Happy Thursday all – hope you’re all good?

I think we’re getting a Mikel Arteta press conference this morning ahead of the Sunderland game and I don’t know about you, but the main question I’d like answered is:

How long is Viktor Gyokeres going to be out injured for?

The talk is that it’s after the international break, as well as a few players expected to be back, but if you think about how long Havertz and Madueke have been out for, it would be a surprise to see them walk straight back in to the first team. They will need to have their fitness built up and therefore whilst it will be good to have them back in training, I do hope that Big Vik is going to be fine after this weekend. Let’s hope the plan is to keep them all at London Colney, get them a full week of training whilst the internationals are on, maybe even a behind-closed-doors game or two, before being ready for the North London Derby.

The fixtures get scary after the break, but Sunderland away has it’s own treacherousness about it, because they have played well all season and will also be buoyed by the fact that we are running low on attacking options. The game is still two days away, but given there will be a press conference today I thought I’d start taking a look at what we’re up against from a team perspective and Sunderland at home have played five, won three, drawn two and lost none. They’ve scored nine at home in that time and conceded three, although their xG is 5.1 so they have been scoring from less than likely situations (that figure puts them 15th in the league). They have been good defensively though – as the three goals conceded suggests – and they’re one of the teams towards the top of the league when it comes to tackles won in their own defensive third.

From an attacking point of view they’ve had the fewest number of shots on target and they’re in the bottom half for total number of shots, which tells me they are a side who have been taking their chances – but is it sustainable over the long term?

Without wanting to jinx it too much (which I may well be doing here but I’m going to say it anyway), I think Sunderland will probably revert to the mean and they won’t sustain a European spot place for the entirety of the season, mainly based on some of these underlying metrics, but unfortunately for us we’ve caught them when they are riding high and we’ve got a bit of an attacking injury crisis, despite the two goals and good form of the likes of Merino for club and country. So some early thoughts for me ahead of this game are that I think we’re going to get a very tight encounter, because of a) their confidence and home ground advantage, and b) our attacking challenges in having to play a central midfielder up front.

And hey, I hope Merino does well and I hope that we get a good game and some goals out of him on Saturday evening, but whilst his goalscoring has been great overall in 2025, I do think we all need to remember that he isn’t a striker. He doesn’t make the kinds of runs that our actual strikers make, his inclusion means we’ll have to adapt our playing style and when he came on against Burnley on Saturday last weekend I think we definitely didn’t look as potent as we were in that first half against the Clarets. I’m not trying to bag on Merino here by the way, I’m just saying that I think we’re probably going to be saying we missed a striker of a certain style on Saturday, by the time the game ends. Last season when Merino had the role over a number of games it worked some of the time, but at other times it kind of felt like we were lacking a little bit. I had a quick look at the end of last season when he played up front and his stats were:

  • Southampton away = drew a blank
  • PSG at home = drew a blank
  • Real Madrid away = two assists
  • Real Madrid home = scored
  • Fulham home = scored
  • Chelsea home = scored
  • United away = drew a blank
  • Forest away = drew a blank
  • West Ham home = drew a blank

So it is a good return to be fair, but I seem to recall in some of those games we really struggled to knit together any kind of attacking link up – like United away and Forest away – and I think what this small sample size tells me is that over a short period of time I think Merino up top is fine, but over a prolonged period, it isn’t really ideal.

And that’s why we went out and bought Big Vik in anyway, right? I listened to two of the prominent Arsenal podcasts over the summer and they both said “the Merino experiment was fine, he’s a good player, but we don’t really want to see that too often” and I don’t know about you guys, but I really didn’t think we’d be seeing it as early as the beginning of November in the season, but here we are. So for me if we can get some kind of words of comfort from Arteta that after the international break we’ll have some players back for that big NLD clash, then that will at least mean that we just need to use our ‘break glass in case of emergency‘ approach just the once more.

A final note from the game this weekend, as I try not to sound too down on Merino (honestly, I am genuinely not, I feel like he’s been really good in filling in and has scored some vital goals for us) up top, is that I looked at the stats on what teams do against Sunderland and Sunderland have had the third most crosses in to the box that they’ve faced of any team this season. What do we all know Merino is good at? Heading in from crosses (think Newcastle away). If we’re going to play to his strengths, I think Leo, Saka and our full backs, as well as the likes of Rice or Eze, need to be looking for that barnet of Merino’s in the box – it might be a secret weapon.

Back tomorrow with some post press conference thoughts. See you then.