Happy Tuesday boys and girls. Let’s start with some FA Cup news, shall we? After all, we did learn last night our fate and opponents in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup and as I hoped for last in yesterday’s blog, we got the kind of draw that our compact fixture schedule could probably do with. It’s not a home game to Mansfield Town FC, but you have to take that as our next opponents, because you’d think that surely it leaves room for a fair bit of rotation, in between a really tough away trip to Brighton in the midweek before, followed by a Champions League Round of 16 game the midweek afterwards.

When you get to that part of the season you’re looking for ways in which you can involve the whole squad, so this opportunity will, I think, afford Mikel Arteta the chance to rest and rotate some of those key players who have been playing all the minutes. I think it also feels like some sort of football karma; we’ve had a fair few years of playing all Premier League opposition, so to be able to play teams with whom we rarely come up against feels quite nice, I would say.

City go away to Newcastel and you’d hope that means Pep has some thinking to do around that time about how he lines up his team for that one. They too will have it sandwiched in between Premier League and Champions League games, so if it helps to contribute towards their fatigue as he’s forced to field a stronger side, then I think we’re all good with that, as Arsenal fans.

But for now, attention moves to Wolves away tomorrow night, for which I do wonder how tempted Arteta might be to play some of the faces that played against Wigan, in some of the positions they play in as well. For example, could we see Saka and Madueke both in the starting line-up? It felt good to me; both seemed to have a good connection, good passing combinations and good rapport between them, with Madueke and Saka combining for the own goal that was scored. My hope is that Arteta is asked about it today and that he doesn’t dismiss it. In fact, if we get a little smile and a vanilla response that you can’t quite work out what he’s saying, I think that means he’s got it seriously in contention as an option tomorrow. With Odegaard potentially not fit, it does feel like it could be worth a try. Alternatively, maybe Eze in the 10 is the choice, with Rice and Zubi slotting into more of a double pivot? Eze’s performance will be such that Arteta must be thinking about ways in which he can unlock him and against a Wolves side sure to sit back into a low block, having the guy who is willing to take those pot shots to try to unlock something might be worth consideration.

As for Wolves, having looked like they might be on the comeback trail over the turn of the new year with a draw away at United and a 3-0 home win against West Ham, they’ve slipped back into defeat mode, so my hope for tomorrow is that the initial confidence that looked like it was sweeping through following the arrival of Rob Edwards, is now extinguished for tomorrow. They’ve picked up a point away at Forest in their last game, but before that it was a 3-1 defeat at home to Chelsea, which came before a 2-0 home defeat to Bournemouth. Before that it was a 2-0 away defeat at Man City, with the game before that being a 0-0 at home to a Newcastle side who have struggled a bit on the road this season (victory at the Scum aside). So it’s not exactly a massive swing in form and we have to use that to press down on the necks of them tomorrow evening. In their last game against Forest I think it is fair to say they got away with one a bit; Forest had 34 attempts at goal! There’s no Strand Larsson in their team any more, replacing him with Armstrong from Southampton, whilst they’ll have no Hwang through injury either.

Their fans are hardly optimistic either. I’ve just had a quick look on a Wolves Forum and not a single fan even predicted their team to score a goal, let alone win the match. The scorelines ranged from 0-2 to 0-4 and that tells you a lot about how they are feeling. You can understand why; they’ve scored 16 goals in 26 games, they have one win and six draws with 19 defeats, they’ve conceded 48 goals (nearly two per game on average) and they are looking like they will be going down within the coming weeks.

But all of that was true when we played them at The Emirates, and it didn’t stop us needing a stoppage-time winner to save our blushes. This is a difficult league, it is an unpredictable league; you never quite know what is going to happen once the first ball is kicked. Arteta should be stressing that to his players. I hope he is also stressing the importance of not wasting up a whole half. I’ll expand on it a little bit more tomorrow, but we need to be going for the jugular from the first minute tomorrow evening. No more walking pace first-half football, please, Arsenal. I don’t want to see Big Gabi and Big Bill Saliba exchanging passes whilst we rest defence our way through a first half. Get the job done early like you did against Wigan. Then you can start thinking about that nausea-inducing North London Derby on Saturday.

We’ll have some press conferences today, which we can have a look at tomorrow, but for now, I’ll leave you all be and be back tomorrow with more of a match preview once we know the team news. Catch you all then.