With the interlull now upon us, I’m minded to start looking ahead to the few week’s after this interminable international break has concluded because frankly, I have zero interest in seeing what England side has been patched together because Liverpool, Chelsea, United and City have all withdrawn players with minor ‘injuries’.

On the Same Old Arsenal pod on Sunday morning after Amanda had gone, James and I had a quick chat about the next ‘block’ of games, as well as looking at Liverpool’s fixtures. As a slight aside, it amuses me that City are being pegged as ‘dark horses’ for the title, because when you spend £400million+ in a January and summer window in a calendar year, being painted as ‘underdogs’ really isn’t a colour that you should be matched to. This is a team with the best striker in the world, the best manager, have spent a fortune and have won five leagues in a row as recently as two seasons back, so I think City have to be in the conversation and I think if they aren’t successful then the same ‘no excuses’ moniker that Arsenal are labelled with, should also be aimed in a Manchester direction.

But anyway, those fixtures, to which a few have looked at them in the media and seen an opportunity for Arsenal to build some potential daylight. Obviously all the usual caveats must apply; this is the hardest league in the football world, it is the most physical, which means the squads have to be deepest and injuries are an inevitable consequence of the game. But it’s hard not to look at this admittedly tricky set of games and not set yourself some hope and expectations as an Arsenal fan.

As I mentioned to James on the pod, I like to – as I’m sure you do too – break down the season into little ‘chunks’. The first ‘chunk’ was up until the October international break and that was the ‘Death Run’ that we had which included United, Liverpool, City and Newcastle, with a dose of ‘potential bloody nose’ against a West Ham side who had sucker-punched us two seasons in a row. We’ve come out the back of that and rather than talking about “well, we’re still in touching distance at the top”, we are at the top and that’s fantastic. It gives us a solid (almost) two weeks to bask. Lovely stuff.

But post the international break, we have ourselves our next ‘chunk’, which if I had to label it, would be the ‘Build’ part of the season. By that I mean we have to start building ourselves a points accumulation that makes us look like we’re champions in waiting. That runs until the game against The Scum and that’s four Premier League matches that takes us to 11 games played by mid November. The old adage is that the table starts to take shape after ten matches. We would go into that NLD on 11 matches played and when I look at Liverpool last season during match week 11, they had 28 points, nine wins, one draw and one defeat. We currently sit on five wins, one draw and one defeat and our next four games are:

  • Fulham (away)
  • Crystal Palace (home)
  • Burnley (away)
  • Sunderland (away)

I’m obviously ignoring the midweek Champions League and league cup for the basis of today, as I wanted to focus on the Premier League for today’s musings.

Now, Fulham away has caused us some issues. We conceded early last season, battered them, scored an equaliser and had one weird and marginal call against us in injury time. The season before that we played shockingly poor and were beaten on New Year’s Eve (I remember being in a fancy hotel in the New Forest and shouting could be heard down the hallway The Management said). So we know that it isn’t a given for us. Crystal Palace are just off the back of a 19 game unbeaten run and their confidence isn’t going to be dented by a game against Everton that they really should have won. Burnley away you’d hope we can do the business and despite the reunion with Granit up on Wearside, we need to be looking at that as a game that we should be aiming for full points on.

If that dream scenario happened and we won all four of those games, we’d be level with what Liverpool were doing at the same time last season. That’s a very good sign in my book. Conversely, Liverpool have a tricky run and given their form hasn’t been great of late, the hope has to be that they can drop some points in games against Man United (har-har), Brentford (although seeing them on Sunday against City, that remains to be seen), as well as Villa (hmmm) and then City away. Of those games you have to look at the City one as one in which somebody is going to drop points, but if we’re going into that weekend and Liverpool have dropped points to any of the above mentioned teams, then you’d be thinking we’re in a good spot going int o the NLD.

City’s run is a little kinder. They’ll beat Everton at home in their next game you’d expect, then Villa away is normally tricky, but doesn’t feel so just this minute (you wait until they have a massive uptick of form when we have to go there, eh?), as well as a tricky but probably winnable game against Bournemouth at home, before they play Liverpool. They too have Champions League and an away game to Swansea in which they’ll inevitably rotate, but it does feel a little similar to our tun other than Liverpool at home if you ask me.

So whilst the prevailing media narrative is that we have a bunch of winnable games, I do think that both of the other supposed ‘rivals’ also have games in which they’re going to win the majority of. That’s why we need to keep on getting those lovely and boring results like the weekend. Let’s suffocate the life out of fixtures. I’ll take more 2-0 uneventful games between now and the NLD please. Hopefully by then the squad will have filled out too with some players returning from injury.

Back tomorrow with whatever other random Arsenal thoughts pop in to my head. See you then.