It’s an early start on a Saturday as we travel to the Midlands to take on Aston Villa.
After an energy-sapping midweek performance, you wonder if the manager could make a change or two to add some fresh legs and give his team something a little different. The difficulty is that we’re not exactly loaded with options, but I wouldn’t be averse to seeing Ben White at right-back, Kieran Tierney at left-back and Leandro Trossard starting ahead of Gabriel Martinelli.
Beyond that, I don’t think there’s much we can realistically do, plus it leaves us with some players on the bench who can change the dynamic if necessary. The continued absence of Thomas Partey makes Granit Xhaka’s experience and size all the more important, and I really don’t think Fabio Vieira is quite ready for the blood and rumble of a Premier League away start in that position yet. There seems to be good news in the sense that Emile Smith Rowe is back in training and everything is going well and he should be in the team today to give us another attacking option off the bench.
About the changes, Mikel Arteta said:
Every week, we consider the best possible option for the players and where they are in terms of performance, mentally and physically, and we will do it again tomorrow for sure.
And while he made some comments about the fact that we’ll be playing early on Saturday after Wednesday night’s game, he played down the idea that fatigue should be an issue, saying:
it is very difficult to play tomorrow [but] we will have full energy. It’s not a concern: I want the players to be in the best mentality possible and physically ready to face that challenge.
They are young, they have a lot of energy!
That said, it’s not uncommon for a team that’s had some midweek action to take a bit of time to get going on the weekend, but today more than ever feels like the kind of day where a fast start it would be hugely beneficial. You don’t feel tired legs when you play well and at the top (hopefully with a goal or two). It’s when you’re scrapping and fighting that they feel heavy, like you’re running through molasses.
Under former Arsenal boss Unai Emery, Villa have been playing a fairly flat 4-4-2 so a lot will depend on our wide men, whoever they are, to find space and test the full-backs. If we can force them back, we may have to deal with an opposing side in a low block, but Arteta thinks that’s a situation we’ve dealt with many times already this season. He says:
How many low blocks have we faced this season? 16, and we’ve won a lot of those games and in the end we’ve deserved to have won most of those games, but then it comes down to efficiency.
Efficiency is the word he used after Man City, and it’s perfect. We have to seize the opportunities we make today. There’s just been something missing in the final third in the last two weeks. The shooting has been a bit erratic, the decision-making a bit delayed, and that can be the difference between a half chance and a good chance.
Arteta was honest about the mistakes we made against City, but he wanted to remind his team how well they had played against the champions. They had the lowest possession stat in their history under Pep Guardiola, and while you don’t get any awards for that, it tells you something about how far we’ve come. Let’s hope the frustration of not getting anything from another game against them is reflected in the quality of our performance today.
We had a tough 2-1 win over Villa earlier in the season so hopefully we can pull off a double later on.
Well, that’s it. We’ll have live blog coverage for you, as well as all the post-game material on Arseblog News. Join us for all that, there’s a preview podcast on Patreon to listen to in the meantime, and I’ll check it out in a few hours to get started.
Let’s go Arsenal!
