Basking in the wins, in the driving seat, rotation
Good (late) morning from a wet, windy, miserable and in my case sleepless Berlin!
Given the weather, at least we still have Tuesday’s 5-1 win to bask in before attention slowly turns to the weekend trip to West Ham. We went into that most recent international break knowing we’d need things to quickly improve on all fronts and the team has already delivered handsomely in the two games this week.
As far as the Champions League is concerned, we’re now five games into this eight-game league phase and the table is starting to take shape. The jumbled fixture list — some teams have ‘easier’ games left, others have monster clashes around the corner — looking at the table and trying to predict how things look isn’t easy but it’s getting easier.
The win this week saw us leapfrog Juventus, Man City, Aston Villa, Monaco and Sporting to put ourselves in seventh and in the driving seat for qualification with two home games left and our hardest looking fixtures behind us. According to Opta, Arsenal now have a 69.6% chance of securing a top eight finish and heading into the last 16 directly, crucially skipping the extra play-off round that teams who finish between 9th and 24th will have to play.
With home games against Monaco and Dinamo Zagreb to come before rounding things off with a trip to Girona, you’d have to fancy the team’s chances of picking up all nine points from here to keep the good mood rolling.
Like a lot of you probably did, I had an eye on Liverpool’s win over Real Madrid last night. Fair play, honestly, I think that’s the best I’ve seen them play under Arne Slot. Obviously, football is as football does and Man City’s trip to Anfield on Sunday looks like exactly the sort of thing that will see City suddenly rediscover themselves and maybe do us a favour out of nowhere in the sort of bizarre turning point football loves to deliver. That or they’ll concede early and continue to crumble. Honestly, whichever way that goes, someone is dropping points and we need to make sure we close one or both gaps.
Liverpool lost Conor Bradley (who was impressive) at right-back late on and Ibrahima Konate limped off too. It’ll be interesting to see how they do handle injuries to key players if and when they do come. Across 17 Premier League and Champions League games, Liverpool have Gravenberch, Van Dijk, Salah have been available to start all 17 and Konate is on 16. The squad will have to come into things a bit more eventually.
Still, it’s all about focusing on ourselves and making sure we keep winning so we’re right where we need to be when the teams above us do drop points. That continues at West Ham on Saturday, the first of nine consecutive games in London. We don’t leave the capital again until 4 January, and that’s only a trip to Brighton, and then again until 25 January to face Wolves.
With all the focus on marginal gains nowadays, not having to travel far (or travel back) for games has to be helpful, as well as just nice for the players, who already spend so much time on the road. Now it’s on them to make it count and rack up the wins.
Obviously to do that we also need to keep key players fit, so it’ll be interesting to see what sort of team is used on Saturday, seeing as we host Manchester United a few days later and it looked like Thomas Partey, Declan Rice and Gabriel Martinelli were all spared a start last weekend so they could be raring to go in Lisbon. That sort of rotation and use of the squad isn’t something we’ve really seen from Mikel Arteta in his 251-game spell to date in charge – even over the last two years, we’ve mostly mounted our title challenges with a group of 12-13 trusted outfield players – but this is the first time, even with Ben White and Takehiro Tomiyasu out, that you feel like the manager truly trusts a bigger core group.
Anyway, I’m sure there will be more chat about what to do at the weekend over the next couple of days. For now, just keep basking in the glory of our last two games; I might stick the highlights on again now, actually.
Wishing everyone a pleasant day and a safe flight to Blogs as he makes his glorious return from Lisbon! He’ll be back in the saddle on this particular horse tomorrow.
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