Morning folks and welcome to Thursday. With the international tedium now well behind us in the rear view mirror, thoughts shift back towards the Premier League and a return of an old adversary to The Emirates in ‘Big Ange’ Postecoglou. His reign at Forest is now underway and, as you’d expect, he’s come out in defiance of his approach. He’s said that he ‘loves winning things’ in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek response to his comments last season that to be fair to him, he backed up by winning The Scum the Europa League and I suspect he might have his eye on that competition again to be fair. But before that becomes real he’ll be facing up against us this weekend and with him already taking training yesterday after his appointment on Tuesday, from an Arsenal fan perspective you wonder just what sort of Forest side is going to rock up on Saturday lunchtime. Surely a few days is little time to change the entire approach of the team, but a defensively low block approach also doesn’t feel like it’s the sort of thing Postecoglou will go for completely, so I’m a bit at odds at what they will do.

That makes them a little more dangerous to us because as much as I’ve talked about us as an unknown quantity this season because of our different tactical approaches and personnel, it feels like Forest are – as of now anyway – also an unknown quantity.

It must be so hard for managers and coaching staffs of opposition players when this sort of stuff happens once the season is underway. All of the analysis your team has done could potentially be thrown out of the water and whilst the phrase ‘new manager bounce’ has tended to be referred to in the context of a squad of players all going that little extra mile to impress the new manager, I think these days it’s probably more about the tactical side of how the new manager will line his side up, that causes the most issues. The Premier League has become such a chess match league over the last five years or so. The kind of inspirational ‘vibes’ managers who would have existed ten years ago just simply wouldn’t cut it any more. You have to be able to forensically analyse your opponents every weakness and then deploy your best team to amplify those weaknesses, whilst playing to your own strengths. When you can’t do that because you don’t know what the strengths or weaknesses are of an opposition because their tactical set up might change, it becomes a little more difficult to really know if your game plan will be the one that plays out on the pitch. I remember – I think it might have been David Luiz who said it – when Mikel first took over and we won the FA Cup, the comments were along the lines of “he knows exactly how a game will play out – to every detail. It is more a case of us as players being able to execute it”. Apologies, I can’t find the exact quote, but I know that it stuck in my head. But what do you do when you have no idea whether a team is going to rip everything up and try something new?

I wonder if this might be a game in which Arteta – being the obsessive that he is – mocks up two different scenarios. Option A is we see a team that Ange has said “look, we’re going to change things, but it will be a gradual change over time, so I don’t want to tweak it too much”. The thing about that, however, is that the entire coaching staff has been changed and he’s got his own guys in already. So what are they going to do? Say to the players “can you remember what was being talked about last week when Nuno was in charge? Keep doing that for a bit”. I think that’s a little less likely more that I think about it, but Mikel still needs to think about prepare for a low block on Saturday I think. Option B, which from an Arsenal fan perspective is what we hope will happen, will be more what we’ve seen from ‘Angeball’. High line, high press, commit bodies and create overloads in attacking space, whilst relying on your core defenders to cover greater ground as a result. If that happens, then Arsenal’s ability to get out of high pressing situations might work in our favour. Ironically, whilst we’ve all been talking about how Martinelli is out of form and should probably be sat down for a bit, a game like Option B mentioned above would suit him waaaay more than option A. The archetypal Martinelli goal is like the one he scored against Brighton a couple of season’s back, or the one he got against Villa when he walked it in to the net. It’s like that one against Chelsea when Kante slipped, or when he was put in behind by Merino in the Bernabeu. Martinelli is a green space running; he wants to have plenty to run in behind on and a Forest side going with Option A means that Martinelli should be nowhere near the first XI for it. Equally there’s the whole form and confidence thing, so I do wonder if it matters what Postecoglou goes for, because Martinelli will most probably be sidelined. But it goes to show you just what difference a change in manager and philosophy can have. I’m just a lowly Arsenal blogger with very limited tactical knowledge of the game and I’m thinking about it, so you can bet your house that Mikel and his coaches and Arsenal analysts are doing it to a much larger degree.

We might get a little more insight tomorrow when ‘Big Ange’ speaks to the press ahead of the game, but he won’t want to give too much away I don’t think. He’ll give soundbites, he’ll be fun for the media and he’ll talk about how he ‘is who is is’ mate, but that Europa League final showed that if he needs to tell his team to low block the sh*t out of a game, he’ll do it. And with Forest I suspect the expectations aren’t the same with The Scum, so they won’t be as expectant to play free-flowing football I don’t think, which means I do wonder if we see a more pragmatic Postecoglou for this stint at his latest club.

We shall soon find out. Back tomorrow with some more thoughts ahead of the game and the press conferences, but I might do a little bit of stooping around on Forest fan forums to see what vibes they are giving off. Catch you then.