It’s Friday, so the official countdown feels like it begins now for this Sunday’s big crunch match against the world’s most reprehensible football club, Chelsea FC.

Today we’ll have the managers’ press conference, which will give us an update on team news, which won’t be very telling on our side. But as I sort of touched on yesterday, it is Chelsea’s team that I am more interested in knowing who is available. For us, the main question will centre around whether Havertz can make the match-day squad, with Mikel Arteta saying last week that he had the outside chance of making the game against the Scum. We’re a week later now and so my hopes are that we get some good news, although we need to be ready to hear a ‘not-a-lot’ update from Arteta; I think he’ll say the same as last week, which could mean anything. The reports of the Havertz injury came out around 12th February, so if he was due to miss a month, that puts him as possibly available next weekend at best, I would suggest. Let’s just hope for some good news, though, anyway, eh?

So, as we head into this weekend’s set of fixtures, what are the pundits saying about our hopes?

Well, Lewis Jones on Sky Sports thinks we’ll get a clean sheet in a 2-0 win, and whilst I’d love to say that it’s music to mine ears, he’s also predicted a West Ham win at Liverpool (never gonna happen), and a Man City draw away at Leeds. I was at a leaving do last night for a mate who is a Leeds fan. We had a chat about the game tomorrow, and I asked him what the chances are of Leeds doing us a favour. To my surprise, he said, “You never know – it’s under the lights as a 5.30 pm kick off, we have a team of big bastards you boot people around, the crowd get massively up for night games, so there might be a chance. Or we’ll be down 3-0 within 15 minutes” – so I liked what he said other than the last bit!

Lewis Jones also said we’d draw 1-1 away at the Scum last week, so I guess his predictions are there to be taken with a pinch of salt. Chris Sutton is going with a 2-0, but his guest – some dude from Neighbours – went for 2-2, and the BBC AI-generated predictor said 2-2 as well, which I thought was interesting because most people don’t really predict Arsenal conceding for obvious reasons. But when you stop and look at 2026, clean sheets have been harder to come by, so predicting that Chelsea will score is probably not too wide of the mark. In every game in 2026, it has felt as though the opposition have one wonder strike in them, or Arsenal have a shoot-oneself-in-the-foot moment, so you wouldn’t bank on that not happening this weekend, would you?

Merse has gone for a closer encounter with a 1-0 to The Arsenal, whereas Mark Lawrenson has gone with a 3-1 Arsenal. Of all of the scores, that’s the one I feel could be on the cards the most, for the aforementioned Arsenal, conceding silly goals or worldies rule. Could also be a 2-1, but obviously, the more we score, the better, and so I’m hoping for some manifestation of my prediction.

What about those Chelsea fans? though? How are they feeling ahead of this one?

Well, the first one I came across on a forum had this to say:

We’ll have no Cucu, no Estevao, no Fofana, a seriously off form Caicedo and a poorly off form Palmer. Only way we score is if Arse sh*t the bed themselves

Yes please! I’ll take that! I didn’t know about Estevao, but apparently, he missed Burnley with a hamstring issue, so let’s hope that remains true. Having scrolled through a couple of pages of fan comments, it’s fair to say they aren’t too happy with their new manager, Liam. The crux of what I’ve just read is:

  • They really don’t rate that Tosin fella at the back, and shortly behind him, they don’t really fancy Badiashile
  • They fear that Rosenior will just replicate the League Cup tactics
  • They seem convinced somebody from Chelsea is getting sent off

One of the forums has a poll of the score and has it as 56% of Chelsea fans thinking it’ll be a win for us, 18% think a draw and 25% think they’ll win. So the odds, even with the Chelsea fans, seem to be stacked in our favour, but they were massively against United, Wolves, Brentford and Forest, and look how that turned out, so we need to be mindful of these prediction routines. Instead, let’s look to the data on Chelsea, which again is quite difficult, given that Rosenior is still forging the identity for his new team. The stats tell us that behind City and us, Chelsea have scored the most goals. It tells us that they haven’t, however, had a ton of shots and sit fifth in the table, having had 43 fewer shots than us this season, and 13 fewer on target. They average more possession than us and sit third in the league, whilst also having attempted 1,101 passes more than us so far. The picture is starting to form on them over the whole season – they want to keep more of the ball than us for sure. They lead the league for passes per defensive active (PPDA), which means they allow the least amount of time for an opponent to be on the ball before engaging them, but only just behind us. Defensively is where they have challenges, sitting firmly in mid-table with their xG allowed, whilst also having the highest average xG allowed per shot – so in other words, of every team in the Premier League, Chelsea do give their opposition high-quality chances.

So we have a bit of a picture here from the whole season. But what has Rosenior done for himself in the 11 or so games he’s managed for them? Well, apparently, he’s given more reigns to Andrey Santos to do the defensive midfield work, which means Caicedo can go hunting for the ball and pop up across different areas of the pitch with more regularity. Enzo Fernandez no longer sits alongside him, but in the left half-space. The teams do, apparently, also have less structure about them compared to Maresca, in which it was seen as a bit of a millstone around their neck at times. They appear to be good in patches, but I found what Merse said a couple of weeks back interesting on Sky Sports – that they couldn’t string a 90-minute match together. I don’t want to say that feels similar to us, because it clearly isn’t, but at times in 2026 so far, it has felt as though we kind of just give up first halves, expecting to then do the business in the second. That’s not how you qualify for the Champions League in Chelsea’s case, and it’s certainly not how you win a league title in ours, so my hope is that we won’t see that this weekend like we did in the League Cup – i.e. a cagey nothing game, certainly in that first half.

In that game, however, we didn’t have to go for it. This weekend, if we want those three points, we really do.

Right, that’s enough waffle from me for one day. I’m off to do some work. You have a great Friday, and I’ll be back tomorrow when we know the possible team updates, as well as who we’ll have in the Champions League draw, which will happen this morning at some stage no doubt.