It’s a wet and windy Friday in London. If they didn’t earn thousands of pounds literally per hour, I’d almost feel sorry for the players going out and training in this up and down the land. But they gotta do their job, like all of us do. And whilst this (blogging) isn’t exactly a ‘job’ (certainly not one I make any real money from) per say, I still gotta do what I wanna do in the shape of talking about today’s installment of The Arsenal in my brain.

And as is my wont these days, I’m minded to go snooping. Snooping on rival fan forum pages ahead of our latest visit to a tough away ground, to see how they are feeling. Yesterday I did a bit of back-of-a-fag-packet style number crunching on what sort of tactical approach Forest might deliver up against us, but today it’s all about opinions. And let’s kick off with those Forest fans.

There’s the usual ‘we’ll win’ stuff, but it tends to err on the side of caution, with comments like “scrappy 1-0 win”, or “hard-fought 1-0” type stuff. But there’s plenty more “I can’t see how we win this”, or even Forest fans talking about how they just want to see Forest score before Christmas! So It’s hardly a massively positive forum I visited this morning. It’s only been three games at home from each team, but they haven’t scored yet, they’ve conceded two, and only the Scum have a worse record at home. As I mentioned yesterday, their home form against us is pretty good, so personally I could see this being tough and us conceding Forest’s first home game of the season, so then it becomes whether we can deliver two or more goals to ensure the three points, because if their fans’ response is anything to go by, two goals probably see’s us win the game.

The pundits kind of agree with me. Lewis Jones on Sky Sports thinks that Forest’s underlying numbers have them as a team who should be outperforming their goal output. Eventually the underlying numbers tend to eek out the reality (if that is true, it is interesting seeing him talking about how City’s underlying numbers are unsustainable, as they should probably have had collected around seven fewer points than they have this season).

Oliver Kay in The Athletic has us as a narrow 1-0 win, saying that their performances have been good this season, even if the results haven’t always gone their way. Chris Sutton is more bullish and going for a 3-0 win to The Arsenal, but I just don’t see it, because none of the games against them have been anywhere near as comfortable on the City Ground and I think they’ll be up for an upset on the main event Sunday game. He cites the Lille game as an example of Arsenal playing well and having a bit of confidence and momentum going their way, and I guess resting some of our attacking creative players for most of the game in midweek might be a really good thing for us, but I’m still skeptical that we can make it that comfortable. The AI prediction on the BBC suggests a more reasonable 2-1. Merson too, has gone for a more reasonable, albeit quite tetchy, 1-0 to The Arsenal, and WhoScored have crunched the numbers for a 2-1 win for us.

So from that perspective it’s looking good. I always like seeing what these more neutral parties say about the game, because you can usually take it and work out a mean average of what is likely to happen, even if we all know that occasionally there is a deviation from the mean. The Brighton game is a classic example of that; I don’t think anybody, even the most die-hard Brighton fan, would have told you they truly believed they’d beat us 3-0. But then again sometimes the stars align, because as good as Brighton were, as crap as we were, they still scored two absolute worldies from outside of the box to make life difficult for us in that first half. Sometimes players pull something out of nowhere and given Dan Ndoye is having at last an average of just under three shots per game, you can’t legislate for one come right out of the centre of the laces and hitting the postage stamp, can you?

We’ll get more ahead of this one from the two managers today, for which I’ll have a look at tomorrow, but for now, I shall wish you all the best and be back when we can see what both Arteta and Glasner say about both team news, but the approach of both sides on Sunday.