Morning peeps. Hope you’re ok. I am still pretty mad about Wednesday night, but you know what they say about time being a healer, right? Well, for me, it’s that and Small Prophets, which I watched the last episode of last night. Great stuff.

I guess the club was also hoping that official announcements of star player signing a new deal would also appease us. Thankfully, because of my curated timeline, I have plenty of sensible people who could divorce themselves from one thing relating to another and there was plenty of love for Bukayo, whilst still being grumpy about that midweek draw to the worst Premier League Team in history.

Then on Sunday we play what some of their fans are calling the worst Spurs team in Premier League history. I don’t buy that for a second. They are better than the sum of their collective parts have shown and, with the NLD needing no motivation, they will show it against us on Sunday for sure. Perhaps Mikel can use that motivation to turn a corner for this Arsenal team? I certainly hope so. The pundits still think we’ll win, though. Sutton predicted 3-0 on Sunday, which I just cannot see in a million years, whilst his guest went for 3-2 to The Arsenal. Merse has gone for 2-1, but Lewis Jones has said 2-1 to them on Sky Sports.

The Opta supercomputer – which I’ll be honest and admit I’m starting to hate right now – is telling us that we have a 60.1% chance of winning that game. I don’t really buy that given our form, their home, as well as a new manager, bounce that has already hit us once this season with Michael-friggin’-Carrick at The Emirates.

Their fans are kind of seeing it as a free hit. I get that. They won’t go down, they’re too good I think, so all they probably ned is two or three wins this season and they’re fine. I think they’ll get that, but will one of them be this weekend? If ever there was an incentive for them, it would be to hand the title advantage to City, so I am expecting their fans to be massively up for that. That club lives for other teams; they focus on making sure we don’t win anything, as 2023/24 showed, so Arteta needs to be preparing for this game as if he’s playing a team and a fanbase who are challenging for the title with us.

So then, what about this new manager? What’s he going to do? Well, he does apparently like a bit of a ‘new manager bounce’, which I bet will be the prevailing narrative on Sunday pre-kick off. He’s been hired midway through a season seven out of his last eight times and has had success at Juve, Lazio and twice managed to avoid the drop for Udinese. He tends to go with a back three and wing-backs, so I expect that’s what we’ll see on Sunday, with man-to-man pressing. That could be interesting, because if he does that, it means there are individual battles that could be won and that will be intriguing for our wide-forwards. It’s also what completely knocked them out of the game at The Emirates, with us three-up at halftime before Frank switched to a back four.

The benefit Tudor has had is that he’s had enough time to drill positions and disciplines into their team. This isn’t going to be a case like it was with Big Ange where he joined and then two days later for Forest they played us and hadn’t quite adapted to the system. There’s certainly an element of ‘you have to do it in a game’, but they will have been training their arses off this last week to be drilled well-enough to execute Tudor’s vision. We also tend to do quite well against.

The data tells us one thing, but I don’t know that it is what we’re gonna get on Sunday. It tells us that the Scum have the fourth-worst xG in the whole league. But then again, so did Wolves and they still managed two against us. They have also taken the sixth-worst number of shots so far this season. Where they are good, like us, is through set-pieces and the Scum have the fourth-best goal conversion from set pieces of any team in the league – 13 all season (we have 16). They also don’t seem to be too great when it comes to fast breaks; they’ve had 13 all season and have only scored in two – this tells me they aren’t a transitional side that will hit us on the counter again and again.

But this is where the data belies the reality, because we just don’t know with Tudor what he will do. If his previous roles is anything to go by, I’ve sort of outlined what some of what we might see above, but if they are also pressing high and with a man-to-man approach, my hope is that it will favour our increased propensity this season for going direct. Maybe, just maybe, this could finally be a ‘Big Vik’ big game? Let’s hope so, because for at least 80% of games this season, his performances have left me feeling a little, well, ‘meh’. If he is fed the ball and has enough green grass to run into with a high man-to-man press by The Scum, then he just has to win his own battle for us to potentially profit.

I hate this fixture. You’re going to hear me say that a lot over the next 48 hours. It makes me more nervous than anything and with the unknown quantity being added in here, as well as our performance in midweek, where at the beginning of the week I said this could be season-defining for us, the first part already hasn’t gone to plan, which means that the ‘season-defining’ part could be for all the wrong reasons. Let’s hope not on Sunday.

The countdown to this game is well and truly on. Let’s hear what the managers say in their press conferences today.

Until tomorrow.