it, as the last time they played in the competition was a couple of years ago in 2022 when they went out in the Group stage, but their domestic form has started in a similar format as Milan’s has. They’ve won two against Lecce (13th) and Fiorentina (14th) and they’ve been beaten heavily by Inter and then also lost to Torino, so they have started ok, but not like a house on fire. Hopefully that is a good omen for us. I’ll have a little look at them tomorrow, as well as us, but what I am wondering right now is whether Arteta is going to give us a hint of any rotation today. I hope so. As much as I want our Champions League campaign to kick off with a win, having a full set of players fit and raring to go against City on Sunday is imperative. We play on the Thursday and City play at home to Inter tonight, so they definitely have the marginal gain on two home games whilst we have to travel, but it will be interesting to see what Pep does with his rotation tonight with us visiting them at the weekend. I might watch the game; well, at least until City get the first goal and then I’ll most likely switch it off.
And I think I’ll also close today’s proceedings down too. I did think about having a word about the PR spin that is that stupid Howard Webb show, but given they’ve taken two weeks to craft their pathetic narrative about how they were right, I think I’ll give that a swerve.
Catch you all tomorrow for some thoughts ahead of the game and our opponents.
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