Match day Saturday for The Arsenal and I come to you from just north of Newcastle, in the North East, albeit not going to the game today. Which is frustrating. But not as frustrating as it might be today if we can’t capitalise on the fact that we’re playing before both City and Liverpool, who face off tomorrow, in a game at which we can see ourselves put daylight between at least one of them if we pick up three points tonight at the Stadium of Light.

I don’t know how I feel about this one today, you know, because Sunderland are a strange ol’ team. I mentioned it a couple of days ago, but they don’t take tons of shots, their stats are such that they seem to have profited from whatever they’ve had, which means they’re in a purple patch right now that see’s them right up the top of the league as a newly promoted side.

They’re good. They’re confident. They’re at home.

Apart from the last point, the same can be said about us, though. So I don’t really know how this game is going to pan out. We’ve been dealing with low block sides all season, but I’m not sure Sunderland will start this one with the same mindset. Under the lights, in front of their fans, they’re going to be feeling like they could take another scalp here like they did against Chelsea a couple of weekend’s back. Which certainly could happen today. As much as we’re all having a laugh and a joke about how we don’t even allow shots on target any more, that run is going to end eventually and that certainly could be today. The clean sheet record has been immensely impressive, this is a rock-solid back line, but football has so many variables and it only takes one lose ball to fall awkwardly and a team can score against you. As I said this week already, I do wonder about what our response will be if that happened and I feel like the clean sheet record might be lost today.

The key will be whether we’ve scored first and how we’re going to respond to that first goal going in. If we’re three-goals up and it happens in the last five minutes, it’ll be annoying. But if the score is 0-0 and then we go one down, that probably will turn it in to a low-block siege mentality game. The question then becomes whether we can unpick that lock and my hope is that we have all of the tools if/when that happens.

For today, the key is Granit Xhaka. Sunderland build up via him. They leverage his ability and passing range to dictate their patterns of play and so if we want to stop them, we need to cut them off at the source, which is the Swiss international. Press him, don’t allow him to get on the ball, force the high turnovers and manoeuvre Sunderland into an unorganised defensive shape with those turnovers when Xhaka loses it. That’s where opportunities will come from and that’s where we pick up the three points.

There will be no Big Vik, as we know, so it’ll be Merino up top but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. He naturally drops deeper when we don’t have possession and so if he’s given the dual role of playing striker for The Arsenal, but also contesting the game and trying to put Xhaka under pressure, that might work for us. Either side I suspect it might be Trossard and Saka (we literally have nobody else) and the midfield three will be Eze, Rice and Zubimendi with the usual back five and Calafiori restored to left back I think. Arteta was a bit cryptic over the team news though, so I wonder if one of the injured attackers might make the bench. Could it be Noni or Martinelli? I hope so. Whilst they might not be ready for a start, having them as an option from the bench would be welcome at a time in which we’ve been finding ourselves getting down to the bare bones.

There were some other bits and bobs from the press conference that might be worth digging in to, like AI and Arteta talking about the use of it already, but I think I want to save that for another day and focus on this match. A match in which Sunderland will line up with a back five and a familiar face in Dan Ballard, who has become a regular for them at the back, but they will be man-to-man and aggressive in the press when they start. Apparently it’s been a feature of their play this season and when we have goal kicks they will most likely press us high and try to force mistakes. If we are accurate in our movement of the ball, that could see us get a fair bit of space today, or at least that’s what I’m hoping.

Their danger is also the long out ball to Isidor and they won the game at Chelsea through a long ball out from the back that was converted, so we need to be mindful of that, although our back line is a little more organised than Chelsea so I’d hope we have the matching of any countered balls like that.

I wouldn’t say I’m massively confident about today, but I do have positivity and hope, born out of the run we’ve been on and how imperious we’ve been at the back. We need to make sure we keep up the ‘foggin estandards’ that we’ve been doing for the last ten games and if we’re as good as we’ve been defensively then I think we hopefully should have enough. We just need to do the job at the sharp end of the pitch.

Right, I’m going to go and take some paracetamol, so I’ll catch you all tomorrow for a debrief.

Laters kids.