But this was a game that should have been seen out completely, and I think Arteta will have some words to say to his team about the second half, because whilst the first half was pretty flawless, the second half certainly didn’t have that about it. And yet, I never really felt like we were in any real danger of dropping any points. Sure, Slavia picked up in the second half and ended up beating us on xG, total shots, and shots on target, but it always felt like we were keeping them at arm’s length. I think the fact that they scored on 90 minutes and not somewhere around the 70 mark probably also helped.

We ultimately did keep them at arm’s length, managed to get minutes into some players who haven’t played as much this season, and we also got some good performances from them:

Hincapie

Not played a ton because of injury, on commentary they said it was only his second start this season, and he offered us a different perspective on that left-back role. I thought he did well on the overlap, got forward and overlapped like a more traditional left-back, which also helped when Eze was drifting in field.

Zubimendi

He’ll be really pleased with his night’s work, because I thought he was excellent. Won headers, won duels, kept the ball well, covered ground, looked impressive. It’s the kind of performance that makes you wonder whether or not he should also get the nod at the weekend too.

Merino

Played centrally, looked tidy all over the pitch, grabbed an assist, got a few shots off and had a decent game. Uncharacteristically headed over from close range from a Gyokeres nod back, but was an awkward position so I’ll give him a break there.

Eze

Again, I really liked what he did last night. Was good on the ball, took his man on well, seemed to be linking up quite nicely with Big Vik, and I suspect the reason he only got 60 minutes was because he’s been carrying a knock, as Arteta had mentioned at the weekend. It was a tidy performance that I would say has helped his chances of competing with Tzolis a bit more than when he was given the chance at Forest, for example.

Gyokeres

Man of the match performance. This is what we thought we were getting when we signed him. We thought we would see this every week: Strong, physical, held off his man, clinical finish that was very impressive given the angle and the bodies closing in on him. He bagged an assist as well as a goal, and as opposed to an easy pass assist, this one was warranted. Held his man off, was strong, then played a very clever over-the-shoulder hook to set up Noni for the opener within the first ten minutes.

And so to Noni, who missed out on the man-of-the-match award by a hair’s breadth, I reckon. I thought he had an excellent game. Had his fullback on toast all night; twisting, turning, finding space, delivering good balls in, and for a guy who sometimes can infuriate with his finishing, he slotted through the keeper’s legs to put us one up as if he’s been doing this his whole career. We obviously know different. But this is EXACTLY what we all hoped for when Saka picked up his injury. We need the next man up to deliver end product and worry defences, and Madueke is now putting together a run of form that has us hoping that he will fill the void and we won’t notice as much that the Starboy is out. I make that Forest away, Everton at home, Lille at home and last night – all games in which he has been brilliant. And I think he was good in the most part in the Liverpool game last weekend too. He’s an in-form guy and given that so many of us questioned the signing, this is really positive to see, because without him it’s going to be difficult to compete for the title given how much we need to spread the goals around.

I guess the one thing that you’d probablygo “hmmm….could have done without that” is that Declan Rice played the full 90. Arteta was asked about it afterwards and just kind of dismissive about it, simply saying:

“The game required it, and he was also rested against Fleetwood. He had a week to recover before Liverpool, it’s his second game in a week and we expect our players to be able to do that”

I mean, I get it, of course he’s right, Rice came through unscathed and put in another solid performance, but I remember a quote from Mikel a few years back where he said that Messi and Ronaldo played 50 – 60 games for like 10 seasons, so if players like Saka want to get to that level, they need to be prepared to play the volume of games. I’m sure they both did, but I bet there were periods of the season, certainly ingames, where they were very much just walking around and conserving their energy. Rice’s game is all action. He covers every blade of grass. He’s a highly tuned machine, but you can’t just run that machine hot for 200,000 miles. You do need to recognise that at times we’re going to need to give him a break. Hey, Mikel has access to more data than me, he has a team of professionals at his disposal, he knows far more than I ever will about playing at the top level, and in midfield. But I just worry that we do need to preserve Dec’s legs as much as possible. I’m not sure how much we do that by not just taking him off for the last 20 – 30.

Anyway, perhaps it is ‘no harm, no foul’ and we’ll just see another solid performance against Hull on Saturday. Which, by the way, is another ‘three games in seven days’ situation. But that’s another gripe for another day.

It’s a weird one though, because you don’t really do that with central defenders. They’re normally just in or out. It’s not like with midfielders or attackers, where after a long injury, you might give them 10 minutes, then 20 – 30, then maybe a half, then 60, etc. With central defenders, they are just in or out. But because of Konsa’s amazing form, I can’t really see Saliba playing tonight or starting on Saturday. After that, however, Arteta has some decisions to make. And having spent the last week or two listening (and talking) on podcasts and watching videos, etc about how well Konsa is doing and what Arteta is going to do when Saliba is back, we now have that reality. I’ll be honest, I thought we’d be able to defer this conversation until the new year. But here we are. And what a lovely position to be in.

It’s the same for midfield too, as Arteta was asked about Zubimendi last night, and he talked about how important he is and how he’s been unlucky with injury. He picked up an ankle injury earlier in the season that kept him out of the Lille game, and he had his nose broken in the Everton game, so it feels like he can’t catch a (excuse the pun) break. Mikel did say that everybody will have the chance to play, but I just wonder if it is enough game time for a guy who is at peak age and a Spanish international midfielder. IN the long run, unless he can find his way into this team, I do wonder what his long-term future is with The Arsenal. And that would be a shame. I think he’s a fantastic footballer; I think he deserves a run of games, but with Myles and Bruno seemingly first choice, I’m not sure when that is going to happen.

Maybe tonight? He has himself a chance, I guess, because Slavia Prague are a perceived ‘weaker’ opponent than many in this competition, so I do wonder if Arteta has a go at a bit of rotation. It’s funny, because we can look  a year to the day in which we played them, at their own stadium, on 4th November 2025, when we picked up a 3-0 win in the blue kit. Funny how things work like that, eh? And so we have a bit of an idea on what Arteta might do in terms of team news. On that day, it was a Bukayo Saka penalty and two Mikel Merino goals (obviously) that sealed all three points, but from a rotation point of view we also saw a fair bit of it. NOrgaard, Nwaneri and Merino up top all started, but the rest of the team was pretty much full strength, so I wonder if Arteta replicates the same approach today, i.e:

Raya

White – Konsa – Gabriel – Hincapie

Zubimendi

Eze – Merino

Madueke – Gyokeres – Tzolis

I think we’re probably more likely to see Odegaard in the middle and Eze on the left, giving Tzolis a bit of rest time given he’s only just back from injury, but if that team above did start, you’d hope we have enough about us to get three points on the ground in which we dominated pretty much all of the stats a year ago.

But no two games are the same, they will perhaps have learned a bit about us, we will need to be on it and I think the Fleetwood result showed us that we have to do our jobs and do it well, because if you rotate and you’re even the slightest bit off your game, you get punished by any opponent in this competition.

But having just beaten Liverpool at Anfield, the boys will be feeling confident, hopefully bullish, and I am expecting us to go and do the business tonight. We kind of have to, given that our next two games are really tough ones against Dortmund and Real Madrid. In fact, we’re about to go into a bit of a ‘Death Run’ when it comes to some of our upcoming fixtures, playing those teams wedged in between games against Newcastle away, City at home, Brentford away and then the Scum away too. So the next month is going to be quite the challenge – and you can see why Arteta is saying that we’re going to need everybody, because it feels like he’s going to have to undertake a bit of rotation to keep players fresh for these big games. So an opportunity to get minutes into the legs of the likes of Merino, Zubimendi and Gyokeres from the start feels like it’s something we should absolutely be doing. Whether Mikel undertakes a larger-scale rotation, however, remains to be seen.

The good news is that, Saka aside, we seem to be back to a practically fully fit squad, which is good timing ahead of the aforementioned Death Run. Let’s hope they can all stay fit and we can get through this next period with a bunch of wins that can set us up for the remainder of this season.

Back tomorrow with some post-Slavia thoughts.

Anyway, as fun as it would be to keep basking in the victory of that important win in the context of our Premier League title defence, there’s no ability to spend too much time enjoying it if you’re Arteta and his team, as tomorrow night we travel to Slavia Prague to take on the current Czech champions. They are top of their domestic league, having not lost yet, and will feel somewhat bullish about their chances of getting something against an Arsenal side that seems to only play away games these days.

Whilst their domestic form is impressive, their Champions League form is the opposite; they’ve played three, lost at home to Lens 3-2, lost away to Sabah 2-0, then away to Fenerbahce they picked up a 2-2 draw. I watched the highlights of that 2-2 draw and Fener took the lead on four minutes with a bit of a worldie, then on 10 minutes, Greenwood bagged the second, and they must have thought they were going to serve up an absolute pasting. Then a familiar face, Matteo Guendouzi, handed them a lifeline with a shocking bit of defending, before a 90th-minute equaliser got them a point. On the day and based on the results, it kind of looks like a fair result, and the goal itself was a rapid counter. That’s probably what they’ll be looking for tomorrow night.

What I’m looking for is obviously three points to The Arsenal, but I think I also want to see a bit of rotation. With all due respect to Slavia, the depth and quality of our squad are such that we should be able to shift the team around a bit, with some of those Arsenal players having put in a decent shift against Liverpool. Could we get away with having Rice sit on the bench at the start? Could we see Eze, White, Mosquera, Gyokeres? Maybe a Merino? I’ll do more of a predicted line-up in tomorrow’s preview blog, but for me I think where I’ve been pleased with Arteta’s selection decisions so far this season is when we’ve found ourselves playing these types of midweek games. When you are hoping to play north of 50 games in a season, you need to be able to draw on all available resources, and I think we’ve seen signs that Arteta will do that.

Will that extend to somebody like Max Dowman, for example? Amanda said that on last night’s Same Old Arsenal podcast, and at first I was thinking about dismissing that as an option because of his age. But as we’ve all been talking about for long enough, having seen the likes of Wilshere and Fabregas arrive on the Arsenal scene, if you’re good enough, you’re old enough. Not only that, but we want to ensure that Madueke is fit and firing on all cylinders in the Premier League, given Max still has to serve two of the ridiculous three-match bans that he’s on, following his red at Fleetwood. He can play in the Champions League, so preserving Noni for Hull at the weekend feels like an eminently sensible move to me.

It’s the same logic for Rice, too, because he was imperious against Liverpool. He’d had a week off, he looked supercharged, and if we can even just have him on the bench and not need him against Slavia tomorrow, then happy days. Let’s not forget how stocked our midfield is; Myles is coming on leaps and bounds, but in Merino and Zubimendi we have two World Cup winners in the squad who can’t get a start. This feels like the sort of game that you’d put them in, I think. You need to be able to use the full extent of our squad and, for Zubi in particular, it just feels like he hasn’t been given enough of a crack to win his place back just yet.

We’ll know more about team news this evening, but with Arsenal currently in seventh in the table and looking to finish as high up as possible to get that favourable draw, you’d think that we need a decent win tomorrow night. Getting three points puts us on ten from a possible 12; I think it probably knocks us up a place or two at the halfway stage of the Group phase, so we need to ensure that there can be no Fleetwood-shaped slip-ups. Yes, we need rotation, but Arteta needs to find the balance, because mass rotation leads to a little less security. Players who haven’t played together misplace passes; there aren’t the same runs as those who are regularly on the pitch for the first time, and we get the kind of stodgy play that we saw in the League Cup. There’s a balance to be struck.

Right, that’ll do me for today, I think. Plenty for us to ponder ahead of the team travelling out today. Let’s just hope the team news is relatively positive.

Back tomorrow with a match preview.

Arsenal went up to Anfield, a place that is traditionally a painful experience; they went to a ground that normally sees the home fans come away happy, and us trudge home; they went to the North West, where we don’t usually fare too brightly, and came away with all three points.

That was the kind of performance where Champions can be made.

Arteta names what is arguably right now the strongest XI we have with Saliba and Saka injured, and in came Tzolis and Bruno alongside the usual familiar faces. This was an Arsenal side that was intent on stamping their authority on a Liverpool side under Iraola that is still building its identity. Ours is already forged; we have a side which has the defensive foundations that make any opponent feel a little helpless at times in terms of their chance creation. And despite the fact that Liverpool hit the bar (I think that was a cross rather than a shot from Wirtz), and despite the fact that they probably got a good shout for a penalty (Timber was silly there, and we can count ourselves fortunate), Arsenal limited Liverpool to zero shots on target. At their own gaff. Marvellous stuff.

I’d call this game a ‘compelling’ one, rather than one that was particularly exciting. But why would we make it one that is end-to-end? That’s what Liverpool would want. Instead, what we want to do is control the margins, the key moments, reduce as many incidents as possible, and when you can limit your opponents’ attempts on goal to zero, you’re doing that.

In the moment, it didn’t feel like it; however, Liverpool still created a lot of chances. They had an xG of 1.05, 17 shots on goal, and a lot more of the ball in terms of possession and passing. So as I was watching it all unfold, I have to admit that it didn’t feel like one of those games that would be comfortable. But I guess that’s the point. The fact we haven’t won there in 14 years shows just how difficult a place it is to go, and getting three points as well as it being ticked off our away day list is quite impressive.

That’s our season so far in the Premier League, however, eight wins from nine to put us clear of 115 Charges FC is a very impressive return. We’re also six clear of third-place Brighton, eight clear of Chelsea, nine clear of Liverpool, and heck, even the Tiny Totts have only got half of the points we’ve got. We’re on pace for a 101-point season at this rate. We won’t get to that, of course, but we’ve kicked off the defence of our title in superb fashion, and have already knocked off Villa Park, The Amex and Anfield from our tough away grounds list.

And I thought yesterday we started off looking every bit the champions. And wouldn’t you just know it, that the hero yesterday was the somewhat villain in midweek against Fleetwood in midweek, as Kai Havertz crept in at the back post to slot home Rice’s superbly weighted ball into the Corridor of Uncertainty to home the winner early on. Kai said afterwards that Dec had done the hard work for him and it’s hard to disagree; it was another action from Rice which underlined his man-of-the-match performance and showed why he is hands down the best midfielder in the Premier League right now. That was his assist; it was his big chance created, he also had a shot on target, as well as one off target, and 38 of 44 passes. But he did his duty defensively too, with nine defensive contributions, three tackles, two clearances, and three ball recoveries. He does his job all over the pitch, and this morning we have to be thankful that Arteta worked so hard to bring him to The Arsenal. We wouldn’t be the same team without him.

I thought everyone did their job; however, with good performances from all of the back line, Noni was spritely, although if you listen to the nonsense of Van Dijk you’d think he should have been sent off. Not for me; if that’s a headbutt, then I’m a monkey’s uncle, because Mac Allister made the biggest meal of what was minimal contact and should be embarrassed by his reaction this morning. No matter, however, because Arsenal did their job and ensured that Liverpool, and especially Isak, were kept out. Which means we’re getting to the quarter point in the season, and we’ve only conceded five goals so far. The next best is Brighton, who have conceded seven, but I suspect they are running a bit hot right now. Let’s see if that can be maintained into 2027. If it does, fair play to them, but with European football properly kicking in, they’ll have to manage a gruelling schedule. We will too, but we’ve got experience in this, and given how good our defence has been for the last three or four seasons, you can’t say that we are running hot – our back line is just that good.

And ‘good’ is the right word for today, because that win last night certainly felt like it was that – in abundance. We were good value for when we went ahead; we had to weather an inevitable storm as Liverpool tried to get back into the game, but we were value for what we got out of the game, and we have a monkey off our back after that win up there. Today is a good day. Plus, seeing some of the salty Liverpool fans moaning this morning is rather amusing, because I had a comment on the site saying that because of the Conor Bradley stuff last season at our place, they were going to be all over us. Nope. Try again.

It was a happy day, it was a fine day, it means that Fleetwood is a distant memory, which is just the tonic. For some more bonus watching, check Mikel’s response on the official site here.

Right, that’s it from me for today. I’ll be back later on with the guys for a Same Old Arsenal pod this evening. Until then, enjoy your Monday.

1. The NLD away – just hate the stakes, even when they are shit and we’ve beaten them on their own ground for the last couple of seasons
2. The Emptihad – because, like Anfield, we just never win there, and it’s annoying

I guess the upside is that City losing yesterday means that whatever today’s result, we won’t really have lost any ground this weekend. City’s defeat means we are level on points with them, and Brighton’s beating of them – led by one manager fast becoming unbearable and certainly hypocritical after last weekend’s moan about Liverpool not coming to play – was good, but doesn’t put them above us in the league. Liverpool can cut the gap with us to three points with a win, but again, we’d still have three points on them. So as we rapidly approach the quarter-season mark, we’re in good shape.

Except we know that from an attacking point of view, maybe not so much, and today is a day to try to prove that we don’t have too much to worry about. Both Kay and Viktor were poor against Fleetwood, Kai’s form in general hasn’t been great, and Gyokeres’ technical deficiencies are there for everyone to see. So we’ve leaned on other players to fill the goalscoring void, and today might well be the same. I’d even go as far as to say it will have to be the same, because I can’t see either of our attackers getting tons of chances and making their mark against a Liverpool defence that has only conceded eight goals this season. Only us and Brighton are better than that.

I also think that Iraola is going to try to match Slot’s blueprint from last season at Anfield against us; i.e., let’s have a game in which two teams that respect each other cancel each other out. This game feels like it’s probably being won by just the odd goal.

You watch this be a 5-4 stormer now.

Liverpool have the weapons for that. Isak always scores against us, he always causes us problems, and he’ll be flanked by in-form Gakpo and new boy Barcola. That’s quite an expensively assembled front line, up against our robust and experienced back line. And you feel as though the tale of this match later is going to be written based on which of those two units bests the other one. Do we remain resolute, watertight and lock Liverpool down? Or do they breach us and go on to collect what they usually do at Anfield against The Arsenal – at least a point, often three?

I wouldn’t put money on us being able to keep Liverpool at bay, although I was listening to the Arsenal Vision podcast yesterday whilst on my way to do the shopping, and Elliott was talking about how he’s been watching their games, and they haven’t been that amazing going forward. He said he’d watched the last four in all competitions and he wasn’t that impressed. I’ll have to defer to somebody that has watched more Liverpool than I have, but I thought they did a good job of getting ahead against Brighton, then just controlling the game. That’s a blueprint I suspect Iraola would love to replicate today. It’s something that we’ve seen from a lot of managers over the years; go hard and fast and high tempo, get an early goal, then control the match and force Arsenal to come out. That’s what we don’t want. We don’t have an amazing record of going on to win games when we are behind. It’s just not us. We prefer to get ahead, then squeeze the opponent. An early Liverpool goal would possibly be curtains for us, because we’d have to come out, and they’d be primed to hit us in a transitional game.

It is interesting, though, because despite the fact they have what looks like a very potent attacking side, Liverpool have only scored 11 goals this season. We have two more. So whilst pundits might try to big this up as an ‘attack versus defence’ game, the numbers don’t really suggest that.

I’m not stupid enough to think that they won’t get a lot of chances today, though. So we’ll need to make sure we win that midfield battle and control the centre of the park, because if we remain strong at the back when they have the ball, if we control the midfield, we might be able to avoid Liverpool’s pace on the counter. In terms of what team I would therefore put out, I am thinking this one might be the best:

Raya

Timber – Konsa – Gabriel – Calafiori

MLS

Odegaard – Rice

Madueke – Havertz – Eze

Calafiori and Eze still need to work on their connections, and I also think we need to see that from Havertz and Eze too, but I’ve gone with Myles because of his ball-carrying ability. I just think that in the middle of the park, if this game is to be a cagey and tightly contested one with pressing, Myles is the kind of press-resistant player that can wriggle out of tight spaces and help us to get Liverpool out of shape and on the back foot. On the attack, I don’t think you want to chuck Tzolis straight back in, but having him as a sub option would be good, and it’s an opportunity for Eze to build a little more momentum with a good performance. With the Greek now back and training, Eze needs a good performance today to keep him on the pitch ahead of Tzolis, so I hope we get the good version of Eze that shows up in big games. The other decision which will cause an eyebrow or two from one or two of you lovely readers, is the inclusion of Havertz over Big Vik. I know Havertz sucked at Fleetwood, but in these types of games, he offers more, and I worry that Gyokeres on the pitch against Van Dijk and Jacquet just seems him isolated, lost in the game, unfindable and therefore rendered rather redundant. Havertz may have forgotten where the goal is, but he will be more of an option on the ball than the Swede.

And we need every player to deliver today. This ground is a curse for us, has been for more of my lifetime, so I’m not especially confident. But if we have every man showing up, giving us a minimum of seven or eight out of ten, I think we win this game.

Back tomorrow for a debrief/post-mortem. See you then.

Anyway, we must make do with what we’ve got, and what we’ve got today is team news, for which both managers have spoken and we have a little more insight on where the teams are. Not a lot, but a little, and we know that Arteta would not be drawn on whether Noni is actually fit for tomorrow. Can you imagine if he’s not?? Who the heck are we going to play right wing? There’s no Saka, Dowman’s red card has been upheld (more on that in a tick), Tzolis has only just returned to training, and Eze is surely going to start on the left. So who the heck takes that spot if Noni isn’t fit?

It’s Merino, isn’t it? Man is a Swiss Army knife, so we might as well see if he can be wheeled out in another position he immediately excels at.

I think the reality is that Noni will be fine. Arteta was bigging him up yesterday in his press conference, so I suspect he’ll be fit and able to play tomorrow, and we’ll need him to continue his decent run of form too. He scored when he came on against Forest for our winner; he was good against Everton, so I’m hoping that whilst our strikers are out of form, that’s one guy who is very much in it.

Let’s talk about the Dowman stuff then, shall we? I thought what Arteta said was really good. He’s a kid, we know we have to protect him, Arteta spoke about how they were talking before about the reaction he gave whilst on England duty, and how that was what fueled his response the other night. But he also talked about how Max needs to learn, about how we need to treat him with respect, but that he isn’t in Disneyland here; this is elite football and the best league in the entire world. What Max is doing is amazing, and Arteta said it, but we also need to treat him like one of the first team, because he is, and he has fellow professionals around him that need to see that he only gets a certain level of special treatment.

I really like that. We need to protect him, nurture him, let him develop, but we also need to hold him to the high-foggin standards that the rest of the first team have.

The other team news is that they don’t know on whether Saka will be back before the next international break, and that there is another scan that is needed. I suspect that’s optimistic, because it’s 12th November when England play Croatia and then Spain three days later. Arsenal played Bayern on 21st October, we were told unofficially that it’s between six-to-eight weeks. the 12th October, on more realistically the 16th October when the matches have finished, puts him at 26 days and just under four weeks out. I suspect we’re talking about the Christmas period for Saka’s return. At best.

He of course also said positive things about Liverpool challenging for the title, about facing his old pal Andoni Iraola, as well as the problems we’ve had at Anfield, but for me there wasn’t really too much there to sink your teeth into, or analyse, so I think I’ll gloss over those comments in made in response to those questions. But I do think we need to acknowledge that Liverpool will be up there this season. Iraloa knows what he’s doing, he’s starting to get a tune out of his players, and the 2-0 win over Brighton last weekend was a positive step for them after a stuttering start to their home form. They should probably be favourites this weekend for this one, given that result and how Isak always seems to score against us, so I do think we’re up for a tough afternoon. He’s in form, is second in the league for goals behind Haaland, and the fact he’s waaaaay down the list for total shots he takes (15 players have all taken more shots in the league than Isak on 20 shots – Haaland has had 10 more already) shows that he is a prolific guy who will take any chance he’s given.

As for the rest of the Liverpool team, the team news from Iraola was that Munoz and Szoboszlai are at the chance’ stage, which I think means they make the squad. It sounds like a place on the bench for them, but you never know, because we’ve had experience of these managers ourselves in Arteta and his Havertz stuff. We all thought Havertz was out for ages after the international break, then ‘poof’, he appears on the starting XI team sheet for Leeds at home. So I’m not going to be making any expectations. And besides, they have enough quality in attack to hurt us without him, as Gakpo appears to be playing well, I’ve mentioned Isak already, plus you have Barcola starting to settle in. This is going to be a streth for our back line.

The weird thing is, the attacking numbers don’t suggest it as much. Liverpool are currently ninth in the table for goals scored. They are eighth for xG, so the quality of chances they’ve been getting have not been amazing. That might also be explained by the fact they’re fourth in terms of volumes of shots taken; so it tells me they’re having pops from distance and maybe have found it difficult to get in behind teams so far this season. Their shot conversion puts them 13th in the Premier League; in other words, they are having lots of shots, probably from distance, but they aren’t converting them, which you’d expect if a side is being a little more speculative.

From a pressing and running perspective – something synonymous with Iraola teams – they’ve got the fourth-highest starting distance in the Premier League in average; so they are playing with a higher line to squeeze their opponents. They’re also mid table when it comes to 10+ passes being strung together; usually that means a team that just wants to go back to front quickly and directly. So it feels like we’re going to see a Liverpool team who wants to play a highly pressing line, and get to goal as quick as possible as soon as they win the ball. They’re top of the table on direct attacks, just behind us, so that backs it up.

So we’re starting to get a bit of a picture of what’s in store for us, but I’ll save any more thoughts on what we need to do until the match preview tomorrow. So for now, have a good one, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Ciao.

I hope that’s the same for the players, for which we’ll find out more today from the manager, and I suspect he’ll also talk about the Dowman card. The fact the club appealed it probably shows that whilst Arteta was pretty surly-looking when he exchanged words with Max on the night, he will have softened his view significantly since then. I wonder if he’ll be asked – or if he volunteers – to talk about it and say he thought it was something else. To be fair to Arteta, when I first saw it, I thought “he’s off – kicking out at a player on the ground”, but then you watch it again, and it’s hardly a kick, plus the challenge that goes in on him and earns nothing for the player is frankly ludicrous.

But that’s the game, unfortunately, and until the authorities get off their arses and do something, we’re doomed to continue to live in a world where spitting at somebody carries the same offence as breaking somebody’s leg and potentially endangering the rest of their career.

Max won’t be available for Liverpool, Hull or Newcastle, and given that we know that Saka is going to be out for a while, he is a definite option that would have got minutes, had he been available. Not a lot we can do about it now though, so we look to Liverpool without him, which is a daunting enough task in itself.

That’s because SUUUUUUCK up there. Our last win was on 2nd September 2012, and it was NEW SIGNINGS Lukas Podolski and Santi Cazorla who scored both goals in that very weird purple and black kick. Since then we’ve suffered eight losses and eight draws, so whilst chasing that win has been elusive, there have been plenty of times in which we’ve at least picked up a point. Which is why I find myself once again pessimistic about this one on Sunday, as I always do. But on the other side of the fence, how are they feeling?

I had a little look, and this is interesting, because unlike some of the teams down there or in mid-table, the talk is all about how they are playing and how they recognise this will be a tough game. When you visit a Sunderland, Forest, Newcastle or Villa forum, it’s all subjective crap like “I hate Arteta” or “Those cocky Cockneys need to get it” and other such nonsense. But the forum pages I’ve looked at are Liverpool fans focused on the best attacking lineup, how to counter our physicality, with a few smatterings of “I’d probably take a draw at this stage in the season”.

Liverpool has always represented a tough place to go, in my whole football-supporting life, and it will prove again to be so on Sunday.

As for the pundits, well, we’ve got Chris Sutton predicting a 1-0 to The Arsenal. But he admits it will be tight. These games always are. Lewis Jones hits us with a 1-1, citing the fact that Liverpool love a tactical foul to slow the game down. We’ve seen enough Arsenal games to know that we don’t need any excuse to slow the game down to try to make it a tactical chess battle, so I can kind of see where he’s coming from here. Sports Mole say the most likely outcome is an Arsenal 2-1, giving us a 47% chance probability of it, but I don’t buy those odds. Give it to me at The Emirates, and I’m probably nodding along in agreement, but not at Anfield, and not with our history there. Squawka has gone with a tight 1-0 win for us, but again, the reasoning I’m just not sure about. They cite the fact that there is no Ekitike, Frimpong, or Szoboszlai, but I suspect he’ll be on the bench and able to get maybe 20 minutes at least to impact the game, and we saw what he did from a free kick late last season. So I’m not as bullish.

I guess if I’m going to make the case based on some numbers (might do a bit more on that tomorrow as well), it is that Liverpool have only won one of their four home games this season, having lost one to City and drawn to Forest and Fulham. So they haven’t been spectacular on their own patch. But you just look at how up for it they were against City, and were the better team until the farcical second yellow for Gravenberch, and you can see that against the big teams who come at them, they can cut you open with the talent they have. We also know that Isak loves a goal against us and always plays well, so it’s going to be tough to contain him, Barcola, and Gakpo.

But if we want all three points, we must contain them, and you kind of feel like we’re going to have to keep a clean sheet to stand any chance of winning it. With our slightly misfiring front line, it doesn’t feel like we’re the kind of side that’s winning it 2-1 or 3-2, so my early prediction is that this game is won by a single goal. Which way that is, I don’t know.

We’ll at least know more on what the managers thinhk – kind of – by the end of today. So we will be able to have a look at that tomorrow, to which I’ll pen some thoughts on that and maybe look at some of the stats for Liverpool this season,to see what type of side they are under Iraola.

Other than that, I’ll catch you all tomorrow, and hope you have a great FRiday.

And he was, unfortunately, which isn’t great news or timely ahead of a big game at Anfield. We all know Gyokeres’ limitations; we know that ultimately he’s probably not really technically good enough to play for Arsenal in the long term, but Kai’s downturn in form is a worry to me. He has all the tools to be a quality centre forward; he’s got physicality, he’s decent in the air in the middle of the park, he can hold off defenders, he has an intelligent football brain in terms of his positioning. But sometimes he does miss the odd sitter. And it feels like when he’s out of form, he looks really out of form.

And right now, he does look really out of form. He’s certainly in a bit of a funk, and it’s not that game against Fleetwood that was isolated, because he’s had a few games like that of late. Somebody even asked me when he last had a good game for The Arsenal. I pondered that. Then I decided to have a little look at the last five games we’ve played in all competitions. At Fleetwood, he was bad. He missed chances; he didn’t seem to be able to get into good positions; he only broke the defensive line once to get in behind, and he put that shot wide when he should have scored. But what about other recent games?

Against Everton, he played around 25 minutes, having come on for Gyokeres, who FOTMOB said had a 7.5 game. Kai’s was 6.4 and included two defensive contributions, zero touches in the opposition box, and one pass into the final third. He won two of two ground duels and made four sprints. He was ok, but Arsenal were already a goal up and scored the second goal pretty much as he got on the pitch.

In Bayern, he played 68 minutes, got an xG of 0.56, which isn’t too bad given that in the Premier League this season Haaland is averaging 0.64 and Isak has 0.61. So for that game, he had decent chances in the minutes he was on the field. He just didn’t take them. He created just one chance; he only had one blocked shot, 23 touches in total, and four touches in the opponent box. That last stat doesn’t worry me as much, because he isn’t a penalty-box striker, but with one pass into the final third and one line-breaking pass, we should probably expect more from our main guy.

In the tight 1-0 win at Forest, he was bad, with again just 24 touches in 66 minutes, 0.33 expected goals, two shots off target, four touches in the opposition box, three line-breaking passes (which isn’t too bad), and one accurate cross from two. FOTMOB has him at 6.4, with only Eze on the day performing worse – and Ebs was hooked at halftime.

The final game in this run of five was the 3-0 win over Lille, in which he played 25 minutes, had 14 touches, got an assist, and created two chances; one of them was a ‘big’ chance. We’d scored just before he came on (Timber’s goal), but he and his other subs definitely made an impact and we won it comfortably. So he definitely had an impact there. But from the start? Maybe Chelsea at home on 6th September?

So when I think about the question, I’ve titled today’s blog as – Do we need to be worried about Kai Havertz’s form? – I do think the answer probably is “yes”. I don’t think we can rely on Big Vik unless he’s got a run of five to six games in a row basically playing 60 – 70 minutes each time, to get back up to a rhythm. So we need Havertz to start affecting and impacting our play more than he does. He’s been fit enough for long enough now for us to know that the previous injuries he’s had should be behind him. But as it stands, we’re going into a massive game away at Anfield, and I genuinely have no idea who should be starting. My gut tells me you have to give to Gyokeres, given he’s had two decent games before Fleetwood, and although he too wasn’t great against Fleetwood, he got his goal, so maybe there’s a bit of confidence he has there. But because we’ve seen the Swede swallowed up by decent defences, I’m still minded to lean towards Havertz. But he has to show us more than we’ve got in recent weeks. Maybe he just needs one to go in off his arse?

I wonder if Arteta will be asked about the strikers’ form in tomorrow’s press conference? I certainly would if I were a journalist in the press room. Especially after that showing of bluntness against Fleetwood, which has come relatively quickly after the lacklustre forward display against Forest. If he is asked, he’ll no doubt bat away any criticism, back and defend his players, but behind closed doors, it would surprise me if he didn’t have them in the video room today, with his coaching staff asking them questions about how we get more from them.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more thoughts as we head towards the weekend – catch you kids then.

That’s the media narrative that will be peddled today and, if we’re honest, sometimes you just have to accept it. Like Chester from The Simpsons once said:

That’s a paddlin’

NOw, of course we didn’t actually take a paddlin’, we should really have dished one out. But when you are the Champions, when you’ve just come back from the Allianz Arena and been the better team against Bayern, followed that up by swatting aside a very capable Everton team in the Premier League, anything else other than a comprehensive victory against the calibre of opposition (with all due respect) that we faced yesterday, then yeah, “A Paddlin'” is what we’re going to get today. Rival fans, the media, most of the internet – most people who aren’t stakeholders with Arsenal connections is going to be after us today. We’re the champions, and when you are, you have a target on your head bigger than any other team – even the ones that cheat.

So yeah, today is going to be one to probably avoid the mainstream media for me, because the hyperbole pitchforks will be out in force.

The reality of the situation is that we’re out of a competition that we probably could do with being out of anyway. It’s four of four in terms of priority, and if you include the Community Shield, it’s only a little bit more of a step up in prestige. If Arsenal won just that, we’re not doing an open-top bus parade. You don’t get a lot of money for winning it (£100k), so the reality of the situation is that further down the line, we’re probably glad to be out of it and have some midweeks spare for the team to have a week off. The fact that Arteta busted out O’Neill for a League debut showed how much he wanted to avoid playing any of his main stars if he possibly could, but by the end of the game it was certainly a more experienced side. So it’s not like we played the kids for the full 90.

I was surprised about Meslier starting, but I guess the thinking Arteta probably had was that the opponent in question was probably such that if you’re going to give him just one appearance this season, that’s probably it. Kepa will most likely play in the FA Cup games, and Meslier needs to at least get his chance in one match this season. Unfortunately for him, in that one match, he basically had nothing to do other than pick the ball out of the net, although the way he conceded – through the legs – does make me wonder if a better ‘keeper would have fared better.

But he didn’t; we didn’t. Fleetwood scored with basically their only shot all night, and it became a training ground exercise of attack versus defence.

Unfortunately for us, our attack was found extremely, and sorely, lacking in quality. I was pleased for Big Vik that he bundled in the scrappiest of scrappy finishes to draw us level, but that was about it for us on a night in which chance after chance was squandered, and if Arteta and his Arsenal team aren’t looking at that January window and thinking about bolstering this front line, then they’re not doing their jobs properly. Because it was pretty bad stuff. One chance that comes to mind was a cross into the box that Havertz got on the end of with a header. It wasn’t really that much behind him; it was a good height for him to angle his head properly. It should have at least hit the target. But I have this saying: when a player delivers a shocking header off target, they have a “50p head” because the angle at which the ball comes off just looks like they’ve got a hexagonal head. That was what happened to Havertz in that moment, but it happened to him all game, because he was utterly abysmal.

And almost to a man, the Arsenal players out there last night were utterly abysmal. You’d like to give the kids a break; they probably should, but Salmon was clearly hooked at halftime because it was his mistake that gave Fleetwood their only real chance. On the flanks, I thought O’Neill looked lively but ineffective, which is going to happen if you’re a kid in a disjointed team that hasn’t played together. That Arsenal team certainly looked like that. Aside from many of the half-chances we never took, sometimes the passing was wayward too, and don’t get me started on the walking-pace football. It drives me nuts. If you’re one-goal down, you should never be having four or five touches and walking the ball forward. You should have an urgency from minute one after you’ve conceded. Yet at the back, we did that thing where we just walk the ball forward. Against a team that has got their goal, who know they are going to defend all night, you can’t just let them settle into a back 10 – you’re not going to get through- and yet that’s exactly what we let them do. And that made it harder for us.

In the second half we were better thanks to the introduction of Odegaard and White, but the forward line and attacking players continued to misfire and look generally quite crap. Havertz had a number of chances, Gyokeres didn’t really do much, and then Max Dowman was finding it difficult too. And so to his sending off. This was a tough one to take, because in real time I thought, “he’s kicked out, he’s off,” and the referee duly obliged. But having seen the replay, I’m sorry, but that’s not a red. There was no ‘violence’ in the ‘violent conduct’ part of the sending off. In fact, there was more violence and intent to literally ‘make a mark’ on a player by the Fleetwood defender. And no amount of ‘he got the ball’ makes the aggression at which he went in on a 16-year-old acceptable. Arteta wouldn’t be drawn on what he said afterwards to Max, but as he walked past him and into the tunnel during the game, Arteta had a face of thunder. I suspect after he looks at the replays he’ll be a little more understanding. The defender was reckless and got away with sending another player off and not himself by the fact that he was lucky to get a it of the ball.

And that’s it, really, for our involvement in this wretched competition for another year. We suck at the League Cup. We have for literal decades. So this one will be easier to get over. But as I said right at the top of the blog, we just have to take what’s coming to us and look ahead to a really tough game at Anfield on Sunday.

Back tomorrow as we start to look at that one.

Not for me. Sorry, but in a team sport, individual awards are just a bit pointless. And ever since Thierry Henry was passed over for Pavel Nedved, I’ve always scoffed at these a bit, so congrats to Harry Kane but ‘meh’.

And I’m also not that fussed about the positions of some of our players in the ‘Top 100’ list. Like, who cares? We won the Premier League. We got to the Champions League final. Who gives a shit whether Rice finishes 99th, 40th or 15th? We all know the reality, which is that we have one of the best teams in Europe, an elite manager who has proved his credentials by lifting a big trophy last season, and one who has the hunger and desire and relentlessness to try to see us win some more this season. That’s all that matters to me.

Which is why today it is more interesting to talk about Fleetwood Town at Highbury (feels nice saying that) in the League Cup tonight. I was reminded by the official site that the last time we went to a fourth-tier side was 2012, when peak Wenger Banter Era was in full flow, and we drew 1-1 with Bradford and went out on penalties. That game sticks in my mind for nothing else other than the infamous Gervinho open goal miss that he had. I didn’t even remember their goal or our goal on the night, but that miss feels like it’s etched in my memory. It’s funny though, because having re-watched it, it isn’t as easy a chance as I remember. I mean yes, it was an open goal, and yes he was inside the six yard box, but it is fizzed across goal rather quickly. It’s no excuse, because he’s still a professional footballer who should have buried it, but I guess time and fading memory amplifies the emotion of what I felt in the moment, which was that he was an absolute clown for missing it.

Anyway, let’s move on to that unpleasantness, and focus instead on tonight’s game, in which Arteta has been quoted as saying that the team tonight needs to respect everything about this game. The ‘foggin estandards’ need to be as they always are, even though Fleetwood are a patchy side in League Two and should be a side that a rotated Arsenal team can overcome. The difference between Fleetwood and Ipswich, I think, will be that this will be a strong Fleetwood side that regularly play together. Gary O’Neil chose the last round to rotate his Ipswich side, and that meant that they didn’t quite have the connections with each other that a side that plays together does, so I am expecting the Fleetwood players to give a different and maybe more difficult game to us than Ipswich B gave us. It’ll be a bit of an old-school cup tie I reckon; it’ll be a bit cold, a bit wet, and this will be a Fleetwood Town who will be feeling like this is their cup final in front of their own fans, under the lights, with the world watching as it’s on Sky Sports this evening. So they will be up for it and putting themselves about.

Which is exactly why I’m hoping a bunch of players don’t even get on the bus. For me, the team I’d go with tonight is:

Kepa

Julienne – Salmon – Mosequera – Hincapie

Zubimendi

Eze – Merino

Dowman – Gyokeres – Harriman-Annous

I’ve gone for Hincapie because he hasn’t played, so if we can give him 60 minutes, with maybe the idea that Myles comes in for 30 or so, I think that works well. Eze I’ve chosen centrally because I’d like to see what he can offer through the middle, but I realise that this might be a bit of a gamble given that Tzolis still doesn’t seem fit. But if needed, we could play Madueke on the left and Dowman on the right at Anfield, and I just feel like Eze is the sort of player that when in his groove through back-to-back good matches and building a head of steam, he and we all benefit. So give him tonight; hope he does well, then we move on to Anfield on Sunday.

That’s why I’ve gone for Gyokeres too. He needs a goal. He needs a performance that has some end product. He’s got two assists, but most of the heavy lifting on those goals was done by the goalscorer rather than the Swede, so he will know that he needs to get on the scoresheet somehow. And doing it tonight will help. The other questions that remain is how deep Arteta rotates. Does he give the above young players all a go? I hope so. With all due respect to Fleetwood, we should be geared up with a rotated team like this to dominate possession, the chances, the territory, and the field tilt. So let’s go out there and do the business.

If we win, then there’s a place in the quarter-final, whereby we’ll probably get another bloody away game, probably to Liverpool, Chelsea, or Man City, but we’ll need to do what we gotta do this evening; then we can look at the draw if we’ve earned the right through doing ‘the basics’, as Arteta put it on his interview on the official site yesterday.

That’s pretty much it from me for today, but despite besmirching individual awards as I did at the top of today’s blog, I am going to ‘hat-tip’ Bukayo Saka for picking up a gong for his humanitarian work that he does. This for his work with BigShoe to fund operations for children in Nigeria. Lovely to see when people in a position of power and privilege can use that to help those less fortunate than many of us. Great work Starboy!

Right – I really am off this time – laters kids.

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.

I’d said in the morning yesterday as I wrote the blog that I really hoped we’d score in the first half. Not only did that happen, but we even got an early goal, as Konsa’s bundled back-post finish saw us ahead within seven minutes. Lovely. It was a scrappy set piece, and just for those rival fans and pundits who cry about us and set pieces, there you go – have some of that!

Mikel even made a joke about it afterwards, which I liked, quite a lot, actually.

On the goal itself, I think Pickford’s not going to be happy about his positioning and flapping there, because it did seem as though it was probably avoidable. Everton in the main, seemed quite organised in defence, I thought, but that one early moment set the tone, and we know that more often than not when we’re ahead, we usually go on to win the game. That’s how I felt even early on in that second half, and whilst Everton did create chances in both halves, I thought overall we looked comfortable.

Until you get that second, however, and until you get that goal that kills it, you’re always worried, so the sight of Big Gabi creeping in at the back post to nod home was grand. We’d had a scare about ten minutes earlier when he went down (Arteta also referenced that post-game), but thankfully it wasn’t as serious as it first looked, and he secured all three points.

I think that was a big win given the context of the lunchtime game, where Villa did their job and beat City, so we had to do ours to keep pace by taking all three points. We’ve done that now; we sit level with them after eight games, and we’ve got a bit of daylight separating City and us from the rest of the Premier League. If Liverpool beat Brighton at home this afternoon, it’ll be five points between the rest of the league and us after Chelsea shit the bed at home to The Scum. As an aside – remember when we were told that no European football would have Chelsea as one of the title favourites? Three defeats and a draw after eight games is not what you’d call title-winning form. The winners of the Premier League in each of the last five seasons have lost five games (us), four games, three games, five games and three games. If Chelsea are to mount this title challenge, they’re going to have to do it pretty flawlessly from here it seems.

That’s why games like yesterday are important for us, because you can’t afford to slip up against opponents like Everton on your own patch. Given how the results have gone for City in this early part of the season, it feels like even draws at home aren’t good enough, so seeing us do what we did yesterday with a relatively easy and professional approach was really positive.

We also managed to rotate a few players in as well – Merino, MLS at left back, Rice in at the six, Gyokeres up top – it was really good to see Arteta use the full extent of his squad. I thought Big Vik did ok up top. Held the ball up at times, looked lively, didn’t score and I don’t even think he had a shot, but he didn’t look lost to me. In midfield, Merino was solid enough, whilst Myles showed us just how versatile he is by slotting into that hybrid inverted left back role that got him into the team in the first place a few years back. This was a great day for the Arsenal squad. I’d have liked to have seen more minutes for Zubimendi, but as Kevin (my cmopanion for the afternoon) mentioned to me yesterday, we don’t know what he was carrying, so I guess it makes sense that he’s being eased in. With Fleetwood to come in midweek, he can get a solid 60 under his belt, then let’s see how ready he is for a starting berth from next weekend, when another big game comes around as we travel to Liverpool.

There doesn’t really feel like there’s that much more to say on this one, because everything went off without a hitch. The players proved that despite the big loss of a talisman like Saka they can step up and deliver wins, and we saw pretty much every one of them put in an impressive performance that has the pundits once again talking us up as potential champions. That’s brilliant to see.

We’ll be discussing it this morning on the Same Old Arsenal podcast in a bit, so if you fancy joining us live – or even afterwards on YouTube – you can do so here.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts – see you then.

That being said, we need to be mindful of the counter today, because I think Everton will fancy hitting us on the break with the likes of Barry and Grealish, whilst Brennan Johnson will get a bit of a hostile reception as an ex-Scummer, so I suspect he’ll be fired up for this. They also have Tyrique George, who, on the few occasions that I’ve watched him, actually looks like a fair bit of a handful. He’s a tricky player with the ball at his feet, so if we don’t see Grealish start, George will offer similar levels of threat.

But this has to be about how we impose our game on them. We are at home, we are the side expected to drive most of the impetus today; we are the ones that need to get the job done to keep pace with Cheaters FC, who play an in-form Brighton tomorrow at home and will probably get more dodgy decisions for them so they get over the line again. So we need to look after ourselves today and do our job.

And with the news coming out last night that Saka is rumoured to be out for between six and eight weeks, we have ourselves today an interview opportunity for Eze to show that he can do the business on the left wing. Tzolis can’t be far away (although I can’t see any quotes attributed to Arteta related to him yesterday), so Eze probably has today, then maybe Fleetwood away in midweek, before the Greek lad is back. He needs to build on his excellent display in Munich, and I hope we see some of the best from him today.

You’d assume Noni will therefore reprise a more career-familiar role at right wing, and I’m intrigued to see how he gets on now. He has basically been given the keys to the car now that Saka is out, and whilst Dowman is an option and was discussed in the press conference yesterday, I don’t see Arteta not giving Noni a run, so he needs to prove his value. His goal against Forest will have given him a lot of hope; his performance against Munich was ok/good, but now he knows he will play regularly. We need to see him step up. Because he’s going to be the main man basically until Christmas now. Use this to prove your value, Noni.

So with that in mind, my gut feel on the team news today is:

Raya

White – Konsa – Gabriel – Calafiori

Bruno

Odegaard – Rice

Madueke – Havertz – Eze

I do wonder if Arteta will shuffle his deck a little bit, but I landed on a relatively unchanged team because I think he makes a lot of changes for Fleetwood next week. The one I’d be most unsure of is having Bruno in there instead of Myles, but I think that Myles plays at Fleetwood; I think Hincapie, Mosquera, Zubimendi, MLS, Merino, Dowman, Gyokeres – all get starts and minutes in that game. Which means he can keep his main team from Bayern on from the start. I have a question on Havertz, but I think he starts this one again, because I think he is Arteta’s ‘guy’. Big Vik had his second successful cameo and picked up an assist for Rice’s goal on Wednesday night, so I wouldn’t be 100% shocked if he started, but I just don’t think it’s going to happen just yet. I don’t think Havertz was great against Forest or Bayern, but he’s still the better technical player.

Saka aside, however, there are plenty of ‘finishers’ in our team that can come on and make the difference. The strength and depth of this team is phenomenal – evidenced by the names I just reeled off who probably won’t start today but will do in midweek. We have so many options and so many good players, and it’s probably why we have shown the biggest impact of subs from the bench this season – more than any other team, I think. And I suspect we will have to rely on this again today too, given the opponent, as well as our seemingly inevitable inability to put the ball in the ol’ onion bag in the first half. In the Premier League this season, we have two goals that came on matchweek one in the first half against Coventry, then all of our other goals have been scored in the second half. Another slow-starting first half that empowers the opponent (especially one like Everton) would be a real worry for me. Get at them, see if we can score early, and hey, maybe even get a set-piece goal? That would be nice.

It’s that most precious of things today – a three o’clock kick-off – and I’m actually sitting in a different seat than my normal vantage point in the North Bank, so I’ll be interested to see how the game unfolds from the upper tier of the Clock End. Let’s hope I’m not pissing off the locals around me in unfamiliar surroundings with my shouting and hollering. With how I expect Everton to set up, I could very well be.

Back tomorrow with a blog and a pod, so have a great Saturday* and I’ll see you then.

*Dependent entirely on Arsenal winning today, of course.

And let’s see how the press conferences play out today. I hope Arteta hits the assembled journo’s with a big fat “see what happens when teams don’t come to play anti-football against us??” vibe. That’s what I’d do. But I’m an emotional, irrational football fan. And that’s why they don’t pay me the big bucks.

So we’ll just get a little bit more vanilla from the boss, who will give us a team news update and the one we all want to know about is Bukayo Saka. All we heard in the aftermath of the Bayern game was Arteta saying, “It does not look good”. I feel like he’s been wrong with some of his instant responses before, but equally he’s also been spot on, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say now that there’s been a bit more time that has elapsed. Sometimes the worst injuries are the ones that happen when there isn’t a collision, and the way he went down and then held his quad has plenty of online physios talking about how it could be a couple of months basedon where he was holding his hands for where the injury was, as well as the nature of how he kicked the ground and then instantly went down. It’ll be a real shame for Saka, because it feels like he’s been plagued with various different injuries in different parts of his body for a few seasons now. If we’re lucky it might only be a few weeks. If we’re unlucky we might not see him until 2027.

Hopefully the rest of the team are fine. From an Everton perspective, we’ll also get confirmation from David Moyes, who may even wheel out Norgaard against his old club, or even Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Both will get a warm reception I suspect, but that won’t last, as we’ll need game faces on to pick up all three points. There’ll have Barry and Grealish for us to worry about, but having looked at the stats, I think we all know that this will be another low-block team who will press us in patches, but try to maintain their shape and frustrate. The data tells us that Everton are a side in the five for high turnovers, which I think is interesting, and they are in the top five for pressed sequences too. They have the seventh-best defensive record in the league on xG, plus the best ball recovery numbers of anyone in the league. They win almost as many ground duels as us and arein the top five for fast breaks. So I think we’re going to come up against another well-drilled side and the inevitable Jordan Pickford time-wasting on goal kicks that will never go unpunished – even with their new countdown rule the refs do (which I actually think is a good addition to be fair).

Their fans are not exactly optimistic, with the following comments I found on one of their forums:

Second verse, same as the first. We’ll gift them three points because of our manager.

And:

Let us grieve, man!

And:

Let me guess, brave resistance and a solid rearguard effort, but lose 2-0.

I can see why they are a little melancholy after the home defeat to Chelsea last weekend, but they sit eighth in the Premier League, they have two ins, four draws and just that one defeat, so they are hardly in a poor vein of form. It’s not rich, but it isn’t shocking.

But do the pundits feel the same? The Sports Mole team reckon it’ll be just that, a 2-0 win, whilst Chris Sutton on the BBC thinks the same scoreline too, and given that was the eventual one last season, you can understand why. Even Lewis Jones on Sky Sports is going with that too, and it kind of feels like there’s a reason they’re all saying this. If that is to be the case (and I really hope it is), then I just want us to score in the first half. We just haven’t done enough of that lately and I don’t know about you, but it’s starting to wind me up!

Right, I’ll leave it there for today. I should probably go and do some actual work. Catch you all tomorrow for the usual match preview. Be good.

Interesting, interesting…

Of course I’m being flippant, probably a little too ‘paranoid Arsenal fan’ as the rest of the league and rival fans like to paint us, but after the heat that Arteta and his players took on Sunday for their…*checks notes*…win against a Forest side designed to not concede goals and be defensively resolute, we found ourselves up against an opponent who had no such intention. And that’s what happens when Arsenal get to play against teams who want to play football. Because we can too. Bayern may have been a couple of players short in attack (for which so were Arsenal after losing Saka on nine minutes and with Tzolis still on the sidelines) and Kimmich missing due to the sad passing of his father, but this is still a team that basically never loses at home. They have been averaging six goals a game in the German Bundesliga, and they have the kind of muscle memory on their own patch that was always going to make this an incredibly tough match.

Annoyingly as well, Harry Kane was deciding to have an absolute blinder, although I have to begrudgingly admit that this is probably just his game, and that he probably is just that good. He’s scored a monstrous amount of goals in an admittedly poorer league than the Premier League, but doing it in the Champions League is something he’s been able to do, and he was, of course, going to score his customary penalty against us. I think we can’t have too many complaints about it, but I literally tweeted nine minutes before Bayern got it that I wondered when he’d get his standard penalty against us. “59 minutes,” came the replay from somebody. That’s eight out of his 15 against us, and whilst in the early days he’d scored for fun against our beleaguered back-end-of-the-banter-era back line, since Mikel has been in charge, Kane has not had too many chances, and seems to only really score when he’s able to put the ball on the spot.

He did play quite well overall, just not really as a centre forward, and I think his passing range being so good last night probably also had a bit to do with how we weren’t 100% sure whether our centre backs should follow him all over the pitch or not. I remember when I was playing five-a-side years ago, with my brother, uncle, and cousin as part of the team. My brother was the best player in the team, and in one game the opponents realised this. So they put just one guy on him, and his whole game was just to man-mark Steve. After about 10 minutes, Steve realised this, so he just stood right on the corner of the pitch and didn’t move, effectively making it a four-v-four situation. Aside from the fact that this was quite amusing to us all, it did feel like at times, we did that with Kane and Konsa, who at times tracked him deep into Bayern’s half. And whilst I don’t think Steven Gerrard is an amazing pundit, he did pick up in commentary that it resulted in the chance Upemecano got when he marauded forward, played the ball out wide, and then had the headed chance on goal at 1-1.

I’m halfway through today’s post, and I still haven’t really spoken of any of the goals other than the Kane penalty, which I think shows how compelling a football match this was. And it was. Two of the best teams in this competition going head-to-head, giving the other problems, tactical nuances and switch-ups that both sides couldn’t deal with, then could, then back to the other side to figure out what the opponent was doing and shift their approach. I thought we had the better of the first half, deservedly went ahead through a fine finish from Eze, then got undone by a great pass by Kane and a smart finish from the incredibly rapid Alphonso Davies. Bayern had more of the second half, I thought, and whilst their penalty was annoying to put them in front, they were probably just edging it at that stage. And then there was a period in which we seemed to be able to not deal with them; we had to do a bit more defending than we’d probably have liked being a goal down, but steadied the ship and started to get into the game. And the fantastic move that Rice put away to give us our point was brilliant on a number of counts. Firstly, it was aesthetically pleasing, but secondly, there were a few players in the build-up who need to take their flowers. I thought Noni’s quick one-two touch and pass with Timber and then on to Gyokeres was great; the Swede held off his man well, then played a great ball right into Rice’s path to put him in. His finish was one that looked like a guy who regularly puts away 20-a-season, and as he wheeled away, I couldn’t help but think it was fair for the game.

The only real sour note of the evening was Saka going off with what feels like a quad injury. It’s desperately unlucky and if that’s a period of time on the sidelines now for a few months, it’s the third potential big injury in three seasons. Not only is that horrible for him, it is also for us, because with Tzolis still out, we suddenly look quite bare on the flanks. Noni will no doubt get himself some game time on the right, and I wonder if this means we start to see a bit more of Max from the bench, but both Madueke and Eze need to step up now. I think both did last night. Eze definitely had his best game this season; he was able to keep Laimer on his toes all evening, plus he got a very smart goal to put us ahead. If we see a performance like that on Saturday against Everton, I don’t think there will be many complaints at all.

And we can’t complain about this result. That’s seven points out of a possible nine. Over the last two seasons, the aim is to get more than 16 points (as that’s secured eighth in both seasons and safe passage straight to the round of 16), which means that we’ve got to hit just three more wins minimum out of our next five games. We play Slavia Praha away next, before then facing off at home against Dortmund and then Real Madrid. I think win the Slavia game and we can start to look at whether we can go for the top spots again.

That’ll do for today, I think. More tomorrow as we have the quick turnaround with a home game against Everton at that rarest of things: A 3pm kick-off. See you tomorrow.

Last season our away games were Athletic Bilbao, Club Brugge, Slavia Prague and Inter Milan, and Inter were hardly any great shakes. This season we come up against a Bayern team who I think are going to cause us a lot more problems. So this becomes a really interesting test of this Arsenal teams’ credentials in this competition.If we progress out of this group stage, and if we do it as a team finishing in top eight, it’s unlikely we’ll meet Bayern again until probably the quarter final, but I expect them to go deep in this competition, so the likelihood is that if we keep progressing, we will see them again. So tonight becomes somewhat of a tester for us against one of the big clubs, and arguably one of the best four teams in Europe, if the bookies’ data is to be believed.

I think that’s probably right. Bayern sit top of the Bundesliga, as usual, and will inevitably go on to win their domestic league. They are undefeated all season, have already beaten what looks like their closest rivals, Dortmund, in the German Supercup, they smashed Leipzig 6-1 at the weekend and are looking their usual imperious selves. They have a Harry Kane who has bagged nine goals in 10 games already, and given his history with us, will fancy getting his customary penalty, which he always seems to get when playing The Arsenal. They are a formidable opponent and we should be rightly wary.

But they are not infallible. Their last outing saw them draw 3-3 with Norwegian side Viking (Harry Kane getting another penalty – warming himself up for us, obviously), with Olise sent off, which means he won’t be available tonight. He’s one of their key attacking cogs, and when you also factor in that they also don’t have Musiala due to his longer-term injury, that’s two very key attacking options they are without. So we have some hope that we could get at them, and this could be better than pretty much every memory I have of playing Bayern Munich as an adult. Even the 2-0 win we got back in 2013 ultimately didn’t mean anything, se we’d lost the first leg at home and then ultimately went out on goal difference. So as a 43-year-old Arsenal fam, I can’t really remember a time away from home that we’ve enjoyed ourselves at the Allianz.

To be fair, few teams do, because the perennial German Champions are constantly stocked with the best players in their league. They have players who come through their youth ranks who are also the best in Germany too, like Lennart Karl, who scored against us last season and I thought looked like a really good talent.

We’ve got our own too, however, and in abundance, so the question for most of us this morning is how Arteta deploys his. He confirmed that Zubimendi is back in the team, and Hincapie is a ‘maybe’, but I think he won’t be risked, and we’ll see him against Everton on Saturday. He was asked a lot of questions about Arsenal’s style of play, brought about by more media comments again as they try to find something to poke at The Arsenal with. I covered this with some thoughts yesterday, so I won’t go over it again. But we all know that we won’t see a low block at Bayern, so I hope the team takes the opportunity to show what they are capable of in an attacking sense.

And with that in mind, I’m really intrigued as to what Arteta goes for tonight. If you’d have asked me two weeks ago, I’d have told you the front three would be easy: Saka, Havertz and Eze. Those are the three best technical players we have at the moment; they are the ones who play the best football and give us the best chance of a goal. But Havertz’s display at the weekend has me questioning, as does Eze’s, and conversely, I thought both Gyokeres and Madueke did well, so I don’t think either could be ruled out. I think Arteta probably does go with Havertz in Germany, because he’ll be super up for this one in his home country, but with Bayern sure to leave more space in behind, a channel runner like Big Vik could be an option. On the left, I think it is more likely we’ll see Noni. His impact on Sunday, plus the way Arteta purred about him afterwards, has me leaning towards an inclusion for Noni, so my gut feel on tonight’s side is:

Raya

Timber – Konsa – Gabriel – Calafiori

Bruno

Odegaard – Rice

Saka – Havertz – Madueke

I toyed with the notion that Arteta would go for Myles either at left back or in midfield, but I suspect he might just stick with the more experienced midfield for now, plus the ‘X-factor’ nature of Calafiori popping up in those pockets in attacking spaces. But if MLS is preferred in any position at left back or central midfield, he’s in such form that I’m not going to complain.

We’re going to have to do a fair bit more defending tonight than we did on Sunday, we certainly aren’t going to have as much of the ball, but we will get more space to play our football. This is not terminal if we lose, a draw would be fine, a win would be amazing, but getting all three points would also be a big statement for the rest of Europe. It would show that this Arsenal team are geared up to go deep in this competition. So I’m excited to see how we get on.

Catch you all tomorrow.

I’ve seen a few bits and bobs from yesterday, and what I saw made me chuckle. Apparently now (and I’m not linking to any of these because I don’t want to fan the flames and amplify the nonsense) was some media outlets deciding that, where last season set pieces were ruining the art of football, now it is just Arsenal’s all-round play that is damaging the reputation of the Premier League.

I know, funny, amusing, and irritating all at the same time, right?

It’s pathetic that professional journalists have to stoop to the lowest form of clickbait to get traction by citing something wrong with The Arsenal, because they know the size of the global fanbase we have is enough to generate digital tailwinds for their lazy gutter-trash pieces of what can barely be described as journalism.

Now, I will admit, I think most of us would agree that on Sunday we weren’t great. We slowed the ball down too much; there needed to be a bit more urgency in the first half. Perhaps we could have just passed around with a bit more pace. But whilst I think that is a valid criticism, talk about us ruining the Premier League this season because of the style of football is just patently wrong. It wasn’t Arsenal on Sunday who formed a block that showed little ambition other than going long in hope of Liam Delap getting on to something. To be clear: I don’t blame Forest for their approach. Glasner has to set out his team to frustrate because they know that with the quality of players we have, if he pressed us high, then we would find space and it would almost certainly result in more goals scored. But there was no way that was going to happen.

Speaking of goals scored, how are Sunderland, Forest, Fulham, Coventry, The Scum, Bournemouth, Palace, United, Villa, Newcastle, Hull, Everton, Leeds and Liverpool all getting on with making the Premier League great by scoring goals? After all, that’s what makes games exciting, right? Because last time I checked, those 14 teams out of the 20 in the Premier League have all scored fewer goals than us. So whilst we can all admit that we’d like to see more goals in the ‘for’ column for The Arsenal so far this season, let’s not pretend that we’re the problem here. Low block football, cautious football, tactical cancelling out happens throughout the Premier League. Arsenal’s ‘struggles’ in front of goal come because most of the time we come up against this kind of football where we have to break down low blocks, because teams know how strong defensively we are. You know when old pros talk about how United, or the Arsenal teams of the past, used to “beat you in the tunnel”, because of the quality, physicality and presence of their side? That’s kind of what happens with us and our back line. If you’re Oliver Glasner on Saturday morning doing your pre-match team debriefs, you’re not telling your players that “we’re gonna have a right go tomorrow”, because you know you’re going to be cut apart. So you set your side up to be difficult to break down and maybe nick one.

We have a whole big match tomorrow night before we next play Everton at home on Saturday, but how do you think David Moyes is going to set up his side, eh? I can tell you now for free, they ain’t playing expansive football. They didn’t last season, did they? We all remember that for the Max Dowman goal, but let’s not forget that it wasn’t until the 89th minute that Viktor Gyokeres scored the first one. WE battered them and had 25 attempts at goal on that day. The season before that? The Sean Dyche 0-0 in which we saw the usual Jordan Pickford spend a minute on every goal kick he took in the first half. That game Everton had two shots in the whole match. We had 13. I’ll do more of a preview as we head into the weekend and that game, but already those ‘neutral’ journos who want to write puff pieces about The Arsenal, will be starting their articles. They already know how the game will play out, and it feeds their narrative that Arsenal play boring football. Hey, come at our team, then see how boring we are, eh? And in the season before that, just to put a bow on this particular discussion, is that we relied on a last-minute Havertz winner again, having had 26 shots on goal to Everton’s five.

I’m not trying to fully defend us. I didn’t enjoy watching the game on Sunday. I suspect you didn’t either. But the hyperbole around Arsenal’s style of play after a result like that isn’t warranted. So I just felt like I’d call that out this morning. More evidence will come tomorrow, too, because I don’t think we’ll see a Bayern Munich team that just sits back and watches us play the ball across our back line. I suspect we’re going to get one hell of a game.

I’ll be back tomorrow for a match preview of that game. But until then, be good, do something amazing today, and I’ll catch you in the comments.

Well, I say “tough watch”, but nothing is tougher than seeing The Arsenal lose, so the fact we speak today safe in the knowledge that Arsenal picked up the sixth win of seven so far this season has to be read as something that speaks with a sliding scale. Because let’s face it, we hardly set the world alight on the City Ground.

Now, what we can say, as seasoned watchers of Arteta’s Arsenal, is that this isn’t necessarily surprising news, because last season it was out most frequent scoreline (10 in total, seven in the Premier League). So we know that we win games by low margins. It’s why we place so much faith in our defensive unit. But there certainly won’t be many more 1-0 wins that I think have such a level of ‘mehness’ about them as that one did. Before we get into the detail of that, however, I will say that ultimately winning is all that matters, so this morning I am happy. And if you give me the power to secure 31 more of those in the Premier League between now and May, played in the same style, I’m taking it. But that doesn’t mean we have to completely wall off any kind of feelings about the approach, the style of play, etc.

The side Arteta named was pretty much as I thought it might be, except Arteta actually gave Eze a shot from the start, which proved to be possibly the wrong move. Hooking Eze at halftime feels particularly pointed, and of course Arteta was asked about it and sort of batted it away, but I’ll be surprised if he starts on Wednesday away at Bayern. It just didn’t happen for him, but he wasn’t alone, because I thought after Saka had Williams on a yellow card early in the game, he should have tested him more. I thought Havertz was anonymous. I thought the midfield and defence were fine (one lax Calafiori moment aside that nearly created a big chance), but we seemed intent on slowing the game down to a walking pace. And that makes for a hard watch.

I get it, Forest sat a solid back five into a mid-block, which constricted the space into the middle third of the pitch. They were diligent, they were a tough nut to crack, they executed their game plan to perfection and it meant we struggled. We always do against those low blocks, because we don’t really have the blistering pace up top and the style of play that those types of teams need against them. In those types of games, where you have a team compacting the middle of the pitch, I always feel like you need a fair dose of ‘risk and reward’, in other words, balls from deeper that are floated over the top, with runners in behind. Ironically, that’s what Gyokeres does, and when he came on I thought he did quite well. It’s probably why Eze and Madueke’s involvement in the game felt so chalk and cheese. Eze is not going to run in behind back lines, and he’s not going to take the ball down the line and look to beat his man on the outside; he’s always going to drift in field and that’s where there was no space. Madueke can do the opposite, did do the opposite, and was rewarded for his good performance with an admittedly fortunate deflected strike. Some will argue it is lucky, but so many goals have an element of luck. You can argue that Pascal Gross’ goal for Brighton against us had an element of luck when he scored, as it went in off the post, so I’m not too minded to besmirch Noni’s goal yesterday.

From a statistical point of view, I guess you could say we possibly edged it, but not by a lot. The xG has us at 1.14, whilst Forest finished on 0.90. We had the one big chance where they had zero, and I saw on Sky Sports that they said it was the highest possession we’d had in any game that we’d had in donkey’s years at 74%. Forest didn’t want the ball, and for large parts of this game they didn’t really need it. That was evidenced by the fact that the goal we scored yesterday was the only shot on target we’d had, and they did say in commentary that if the game finished that way, it would be the first time that’d happened to us since before COVID. Such was the ability that Forest had to stifle us, we were just unable to truly have any kind of meaningful impact on Matz Sels’ day.

As I’ve already hinted at, however, perhaps this was always going to be one of those tough games. There are just some grounds that some teams find difficult. For some reason, the Scum always used to be able to get results against City under Pep. Years back, Bolton was a tough place for us, and now it definitely feels like Forest is one of those places. We failed to score in the previous two seasons; we experienced defeat there on the first season they were back in the Premier League, and the scorelines of teams going there this season have all been 1-0. They may be down there in the relegation spots now, but I don’t imagine under Oliver Glasner that they’ll finish there. It was never going to be a Thriller in Manila

But we did break the deadlock eventually; it was a relief to do so, and Arsenal continue to keep pace with Cheaters FC at the top of the league. It’s Everton at home next weekend, to which we can expect to come up against another stubborn back line, but hopefully we can fashion more chances than we did yesterday.

And that’s probably all that needs to be said about that. I don’t think this game will live long in the memory for many Arsenal fans, but the job was done and we move on to the next one. We probably do need to have some concern about how the attack isn’t clicking, but I’m not minded to go in too hard on that just yet. Not today.

We’ll do a pod tonight on the Same Old Arsenal feed if you’re interested, but otherwise, I’ll be back tomorrow as we start to prep for a really difficult one away at Bayern. Catch you then.

We’re a good team. We’re the champions. We have managed to rotate a few players from midweek, and hopefully that means we’re a little fresher. Arteta has had Thursday, Friday, and yesterday to get the boys in training, get them drilled on how the game plays out, so there can be no excuses from The Arsenal today. After City got their expected win at home to Ipswich, we have to respond.

It’ll be tough, though. It always is away at Forest. I went to the FA Cup game a few years back when Djed Spence had a blinder, and we had Nuno Tavares hooked after just half an hour as we were dumped out at the third round stage. It was a long journey home in the car with my mate Dave Seager that day, and we haven’t exactly had easy ones coming home since then either. Even the one win we did get a few years back was a tight 2-1; for some reason Forest always seem to make it really difficult on our own patch. Certainly compared to when I’ve seen other teams go there.

So I’d love us to start fast today. It’s felt like first halves have been a bit stodgy this season, which has been frustrating, but a fluid and high-tempo-driven first half would be super today. Let’s pop the ball around like champions. Let’s show the world watching on the main event Sunday kick-off time that we are in this fight with City for the long haul. Let’s respond with our own answer to the victory from Cheaters FC by going away to a tough place and returning home with three points tucked under our wing.

In terms of the team I think Arteta will go with, I think we’ll see:

Raya

White – Konsa – Gabriel – Calafiori

Bruno

Odegaard – Rice

Saha – Havertz – Madueke

It’s not what I’d go with, but I just think Arteta will want the pace and trickery of Madueke over Eze. The one thing that could see Eze start instead would be the second half against Lille. He was great in that second half, got a goal, should/could have had another one, and when Saka and Havertz came on, it felt like it clicked more there. So Arteta could take the view that with those two players on from the start, there might be better relationships with Eze and we might be able to bring the best out of him. I’d certainly go for that instead of Madueke, but I think Arteta has been talking up Noni quite a lot in the last week, so I have a feeling he might start on the left.

In terms of the rest of the team, I think sharing the minutes between White and Timber makes sense, whilst Bruno has started to establish himself as ‘the guy’ in midfield, so as good as Myles has been, I think this is the sort of match in which Bruno should hopefully thrive. Forest will sit in a mid-block and having that verticality of passing would be very handy, so I’d have Bruno rather than the ball-carrying skills of Lewis-Skelly.

Forest have a question mark over Morgan Gibbs-White, which would be a touch for us if he doesn’t make the team, but I think there were rumours that he was doing a training session yesterday, so I suspect he will play today. He’s their best player, one from whom a lot of their good work flows through, so if he’s fit, he plays. And that will be a threat for us. He’s got a goal and two assists this season off an xG of 1.67 (only Dan Ndoye has more) and an xA of 1.87. He’s the one that a lot of their creative play flows through, so if we keep him quiet, you’d hope that we might be able to get the points today.

We need to see more from our attackers though. Saka and Havertz came on and looked great against Lille I thought, so I want a repeat of that this afternoon. I also want Odegaard central to our attacking play too, because if he’s visible, if we’re finding him, then we’re on top and stand a better chance of winning the game. Let’s hope he continues the good form he had when he kicked off this season, because it feels like he’s been a little quieter in the last couple of games. But today could be a good opportunity to stamp his mark and I’m hoping we see an Odegaard masterclass today.

We’ll be going live after the game today with the Same Old Arsenal podcast, so if you fancy an immediate post-match debrief, check it out here.

Otherwise, I’ll be back on here tomorrow to look over the key parts of the games with you. Have a good one. Up the Arsenal.

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.

It’s funny because at times in the season like this, there’s still not tons of data to try to interpret how your opponent plays under a new manager, plus I haven’t watched a single minute (live – I’ve watched some incidents on replay) of their football this season. We know that Glasner is a good manager, that games against Palace were always tough and that he’s delivered Palace two trophies in two seasons, but can that form be translated to a strange club in Forest, with a mental owner who once held Morgan Gibbs-White hostage live on TV with a contract announcement video?

Their results paint an interesting mixed bag. Back-to-back defeats to kick off the season against Leeds in the league and then the League Cup, a perfectly respectable 2-2 draw away at Anfield, followed by a 0-0 in which they had what looks like a perfectly good goal against the Scum. They won 2-1 away at Villa, which is impressive, but then lost 1-0 at home to Coventry, before going ahead against Palace before ultimately losing 3-1. So it’s a very mixed bag start to the season for them, reflected by the fact they’re currently 15th in the table on five points.

I remember the game last season. Tough, difficult to break down, then reliant on the most blatant handball not given to us after Alaina flicked the ball with his hand. He even joked about it on social media afterwards. I don’t recall a PGMOL apology either, although that’s hardly surprising. But Forest have remained a really tough nut for us to crack since they returned to the Premier League, so I expect Sunday to be the same. In fact, if you look in all competitions under Arteta, our record away from home reads:

• 0-0 in 2026/27
• 0-0 in 2024/25
• 2-1 win in 2023/24
• 1-0 defeat in 2022/23
• 1-0 defeat in 2021/22 (FA Cup)

That’s hardly sparkling, is it? And some of the performances have been pretty dire too. That 23/24 win was super scrappy, and we didn’t get our first goal until 65 minutes through a Gabriel Jesus goal, before Bukayo made it two.

So I think we should expect more of the same. Oliver Glasner prefers a 3-4-2-1, and it sounds like he plays a mid-block, which we’ve struggled with at times, as Aston Villa away showed this season. They’ll play with wing-backs who will look to exploit the spaces vacated as we press forward, and hit us with fast back-to-front transitions, relying on the likes of Munoz and Williams to venture forward and support Ndoye and Gibbs-White as the wide forwards. Liam Delap will do his usual kicking everyone.

Forest also have a pretty decent defensive record, given their position in the admittedly very early league table. They’ve only conceded eight goals so far, and when you look at all of the teams in the bottom half of the Premier League, that’s by far the best. You have to goal all the way up to Liverpool in ninth to see a team that has conceded less. But they’ve also only scored five, the same as Coventry, and hilariously, the Scum – who are bottom of the league for goals scored on three.

There are signs that they create chances though; they have the seventh-highest xG so far this season, they have created the third-highest number of shots, they’ve hit the post the joint-highest along with Man United, plus they’ve had the second-highest number of headed shots (and second in the league for successful crosses this season). So a picture is already starting to be painted of what we might see on Sunday:

• Defensive solidity and compactness at times into a mid-block
• Balls into the box (which is where you tend to get headed shots from)
• Chances created, albeit not at the greatest conversion rate (go watch them score two goals from two chances now I’ve said that!)
• A team that will play mostly without the ball (15th in total number of passes this season) and play forward every time they do.

Arteta will have this data, his Arsenal coaching staff and data analysts will have this data, so today and tomorrow needs to be spent formulating the plan to counter that threat, and maximise ours.

The next question will be who will play, which after the game against midweek is easier to pick in some positions than others. The Havertz/Gyokeres is easy, but others remain up in the air:

• Bruno or Myles at the base of the midfield?
• Eze or Madueke on the left?
• Timber or White at right back?

Those are the questions Arteta will need to ponder and, depending on the fitness of Timber, for example, you’d wonder if he can start to look at the opponent and the best player who can slot in based on their weaknesses. If, for example, you think that Timber works better because his channel running is inside of Saka and in between Forest left centre-back and central-centre-back, then go for it. But if you want to create space by overlapping your right back, then you go for Ben White. It’s a question that I’m not sure what the right answer is to, but that’s why they don’t pay me the big bucks.

I do think the combative nature of Bruno should be considered, which would be harsh on Myles given how well he’s started this season, but we’ve got options and a big enough squad, as well as plenty of games, so I think he’ll be alright.

We still have another 24 hours before the managers deliver their team news, so there’ll be plenty to unpick there, but for now I’ll leave you be and be back tomorrow with a look at what their fans are thinking ahead of this one, as well as what the pundits are saying.

Laters.

I guess that’s only natural. Arteta rang the changes – as many of us (including me) asked – and when you get that, you’re always going to get a performance that isn’t exactly slick. The players haven’t built up those fabled ‘automatisms’; they’re a little rustier, plus they’re also in the squad rather than regulars for a reason – the others are better. But nevertheless, this was an Arsenal team that, on paper, was more than capable of beating a functional, but not particularly spectacular, Lille side. And the first half pretty much played out as, in hindsight, a lot of us would have probably predicted. Arsenal had the lion’s share of the football, created nearly all of the chances, whilst Lille sat back in a compact formation designed to frustrate the home side and its supporters. In some ways, this is a standard game at the Emirates when a smaller team comes to us and has the prize of playing for a point. We huff and puff, they frustrate; the outcome is that at halftime we’re in the concourse and sat at home all wondering if this is going to be ‘one of those days’. It felt like that at times against Leeds at the weekend.

The difference last night compared to Saturday was that Leeds came with an ambition to press us higher up the pitch, kind of trying the Brighton model, whereas Lille went back to more Dycheian tactics of just trying to be compact and not venture forward too much. In that first half, they had two shots and one disallowed goal that was offside, but those were speculative shots that never really troubled Raya. We had a couple of big chances: one with Bruno who quick-fired a shot wide after a good move in the build-up, then one that took a slight nick off a defender from a Bruno shot, only for the ‘keeper to scramble away from Gyokeres, but that was pretty much the total of it in the first half from us.

Huffed. Puffed. Looked a little stodgy. I just don’t think there was enough guile in there. Madueke had one of those nights where he twisted and turned, and when he did get the ball released, it was overhit as a cross, whilst on the other side Eze was hardly blowing us away in the first half. Big Vik was anonymous, as he was for pretty much the entirety of his time on the match, to be fair.

And the second half served much the same, although much like the weekend, the introduction of the subs did make a change – even though the goal was scored before any of them came on. So there’s a temptation to say they changed the game, and I definitely think we played better and with more swagger with Saka, Odegaard and Havertz on the pitch, but game state in these situations needs to be factored in as well. Arsenal were a goal up just a minute before they came on. That meant that the Lille game plan was essentially ripped up when those players were getting into their stride. That means more space; it means an opposition who have to commit bodies forward more; it means you’re going to look better, and those who came before you may well have had more joy if there was more space when they were on the pitch. But that narrative aside, I just don’t think Gyokeres makes the run and pass for Saka’s goal, and Noni wasn’t making the kind of pass and run that Saka made for the second goal from Eze, either. Noni picked up an assist for the first, but all of the heavy lifting on that one was 100% done by the goalscorer Timber, who lifted the ball over the onrushing ‘keeper like he was our 25-goal-a-season bagman. It was a deft finish that we were used to seeing back in the Aubameyang days, not from our right backs.

So to some individual displays, for which we had mixed results. I’ve mentioned I didn’t think Noni was great, although he got the assist, so that’s positive. Gyokeres was anonymous, did nothing, had 13 touches all match and at this point I’m left thinking that the number of ‘Gyokeres games’, i.e. when he would be a perfect fit, feel like it’s dwindling by the second. I really hope he can find something, anything, to get on the scoresheet, because what we’re getting from him isn’t good enough, although there was one run he made centrally in the first half where Raya could have tried to put him in behind and just didn’t even look that far up the pitch. I just don’t think his teammates think he’s getting in behind, and that’s a worry.

I wouldn’t say Eze’s first half was a ‘worry’ too, because he showed flashes, but he didn’t take control of the game to suggest that Tzolis is going to sit down for too long when he arrived. However, the second half was a different story, and I thought he was superb and a real threat. His goal was a classic Eze finish; he made it look so easy, but he was running at his man and getting on the ball so much easier after Lille opened up, and I thought he was going to get a second on the night on a couple of occasions. He had 53 touches in total, had the most touches in the opposition box, took the most shots, and completed the most dribbles. If it wasn’t for Timber’s goal and all-round impressive play, I suspect UEFA would have given it to Eze on the night. It certainly was close.

And I wonder if that will give Arteta food for thought for the weekend against Forest now. Noni was alright against Leeds, if not sparkling, but not as good last night, despite the assist. Eze was better in the second half against Lille last night and showed his ability with end product. So what do you go with on Sunday? We’ll wait and see with bated breath.

But for now, it is two out of two for The Arsenal, and onwards we march in the Champions League.

Back tomorrow for more of the usual thoughts. See you then.

He spoke fondly of Arsenal in the pre-match press conferences yesterday, also reflecting on his Puskas goal against Crystal Palace all those years back. That will live long in the memory for sure, but as he put it, I don’t think we’ll see one like that again, and very unlikely for lightning to strike twice tonight.

Lille will prove a stern challenge, however, having kicked off their season with four wins, a draw and a defeat, and alongside Giroud there will be a pantomime villain in the shape of ex-Scum player Nabil Bentaleb, who played for them for four years before moving abroad to Schalke.

Apparently, accoridng to the internet, they are an aggressive pressing side who will go direct, and you’d expect with somebody like Giroud in the team, they’ll be looking for rapid players to buzz around him as the target man, which means that whoever has the man-marking job this evening, can stifle a lot of their play if he can win the duels against the Frenchman. Here’s what David Ancelotti (son of Carlo) said with regards to his footballing philosophy:

But my idea is: during the defensive phase, a compact defensive line must be built, whether it’s high pressing or low block defense.

To me that says that Lille are going to try to low block us this evening, so we better be prepared for it, because you don’t normally see too much of that in the Champions League. usually you’re up against teams who want to come at you, but if Lille are playing for a point in North London, it could be a frustrating one for us I think.

I do wonder if Arteta needs to do a bit of rotation to freshen it up, on that basis, you know? I would have said “how about Zubi in midfield?”, but as confirmed in the press conference last night, he’s out. As is Hincapie, and that one doesn’t sound good. Apparently he had to be carried off the pitch after Leeds game by Meslier, and Arteta seemed to back it up that it doesn’t look great. He’s such a good footballer, but much like Calafiori (although maybe not quite a bad), he’s had a fair few injuries now since signing for us. It’s only because Arteta loves a left back, that we have always had options, and you do wonder if we’ll start to see a little more rotation with Myles in at left back to protect the Italian’s legs.

I’d do that tonight, actually, and give Myles the left back role, moving Bruno in centrally, so that you can reward him for his good performance and splendid finish to win us the game on Saturday. I thought that, goal aside, his overall play in changing the game was good too, so I’d like to see him take to the pitch from the start this evening.

And I do wonder if Mikel might change it up again in attack. Noni was alright overall on Saturday, even if he did have some iffy moments, but I’d be tempted to shift him right, give Saka a rest, bring Eze in on the left. I’d also have a think about Gyokeres, but I think a complete shuffle of the front three is probably unlikely by Arteta.

Unlikely, but not completely impossible because let’s face it, we weren’t exactly sparkling against an admittedly well-organised Leeds. He sort of called out the attacking too, saying last night:

But I think we’re certainly getting in some great, great, great positions. We need to be more clinical now to finish more actions.

I think that was the only problem from the Leeds game, but we also need to recognise that Leeds had only conceded three goals all season, and hadn’t conceded two since god knows when, so perhaps I/we need to be less harsh on the team. And perhaps that extends to tonight; Lille will be a tough nut to crack, they’re full of confidence given they’re second in Ligue Un, so a probing approach will probably be Soup Du Jour for those going along tonight.

I shall be one of them, hopefully not losing my voice like I did at the weekend, but a lot of that will be predicated on how the team gets on. My hope is that we see a slightly rotated side, because I do think Arteta needs to ensure he leans on to his squad more, to try to mitigate fatigue-based injuries. But also to keep those Arsenal players on the fringes of the team engaged. If you can’t give players more minutes when we’re easily playing two-to-three times a week, when can you give it to them? That’s what I think we need to see tonight, and hopefully Arteta does that.

So my side for this evening would look a little like this:

Raya

Timber – Mosquera – Gabriel – MLS

Bruno

Odegaard – Rice

Madueke – Gyokeres – Eze

There’s enough freshness in there, we have options on the bench, we also have the goal machine that is Merino if we want him to start, so I’d also potentially think of him instead of Big Vik. But I do think an element in rotation, in putting some more faith in the squad, is what you can do for a game like tonight. Let’s see if Arteta agrees.

That’s yer lot for today – back tomorrow with a Champions League debriwef, to see if we’ve maintained a 100% record in the competition. See you then.

But aside from that, the way it all panned out, what we witnessed, how it all unfolded, it just rendered the result completely meaningless by the end. Even at this early stage in the season, Manchester City, #114 FC, aka Cheaters FC, have been gifted six points thanks to newly re-branded, historically terrible, ProRef. We all remember the damage Kavanagh did to us when we played Brighton at home two seasons ago; well, now he’s done it to Liverpool.

And I’ll bet if you asked Richard Masters privately, he’d probably admit to this being the last thing he’d want to see, because this only undermines the Premier League as a product further. The team that has just been found guilty of cheating on an industrial scale, find themselves undefeated and top of the division, not through being amazing, but by having two slices of incredibly questionable officiating at both Old Trafford and Anfield. Two of the hardest grounds to go on. Yet they have navigated them with maximum points, despite not being the better side in either game, which was what the match was yesterday until that second yellow card was offered out from what looked like a reminder from Erling Haaland.

It’s all incredibly murky. And what hasn’t helped is that we now appear to have City fans who are doubling down on the ‘Cheater’s labelling. I get it, you back your club to the hilt, but it appears they’re going way beyond this. They’re going to actively play up to the fact that they’ve been caught cheating. Apparently, the bananas that were on display yesterday were a throwback from when they were a couple of divisions down. Perhaps they are engaging in a bit of Gallows Humour there; the chanting is one thing, but the unwavering support for the regime that has cheated them as well and potentially caused massive damage to the club is the bit that I think muddies the waters.

And this defiance from City and their fans yesterday, their (the owners’) refusal to acknowledge their guilt and take their medicine, means that we’re in a weird No Man’s Land, for which we don’t even know if all of yesterday’s pantomime even matters or not. Will we find that every victory they got was ultimately in vain and hollow? Or will they be allowed to prosper in broad daylight in front of everyone who watches the game?

I tweeted about this, but I do think that it needs to be re-said on here, because everyone who loves football has a duty now to not let the media just fizzle out what has happened since the guilty verdict was announced. The challenge in things like football, very much like in politics, is that you get the old adage of:

Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper.

That is what City are trying to do by dragging all of this out. They have spent billions on sportswashing, on seeding out their tentacles through the media, through ex-players, people who are on their payroll, people who they can buy to get them to peddle whatever narrative they want. Then they think that can be leveraged to ‘wash away’ any potential wrongdoings. And so I think it is incumbent on the football community to not let this situation become a non-story by the time 2027 rolls around. At every ground, in every interview, with every set of away travelling fans at the Emptihad, in every pre- and post-match, there needs to be talk and a reminder of this. We cannot allow this situation to disappear quietly into the night. It does nobody any good other than the Manchester City owners. We cannot normalise the situation to the point in which apathy takes hold. This outrage needs to stay in the public’s viewpoint for a long time, and certainly until justice is done. Remember when the Super League was brought up? Remember how the football community united as one to stop it? Remember how the pressure was so intense that the clubs had no choice but to back down? That’s what we need to have in this situation. The football world needs to unite to get to the outcome. When the Super League came out, I remember saying to my brother that I would have to give up my season ticket. I could not put my money into the hands of a collective like that. It would not be right. The same energy needs to be put into ensuring justice for the game now. And if City fans want to double down, then that’sfine, unfortunately they’ll have to be the sacrifical lambs when their club is served up the punishment it deserves. It won’t be their fault, but for those fans holding up masks of the owners yesterday, flags of defiance and support, I’m afraid you do not have my sympathy (not that any of them would want it, mind).

Arteta talks to the press today, and we can get back to talking about The Arsenal for the game tomorrow against Lille. That will at least be the bad taste in my mouth and mind, left by this grubby situation we’ve all just witnessed in the last 24 hours.

Catch you all tomorrow.

They are a strong team.

They are a physical team.

They press intensively.

They go long and direct where possible.

And that’s pretty much how the game played out yesterday. Leeds haven’t lost this season. They have one of the best points accumulation in 2026 going back to December last year. They changed their approach and style back in December and it has seen them look like a very capable Premier League outfit. This isn’t the same side we played and spanked at home towards the beginning of last season.

On that day, it was two goals in a five-goal hammering from Big Vik that had us wondering whether his goals might actually translate from Portugal to the Premier League. That has only really half happened, but I did expect to see him from the start yesterday, and I think a lot of Arsenal fans did too. So when the team news came out, there were plenty of raised eyebrows, not least because Kai was starting. We all thought he’d be out for a few weeks like Tzolis, but having him available is great news for Arteta and us too. Kai is by far the better footballer. But I do wonder whether or not it might still have been a day for the Swede. Just back from Sweden with a bunch of goals, up against a good Leeds side, but one in which there was space to run in behind, and we did try those balls in behind for him to chase a few times. Gyokeres’ game is a basic one, but it is one that suits the style of play that we saw yesterday. I wonder if he might have got more joy than Havertz in that first half, because whilst the German was busy enough, he wasn’t quite at his best I didn’t think. He never really got much change out of the back line in the first half, bar that one header that he nodded back pretty tamely to Trafford in the Leeds goal.

It was a pretty uneventful first half, if truth be told, and there were one or two wobbles from us defensively, but Leeds never really carved us open. I don’t know what happened to Big Gabi yesterday, but I thought he was poor, with some of his passing particularly noticeable for its inaccuracy.

To be fair he wasn’t the only one, because I saw a bit of that from MLS, from White, Calafiori wasn’t getting into the advance positions where we know he can do damage, plus we had Madueke on the left doing one good thing for every headless chicken thing he does. And the result was a halftime beer wondering if we were going to come out at Leeds quickly in the second half.

Only we didn’t. It was all a little too pedestrian at times, and as my mate Luke had remarked at halftime, if Odegaard isn’t dictating the play, if he’s having a game where he’s busy but doesn’t find the space to punch through those creative passes, then we look a little stodgy at times. And up until the Leeds goal, that is how the start of the second half played out. Leeds grew into confidence in the game, although they only created one shot that Raya tipped over from my recollection.

The numbers bear that out too; 2.33 xG for us against Leeds’ 0.62. Leeds may have had 11 shots (we had 13) and five on target, but they were long-range shots that, most of the time, you’d rather take your chances with than being cut open inside the six-yard box. But then they scored in the 55th minute, and the worry I had was that this was starting to feel like “one of those days” – you know what I mean, where things are just weird and off. The problem is, we had that in our last match, so when you go behind at home in the manner that we did yesterday, that is a big concern if the team doesn’t respond. Two defeats back-to-back can quickly turn a blip into a spiral. The team had to respond.

And I really thought they did, but it did take us about five minutes to get our heads right. Leeds had a bit of territory for five minutes after they scored, but just as Mikel was getting the subs to warm up, our response did kick in. On their goal, my initial thought was that Rice just didn’t track back, but to be fair, he got all over the pitch, so he can hardly be blamed too much for being half a yard behind the onrushing extra man Leeds had in that move. Justin’s finish was tidy too, although I feel like he scored a carbon copy of a goal like that for Leicester a couple of seasons back, so perhaps that was something that could have been anticipated.

Regardless of that, we were back level just six minutes later, and it was the move that sparked us into dominating the final third of the game. Madueke’s clipped ball to the back post was good, White’s header back was well timed, and unlike in the first half, Calafiori was in a dangerous spot to tap the ball in off Trafford. He’ll probably feel like he should have saved it, but sometimes these balls come at you so quick that you don’t have too much time to react when they are straight at the body. It went in, Calafiori wheeled away in celebration, and the firghtback was underway. From that moment onwards we dominated, and the subs that Arteta made had helped that. Bruno was getting on the ball and moving into more dangerous spaces than Myles had done, Viktor did pretty well in occupying his markers, whilst Jurrien looked decent and managed to get a solid 30+ minutes under his belt. The goal that was scored by Bruno, however, wowsers. It was lovely stuff from Odegaard in the build-up, Rice with the flick, then Bruno’s finish was sublime. The stats nerd in me says that with only a 10% likelihood of scoring, it was a tight one that decided the victory, but the football purist in me doesn’t car; winning games with screamers is the funnest way to win football matches. I’d take that all season long please.

And so we find ourselves today with another win, five out of six, in a good spot, knowing that we can watch the Liverpool v 114 FC/Asterisk FC/Cheaters FC game having done our job.

On to Lille on Tuesday night.

Catch you all tomorrow.

And it’s Leeds United for The Arsenal for the early kick-off today, which means I’ll be dumping these thoughts on here, going for a quick run, then making my way straight to Highbury for a pre-match warm-up with my mate Steve.

These early ones are funny, I find, because they’re usually a little stodgy, particularly if we’ve played in midweek. We may not have done, but the players did for their international teams, so whether we see a free-flowing Arsenal or not remains to be seen. That is also the case with the team selection too, as we have lost a few players due to this patchy international break, but the good news is that we do have some returnees. Ben White, for example, is back and able to start, and you’d expect him to given we’re easing Timber back into first-team football. I also wonder if they might save Konsa and give Mosquera a go at centre-half today too, with the Champions League kicking back off next week. In midfield, Arteta confirmed that Declan is back and that managing his load by not playing for England was the right call. But up top, we know Kai and Tzolis will be missing, so I suspect it’ll be Eze and Big Vik that come in.

So for me, for today, I have a feeling Mikel might go:

Raya

White – Mosquera – Gabriel – Calafiori

Bruno

Odegaard – Rice

Saka – Gyokeres – Eze

There are, as we know, plenty of bench options which do include Madueke and Dowman, plus the return of Hincapie, so we will be stocked. But today needs to be a physically imposing Arsenal side who will come up against a physically imposing Leeds United side. They’re missing Rodon and Daniel James, but the rest of the team are available, I think. And they come into this one in fifth place, with two wins and three draws, so they will certainly be feeling in fine form and able to cause an upset at the Emirates. IN their five games, they’ve scored seven and conceded just three (better than us thanks to that Brighton result we suffered last time out). They gave Newcastle an absolute battering a couple of games back, but drew with Palace at Elland Road last time.

This stage of the season is always a tough one when you try to look at the numbers and assess what sort of opposition you’re up against, but three of their seven goals have come from set pieces, so I think we’re going to need to defend better than we did for Brighton’s third goal a couple of weeks back. Leeds have a strong team, a tall team, and my mate Adam, who I used to work with (a Leeds fan) said to me when we were talking at the start of the season that “we’re a bunch of big bastards”. And at the spearhead of that team will be Calvert-Lewin, who is going to throw his arms and legs and elbows around today for sure. We need to be ready for him.

Leeds will probably accept that we’re going to have most of the ball today. They’re 15th in the League on average possession per game, and third from the bottom in terms of the total number of passes they’ve made so far. They’re also bottom for final third passes, through balls, and fourth from bottom on crossing too. But they’re fifth in terms of getting the ball forward with their pass direction; this is a Leeds side that is going to be direct as soon as they get the ball.

And without the ball, they will press us, intensively. They sit second behind the Scum in terms of pressing sequences and are fifth from the bottom in the number of times they put together 10+ passes. Again, this is building a picture to me of how this game is going to shape up. They will be strong, physical, look to catch us out with longer, direct balls, and they will be dangerous on the set pieces. That’s the sort of game I would normally love, until two weeks ago, when our defending was all over the place against Brighton. But I don’t think Leeds will press us as high as Brighton, and I don’t think they will look to catch us out in the same way, so my hope is that we control the game and do our business in the top end of the pitch. That means that we need to see more from Eze and Gyokeres. We need to have them performing like they did at the beginning of last season and I believe it was the Forest game in which both combined for one of his goals. That’s what we need today. We all know Saka will do Saka things with Odegaard and White on the right, but we need to see Rice, Eze and Gyokeres do some bits on the left. We need more unpredictability.

Perhaps that also comes through Calafiori occupying those unsual positions, because this feels like the sort of game where an organised Leeds defence will make it difficult to create chances, and so having a bit of an x-factorplayer comes in handy. Of course we also have the likes of Merino available too, although I suspect he’ll be a bench option rather than a starter today.

You can’t take anything for granted in the Premier League. Everyone can beat everyone (almost). So we cannot count our chickens. But if you want to fight for the title, you have to win home games like this, so I am hoping that we see an Arsenal side a little wounded from the Brighton defeat, and therefore ready to come out and prove a point against a decent Leeds side today.

Right, I’m off, time to get myself to the ground. See you tomorrow.

Mikel Arteta has signed a new contract with The Arsenal

This is fantastic news. Yes, everyone was ‘calma’ about it at The Arsenal; the journos ‘in the know’ were all saying it is pretty much done, but now it is all official, and he’s signed on until 2030. That means, if he sees out his contract, he’ll have done 10 years at The Arsenal and hopefully will have built that ‘legacy’ that we are all talking about right now.

It has not been all plain sailing; we’ve had some bumps along the way, but this is the right move for the club, and I don’t think you’ll find any proper Arsenal fans who aren’t delighted with this news. The video the club did, where he stood in front of two LED walls of Arsenal fans and their messages, was absolutely lovely to see. I’m clearly biased on this, but The Arsenal has always tried to demonstrate that it acts with ‘class,’ and when we do things like this, you really get the sense that those values shine through at the club. When some clubs are intent on taking cheap shots on signing unveiling videos, or two drag the game into disrepute with their own inability to admit their dodgy wrongdoings, The Arsenal does things the right way and, in that regard, I am proud to call myself an Arsenal supporter when I see things like yesterday and all the #content that accompanied the video.

There were also the little touches that reflect, represent, and acknowledge the proud tradition of the club, like the fact that his ‘contract’ (although we all know that deal had been signed somewhere else, and this was just ‘for the Gram’ as the kids say) was delivered to him by the CEO in a box that was used by David Danskin, the club’s first Club Secretary, as a writing desk tool as well. Richard Garlick even talked about how we are connected to our history, we acknowledge and are proud of it, and that shines through with little actions like this.

I’m also proud of the longevity of managers the club has had in my time. I was born in 1982, so I’m not really going to count or claim Terry Neill or Don Howe, as I didn’t even get into football until I was six, but by then George Graham had been in charge for a couple of years, and so my experience of full-time (not caretaker) managers is:

1. George Graham
2. Bruce Rioch
3. Arsene Wenger
4. Unai Emery
5. Mikel Arteta

Five in 28 years. That is class. That is The Arsenal.

Like I say, it hasn’t always been perfect though, and I remember telling my mate Johnny from The Arsenal Opinion Podcast after the Villarreal defeat (ironically at the hands of Emery) that I thought he wasn’t going to make it. I don’t like being the guy who shouts for the manager’s head, but I was basically there in 2021, so to see how this has turned around is marvellous. And as I’ve already said in my blog in May of this year (KSE apology tour), you have to give huge credit to the owners on this too. They stayed patient; they truly did ‘Trust the process’, and in May everyone with a stake – whether physical or emotional – in The Arsenal was rewarded.

And now we find ourselves looking towards the future. I’ll save Leeds chat for tomorrow, but next on the ‘to do’ list is apparently Decaln Rice, which again, I don’t think you’ll find an Arsenal fan in the proverbial house who doesn’t want this deal done quickly and soon. He’s a key cog in the team; he is one of our best players (there’s a shout for ‘The best’ player), he’s a guy we want to be part of this ‘Legacy’ that Arteta is talking about. So let’s get him on the train/boat/bus – whatever form of transport metaphor takes your fancy.

One more final video link to show you before I pop off for the day, which is back to Mikel, and the fan sit-down that he did that the club videoed. I just think this is lovely. Yes, it is PR; yes, it is heavy on the production value, but it comes across as so genuine. There is genuine warmth from him, from the fans around the table, and it serves to underline the ‘connection that Arteta is always talking about. You see things like this, and you realise that to him, these aren’t just words at pre-match press conferences; they are real values and cultural identity that he has been despErate to build at the club since the day he walked through the door. He ‘gets it’ and ‘gets’ what it means to all of us. Having a manager like that is amazing. Yeah, he rubs up opposition fans, pundits, and the media with the most trivial of things (“HOW DARE HE STEP OUTSIDE ARBITRARILY WHITE LINES THAT ARE PAINTED ON THE TOUCHLINE!”), but you cannot look at videos like that and what his actions have shown and not convince me that every single Premier League team wouldn’t have him in a heartbeat if they could.

They can’t. He’s ours. And he’s here to stay for a while longer.

Back tomorrow as we start to preview the return of The Arsenal and Leeds at home. Speak then.

The Good Lord Giveth, and he taketh away.

The ‘Taketh away’ bit is, of course, the injuries to Havertz, then Tzolis, then Konsa too, who I haven’t mentioned this week, but of course has to be a concern. The latter is a worry, but with Christian Mosquera in the squad, we have a very capable deputy who could cover for Leeds at home on Saturday, for example, so I think that challenge can be mitigated by Arteta. In Eze, there is a guy who just got 90 minutes playing for England in a 3-0 victory, showing some bright moves in the little that I switched it on to watch (about 10 minutes of the second half). His stats are also decent too: 68 touches in total, 44 of 48 accurate passes, three blocked shots, two defensive contributions, and overall a fine – if not sparkling – performance. We didn’t need him to be. He will get game time on Saturday and, having played 90 minutes for his country last night, he’ll be in a better position to give us the best of Eze against Leeds.

The ‘giveth’ part is of course the performance of those players who might replace Kai Havertz up top, because last night Mikel Merino chucked his hat in the ring to give Arteta something to think about. I haven’t seen his first goal, but his second goal was an absolute peach of a finish. It was the kind of touch and swivel inside the box that, if Thierry had done it, you wouldn’t be surprised and would be nodding your head and explaining out loud, “that’s Titi, man”. Merino now has three goals and two assists in his four matches he’s played for Spain. But what makes it more impressive is the number of actual minutes he’s played in order to deliver that return: 109. So basically he’s played just over the equivalent of one football match and has the equivalent of a hat-trick and an assist. Honestly, this man is absolutely brilliant, and I can’t wait to see him on the pitch in an Arsenal shirt.

Who starts on Saturday, though? Because Big Vik will have his hand in the air too, given that he’s bagged four in four during this break. His goals have predominantly all been of the predatory kind, which whilst it’s great for his confidence, does make me wonder about whether it’s the best chess piece for Arteta to be placing on the board for the lunchtime kick-off in a few days. I suspect he will go for Big Vik, but Merino simply has to get game time at some point, so a sharing of minutes in that position wouldn’t surprise me on Saturday.

I guess it also depends on how Leeds are going to set up. If they are going to sit deep, be compact and tight, try and restrict space in and around their own penalty box, then having Viktor mark himself out of another match might not be the best option. Likewise, if we have to resort to a bit of a battle for some aerial dominance, then you’re picking Merino all day long for that striking slot. But as it stands, right now, the positive we have as Arsenal fans is we have a few players who have hit some form and are showing signs of knowing where the back of the net is. Good stuff.

There were also performances from Martin Zubimendi in that Spain game, for which he also assisted the goal for Merino’s winner at the death against Croatia. And Myles Lewis-Skelly, who played the full 90, had 72 touches, completed three of four successful dribbles, had a 91% passing accuracy and four of five accurate long balls. FOTMOB gave him a 7.4 (Eze got a 7.5), and at this point, if you’re Arteta, you really are spoiled for riches in the middle of the park. He’ll probably also be telling the players that it is a shame that he can’t play 13 players from the start, because I suspect he might think Merino AND Gyokeres, or Bruno AND Myles, AND Zubimendi. But hey, as a manager, you always want those kinds of headaches, so I’m sure he won’t be complaining too much.

And neither will we, because we can finally wave goodbye to this frustrating international break, and start looking ahead to the threat that a decent Leeds side and the elbows of Dominic Calvert-Lewin will pose. I’ll start to look at them tomorrow, I think, followed by the usual review of what the pundits are saying on Friday, as well as early injury news. But for now, for today, that’s me done.

Have a good one, kids.

Getting goals will definitely help that. We saw when he arrived in that cab and read aloud the message from Martin about how if thehere’s anything he could do to help him settle in, he just needed to let him know. His response was something like “assists, I just need assists”. This is a guy who essentially models his game entirely on end product. He isn’t skillful with the ball at his feet, he can’t beat a man, we’ve seen he hasn’t got the pace to get away from Premier League defenders; he’s not much of an aerial threat. But what he can do is shoot. Hard. And his goals have shown us that he can find space inside the box, so the challenge is how we do that in a league in which a lot of teams just sit deep against us. But you can’t argue with his Sweden form right now. And that can’t just be fluke, either, because he’s got 25 goals in 41 appearances, he’s scored six goals in his last seven games for Sweden. I get that there’s probably a bit more space for him in international games, and we all know how Martinelli said as much in Champions League football too, but there must be a way we can find the best out of the Swede in an Arsenal shirt?

I do think confidence will play a little part. In the Ipswich cup game he looked like he was hiding in plain sight a bit; his movement just wasn’t there, he had a couple of occasions to step in front of his marker when balls came into the box, yet he declined to do so and had what we all now know was a VERY underwhelming performance. But his recent international form will have him returning back to London with a bit more of a swagger in his step. That might give him an extra 5 – 10% edge, but he’s now going to have to deliver on Saturday in an Arsenal shirt.

The other goalscorer was of course Riccy Cala, who bagged one for Italy against Turkey, and he did it with just 34 minutes of football. That, for me, is great on both counts. He too will come back with a swagger to London, but hopefully in one piece, having not started the game but finishing it. It was his first goal too, from a nice set piece, so that’ll sate those of us who are getting a little sad that we haven’t been able to sing n’set piece again ole ole’ in relation to an Arsenal player.

That is something I would like to see us get back to, you know, because it is annoying me with the lazy media narrative that we only won the title last season because of our set pieces. I’m sure you’ve heard it too; a rival fan, or ignorant pundit just carelessly chucks out a comment about how the rules on hugging and grappling have now changed, which is why Arsenal haven’t been scoring from set pieces. Firstly, anyone who looks at the way we set up on corners and free kicks will know that we don’t have that most of the time. You know what I’m talking about: Our players bunch at the back post, then just before the ball is kicked they make their moves and run into their positions. Grappling doesn’t suit us; it suits our opponents who want us to be static. If you want to look at grappling, go watch that United v Everton game from last season, in which the two teams were essentially engaging in judo matches all around both penalty boxes. But you’ll never hear about that, because neither side was fighting for the title.

The reality is, I think, that teams are a little more familiar with our patterns on set pieces so far this season, but I also just feel like we’ve been unlucky on a couple of occasions. We have players who are good in the air, we will start scoring set pieces again, but there was probably an element of us running hot on set pieces for a short period of time last season, then having the pendulum swing the other way a tiny bit this season. And this idea that we get a ton more than everyone else is folly too; last season we were top with 25 non-penalty set-piece goals, but we also saw Man United get 22, so there’s hardly a massive gap.

So whilst we do have that as part of our, ahem, ‘arsenal’, I think the laziness to just dismiss us this season on those goals because of a slight rule change (which probably goes away around this time anyway) is half-arsed analysis if you ask me.

But what do you think?

Their defeat yesterday was one I watched a big chunk of, and actually I thought they played quite well until they went behind. That felt like the game was over, so I switched over, and the final result of 4-2 to #114 Cheating FC leaves them floundering in mid-table. And unfortunately, I suspect it does mean the title might be done. The challenge for teams at the top fighting for the title in the WSL is that the margin for error seems really slim. Two defeats away at perennial winners Chelsea, then last season’s champions Man City, is no massive shock, and of course there will be the home games for the ladies to get revenge, but when you look at the history of winners in this competition, it means the margin for error is tiny because of the fewer games they play.

Last season, City won it with three defeats, but they won 18 of their 22 games. Arsenal have won one of their first five. In 2024/25, Chelsea won it going unbeaten and bagging 19 victories out of 22. The season before that it was 18 wins and three defeats; the season before that it was 19 wins and two defeats; and the season before that it was 18 wins and two defeats. So when you look at historical data for the last five years, you have to say the chances of Arsenal doing anything now look almost impossible. They’d probably have to win every single match between now and the end of the season, and so those two draws at home to United and Palace are going to have huge repercussions. There’s just no margin for error in the Women’s game, unfortunately.

That’s on the women’s side, but on the men’s side, we’re waiting to see how big Riccy Cala gets on in Italy against Turkey. I hope that his time is limited and Mancini is sensible with him. He played the full 90 on Friday, and I hope Mancini takes the same approach as last week; we want to see him warming the bench and getting a maximum of 20 minutes tonight, if anything at all. In group four, Big Vik gets a chance away in Romania to bag more goals for his national side, and if he does it tonight, I’ll be happy to see him return and see if he can continue that good scoring form and confidence. We will need it, as many of us have already discussed, with Kai out for the immediate future. Big Gabi seems ok having just done a half against India, as did Bruno G, so I think we should be fine with those two. Then the final two sets of players that we’re focused on will be tomorrow night with England and Spain, and if we get a clean bill of health tonight, then we can all start to look forward to Saturday. Martin Odegaard’s Norway unfortunately lost away in Portugal, but he played the full 90, so that says to me he should be fine, and we can welcome him with open arms at London Colney probably from tomorrow, I’d expect.

To me, that’s positive, because his start to the season has been fantastic, and obviously we want that to continue for as long as possible. He’s been the centrepiece through which a lot of our creativity flows, and it is no surprise that his having an off game against Brighton was part of the reason that nothing clicked at the Amex a couple of weekends back.

Other than that, there’s really not a lot else going on, so we’ll just have to see how our boys get on tonight in those aforementioned international games; then we’ll get more updates as the players start returning to London Colney.

And so I shall take my leave again, wish you a happy Monday, then I will see you all tomorrow with hopefully news of a rested Riccy and a goalscoring Gyokeres to speak of. Until then.