With Arsenal doing their job on Saturday, having already seen the women beat the Scum and Man City lose away to Villa, yesterday was a day to enjoy a bit of hate-watch TV. And although Liverpool won, the fact it was Brighton on the other end is probably a good thing for us. Hürzeler is a really dislikable bloke, so having him sad is always a good thing, and yesterday he trotted out the same line that he did after we played them at the Amex last year:

In the second half, and also a lot of phases in the first half, only one team was playing and trying to win

What a twat. When you’re winning in a game of football like Liverpool were, you don’t commit bodies forward in phases of play where you don’t need to. Honestly, as a club, I have no main beef with Brighton, but he’s a bit of a knob, and it makes me more hopeful that this purple patch they are going through comes back to the mean of results. There’s no doubt they’re running hot; they’ve scored 23 goals from an xG of 14.91, and have an xG goal differential of 8.09. That’s miles more than any other team, even City on 3.88, so what is happening with Brighton at the moment is that everything they touch turns to goals.

It was the same against us, when you think about it, with the goals they scored. There’s no doubt they were deserved winners; there’s no doubt we played crap, but their first goal is one of those that Pascal Gross probably scores one in 10 of them if he tries that again. The same with their second goal that the Greek lad got. Then you see stuff like that shot from the halfway line they had last week, or the fact Lewis Dunk did a similar wonder strike towards the start of the season. I’m not saying they don’t deserve to win these games, but I am saying that I do think their hot streak in terms of those goals going in will readdress itself over the coming months. They’ll still be up there; they’ll still be a force to be reckoned with, but you can’t tell me they’re going to finish the season with 109 goals, because that’s what they’ve been trending on up until this point.

One team that definitely won’t be up there is Man United, who looked massively cooked last night against Bournemouth on their own ground. Surely United fans couldn’t have seen this coming? They’ve made this mistake before, hiring the caretaker manager, so this has been in the post last season. People questioned whether they’d be challenging for the title, but that was always going to be a fool’s opinion; they rode the crest of a wave for Carrick’s arrival, then when they weren’t playing one game a week, the poor design of the squad has been found out, as well as the tactical knowledge of the manager – which has players like their captain openly questioning him in public. United continue to be a hilarious hot mess, and as an Arsenal fan who lived through football in the 90s and 2000s, this is delicious to see. Long may it continue, although I suspect for Carrick that won’t be the case.

As for us, we’ve got the small matter of a trip to Highbury to face off against Fleetwood tomorrow, and as James said yesterday on the Same Old Arsenal podcast yesterday, they’re hardly in the best run of form. They’re currently 18th in League Two, having played 13, lost five and drawn five, and on Saturday they lost away to Exeter City 2-1. They also lost their game before that to Cheltenham 4-2, and according to WhoScored, their playing style is that of a team that takes long shots, attempts crosses often, controls the game in the opposition half, attacks through the middle, and tries to play possession football. There’s limited data I can find on them, but the little I have is that they are not a low block team, so hopefully they come and have a go at us tomorrow, because if they do, then we could be in for a treat of a football match.

As I said on the pod yesterday too, to be fair to them, I thought Everton also tried to come out and play a bit. Now, I don’t know how much of that was down to game state; we’d scored early so any potential plans to frustrate us kind of went out the window after we’d gone ahead early, but I like to think that Moyes wasn’t expecting to go full Sean Dyche on proceedings on Saturday, and I hope the Fleetwood manager Matt Lawlor decides that there’s no benefit in setting up to frustrate. Let’s have a bit of a football match play out tomorrow.

And hopefully Arteta will give us some mass rotation. I’ll do my predicted lineup tomorrow, but I think it must be inevitable that several key players are going to be asked to stay at home. Rice, Big Gabi, Odegaard – you guys need not even get on the bus. Get yer feet up at home and watch it on Sky Sports.

That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow, and before then, I’ll pen some match preview thoughts tomorrow based on what we hear from Arteta today in some kind of pre-match press conference.

See you in the morrow. Have a good one.