I’m going to do my usual look at how Palace fans are feeling right now ahead of our game at the weekend, as well as a bit on their game last night against Larnaca (which I think is more famed for it’s party town history than it’s football team, but there you go), but before that how about the interview in The Standard with Gabriel Jesus in which he says he’s feeling good and is looking forward to the final stages of his rehab and a return to the pitch soon. How soon that is remains to be seen, with even him saying that he has to hold himself back from doing too much, as he’s now on the training pitches. A quick google of a ruptured ACL puts the timeframe at nine to 12 months, so we’re slap bang in the middle of that and given he’s 28 and not getting any young, any setback now could have longer damage than any potential involvement in this season.

It’s a fascinating case because I think most of us have sadly moved on from him, but as Simon Collings’ article points out, it’s easy to forget that before he did his knee in that United FA Cup game last January, he was on a run of six goals in seven games. I’d completely forgotten that and I think i’d even mentioned on here and on social media that my feeling was a move back to Brazil was probably what he should be angling for this season. After all, he’s most likely fallen down the pecking order with Kai and Big Vik duking it out for that central spot and Merino knocking on the background with his goal output. Gabriel Jesus can play across the front three, for sure, but he’s not getting in ahead of Saka, Martinelli, Trossard, Madueke and probably even Eze at this stage. But at 28 he isn’t a busted flush and that goal return before he was injured is worth considering before we think that he’s done. He doesn’t think he is at Arsenal and good work to the lads at Arseblog for doing the translation on an article in which he says he still wants to win things at Arsenal. nice words, the right words, but I suspect if there’s an offer in January to be had, Arsenal would consider it. We’ve got a big squad as it is, but having players already not making the match day squad and with his wages as it is, I suspect Arsenal might look to cash in on an asset – as nice a guy as he might be.

Until we get a deal though, he’ll be re-integrated and it shows just more strength-in-depth that we have at the club and I wonder if that is something that Palace will be wary of on Sunday. They were defeated to Larnaca last night and whilst I didn’t watch the game, I had a look at the result and stats and it seems they had a lot of dominance in the game and played a pretty full-strength team. Henderson, Guehi, Lacrooix, Munoz, Mitchell, Sarr and Mateta are all regulars for the Eagles and whilst subs were made by Glasner from 71 minutes onwards, it’s still guys getting games on a Thursday night before playing on Sunday. That’s something our squad is used to and our depth has been able to handle, but I wonder how Palace react to that? Hopefully they feel the fatigue whilst we’ve had two extra night’s rest and with Bernardo Silva bitching about it in the game we played against City (they had no issue the season before when we were in Italy two days after they were playing at home before going to Manchester, but there you go) , you know that this impacts these finely tuned athletes. Even if it’s just a 5% difference in our favour, that works for me.

As for their fans, a quick check of a couple of message boards reveals a little discrepancy between fans. Based on the 30-odd predictions that I read, there’s a blend of “We’ll get a scrappy score draw” and “this isn’t a good time for us to play them given our form”, with more leaning towards a score draw than a defeat. I can kind of understand this. We have to remember that Palace were on a mad-crazy undefeated spell before they got beat up at Everton, but that defeat last night is now being spun into a “three without a win” jibe at the FA Cup holders. As usual from the Palace fans I’ve seen there is a little bit of the ol’ “as long as we’re good on corners they can’t hurt us” and whilst I’d hope the Palace coaching staff apply the same principle, I’m not naïve enough to believe so.

We all know this is a good Palace side, a well-coached Palace side, who do create a lot of chances with their mid-block approach that gets plenty of chances when they spring rapidly from front to back. Heck, they’re the current xG leaders in the table by some distance:

Hopefully that screen grab comes through and you can see it from FBref.com, but what it shows you is that Arsenal are coming up against a team who know where the goal is and I suspect we’re going to give away a few chances on Sunday in search for the goals. What it might do is turn this game into a transitional one and create more chances for us, but I’ll park any further tactical analysis for the weekend.

For now we’ll wait until we hear from Mikel and Oliver on team news and whilst ours is hopefully positive, it’ll be interesting to see what Glasner hints he might do given the fact that Palace have – unusually for them – a disadvantage playing a European-playing side this time around, because of their own involvement in midweek competition.

So I’ll leave it there and be back to you tomorrow with some more thoughts following the press conferences. Have a good one.