Right. Now, with the dust having well and truly settled on our Champions League progression, eyes are beginning to shift to that Cup final on Sunday. Sure, we could probably take a moment to laugh at the ‘Spurziness’ of the Tiny Totts winning their first game of 2026, only for it to be worthless as they were knocked out to Atletico, but I choose to ignore less relevant teams and focus on what Arsenal have ahead of them.

And the thing that I keep going backwards and forwards on, in my mind, is “What sort of state will this Man City team be in?”

There are obviously two schools of thought on this one:

  1. Confidence sapped, psychologically wounded, fearful of the season imploding
  2. Compartmentalising and recognising that this is the perfect game for them to show up against the current Premier League leaders.

Obviously, we all hope that it’s option A, but I was curious to see where their fans’ heads are at right now. If you watch the YouTubers, you see a very arrogant fanbase that just talk about how City are inevitable, how they have the muscle memory, how it is always ‘in the bag’, but some might say that about the Arsenal fans. In reality, your average Arsenal fan is like me: Nervous, worried, doesn’t want to jinx anything. We’re not all YouTubers vying for clicks with extreme opinions.

But can the same be said for City fans?

Well, here are the first few comments on a thread that I read this morning for City fans:

Don’t care how, just get us a win and that trophy. Going to have to fight for this.

and:

A must win in an otherwise awful campaign of uninspired football.

and:

100% right mate it’s been fuckin atrocious

Now, I think it is fair to say that those fans are probably reacting in the wake of being knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid, but I guess if you’re looking at it from their perspective, they’ve just seen their side go away to a Real Madrid who they expected to beat up on, plus back-to-back draws in the Premier League. In their last six home games, they have won three and drawn three, and in their last six away games, it is two wins, three draws and one defeat. In the thread I mentioned above, there are also comments like “First time going to Wembley expecting us to lose” and “We won’t win on Sunday, Arsenal are too physical, and our players will run off hiding”. I have to say, it’s a real surprise to see this level of apprehension from a fanbase who have pretty much had it their own way for trophies in the last seven-odd years.

I welcome it at this moment in time, but I’m also wary of the fact that we haven’t exactly been sparkling, with our games being more attritional than anything else. In the game at The Emirates, City scored first, scored early, after we made a couple of mistakes to set Haaland in behind. I doubt we’ll be as open and attacking as we were that day when it was 0-0, but I do wonder what Arteta has in store. We’ll find out tomorrow on team news, but he has lots of options to switch it up from even the game on Tuesday, so it will be fascinating to see what he says about the press conference tomorrow.

I wonder also if he’ll be a lot more jovial about this one, too. After all, this is selection number four of four for the trophies we want to win. All of us want it, we want to lay down a marker, we also don’t want to hear the media narrative about how “now the wobble begins” after a loss to City at Wembley, that we have an extended period of listening to because of internationals and the FA Cup after that. But in reality, even if we lose on Sunday, if we right ourselves by the time Southampton, Sporting Lisbon and Bournemouth come around, then we could still be on for a glorious season if things keep ticking over as they have done already.

Their fans are talking about how Pep doesn’t seem to know his best team, which I think is interesting given that it has, for so many seasons, been the thing that has made them unpredictable. We’ve also heard a lot about him ‘saving’ players for the second half of the season; I’m pretty sure that happened with Foden and/or Grealish for a few seasons. But now they need a settled side that Pep knows and can rely on; that side does appear, by the sounds of a few of them, to be involving Cherki, who I will admit impresses me whenever I see him play.

I wonder if, in that ‘saving players’ regard, we’re seeing the fruits of such an approach with Eze? He has played well in the last three matches, I thought, with the goal on Tuesday night being a cherry on top of the performance, and there’s been lots of talk about how he really comes alive in the back end of the season. Whether or not Arteta has planned this by action or design, I’m not so sure, though. Were Odegaard not struggling for fitness, I’m not sure Eze would have been given the games he has of late to build up the head of steam he now has. Hey, sometimes you need a little bit of fortune dressed as misfortune to allow you to stumble upon something. We all saw how the introduction of Emile Smith Rowe in Arteta’s first season effectively salvaged something for the manager over that Christmas period and that win at home to Chelsea. That came about because he had no other options, and Emile was the ‘Hail Mary’ that paid off. Eze is not that; the whole “save him for the Spring” could be revisionism, but if it works, none of us will give a flying fudge, will we?

Right, I’ll leave it there for today, I think. Have yourselves a great Thursday and I’ll be back tomorrow as the countdown to the big weekend intensifies even more.