Before we talk The Arsenal and look ahead to the game tomorrow night in Belgium, let’s spend a minute or two talking about the Mo Salah situation, eh? Because as Arsenal fans, we’ve seen this stuff play out a couple of times and we know how it goes:

  1. Big Name ageing player on big money loses form and starts to show his age
  2. Big Name player’s power starts to wane and he ends up seeing less game time
  3. Big Name player plays one of the cards in his deck – moaning publicly to the press

The result is that it causes issues in the dressing room, it destabilises situations and as supporters you have to watch it all unfold feeling helpless as the player and club eventually part ways.

The three stages I’ve listed above could have ‘Big Name’ replaced by Ozil or Aubameyang in our situation, but it is for Salah right now and it is for Liverpool that it’s happening. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think any non-Liverpool fan couldn’t already see this coming. Certainly us Arsenal fans could. Ozil got his big-fat-contract and basically that was it, his job was done. He was never really the same. Auba was always a bit of a diva – we’d seen and heard about it in his Dortmund days – but we needed his goals and impact and so he played brilliantly for us, but his age curve would always bite at some stage and so we saw him decline. The difference was that the ability for Arteta to turn the other cheek was waning as was Auba’s impact and eventually it came to that inflection point that we are seeing at Liverpool.

How much sympathy do I have for Liverpool fans? Maybe a little. But there weren’t many that I saw that had sympathy for us. They laughed it all off as we were in the doldrums. So I won’t be shedding too many tears for them. In fact, I will just hope that they go through the same pain that we do, because I have a feeling they will get off scott-free with this one, because they’ll offload Salah to a Saudi club who will not only take on his mega wages, but they’ll probably pay him a massive fee for them to re-invest in the club too. If they’re to get the full experience, I hope they have to pay Salah to go away like we did with Ozil and Auba.

Right, to The Arsenal then, with whom the manager has some decisions to be made I suspect. And I don’t think there’s an Arsenal fan out there who doesn’t want those decision to involve a fair bit of rotation tomorrow night. He’ll do a pre-match press conference this evening at some stage, but the big talking point I wanna hear from Arteta’s mouth is that we have to rotate players who need a rest. Having a quick look at the way our fixtures fall, it does feel as though this game can – with all due respect to Club Brugge and the Champions League as a competition – be sacrificed. It’s a natural consequence of the stupid new format anyway; the extra two games means that you can look at some of these matches and make them secondary in importance and so I hope that when I’m talking about the possible team line up, the focus is all on how many he will rotate.

We’re top of this competition, we’ve won all of our games so far, we’ve got a superb goal difference and if you look at this article from September last year, there’s a 98% likelihood that 16 points gets you through. That means we basically need a draw from our last three games. Surely, I mean SURELY, Arteta and his team of coaches must be looking at that, looking at the leggyt performances from some players last weekend, and looking at how some need more game time, then thinking about big rotation. There are players like Declan Rice, for example, that we could be giving a full week off to by not having him play any part tomorrow. We also then have that rarest of things at this time of the year – a midweek off next week. That means Declan Rice, who we’ve all worried a little about despite his awesome engine, could play just two football matches in 15 days. And if you count the Palace game as one in which we might be able to rotate too, then you could be looking at three games in 21 days. That would be huge in getting him recharged for Christmas. It’s the same for Saka, for Merino, for Zubi too. Let’s get these key players some rest time and let’s use some of that squad depth we’ve all been banging on about so much.

Club Brugge are also hardly a team in sparkling form either domestically. They’ve lost five of their 17 games in the Belgian Pro League and currently sit third. In the Champions League they have one win in their five and have conceded 13 goals, whilst scoring eight. I’m always reluctant to use stats too much in this competition because there are so few data points compared to the Premier League at this stage, but decided to have a look anyway today and they sit around about where they are on xG in 24th (they’re actual position is 27th our of 36), but their 32nd in terms of xG against and they have the second worst form in the whole competition, so they will give Arsenal chances. They haven’t lost at home in the competition, to be fair to them and have a win and a draw and one of them against Barcelona with the other a smashing of Monaco. So they’re clearly a team who can score goals at home. I watched the match recap of both of those games – Mignolet was silly giving away a pen in the game against Monaco but got away with it, then Monaco were just terrible at the back. Lot of statues for certainly the second goal and a good set piece for their third. By the time the fourth came around Monaco were a shambles. So were Barcelona to be fair, whose high line against Chelsea was on display in that game too. The first goal Brugge scored was a curved run that was almost on the halfway line. The second goal was because Barcelona left a two-on-two in the opposition half and Brugge countered. The third Barcelona conceded was another high line ball in. If Arsenal give up chances like that tomorrow night I think Arteta might explode into a rage ball of flames.

So I guess what I’ve learned with my admittedly small amount of research on them is that they will give us chances and if we are not playing suicidal high-line football then we might be able to negate their attacking threats in Carlos Forbs, Christos Tzolis and Nicolo Tresoldi.

And I think on that note I shall pause for today and bid you a fond farewell on this Tuesday morn. Have yourself a good one and I’ll be back tomorrow for a match preview.