AN ARSENAL VS CITY TRILOGY TO DECIDE IT ALL (MAYBE)
It’s been a real nostalgic few days for me. I spent time in London at its wintery best, hanging with beautiful people and my Arsenal family… now I’m in New York, staying where I used to live, and it’s just a whole whoosh of feelings.
Hold on, am I writing a diary here?
Anyway, what a couple of great cities, truly, the best there is. I know this is a boring opener, but Londoners sometimes don’t appreciate how incredible their city is. That new Elizabeth Line feels like it could only exist in Tokyo or London. A feat of engineering genius, but also, an outrageously beautiful piece of design.
Anyway, ENOUGH ABOUT TUNNELS ALREADY.
Arsenal leadership are dealing with the very painful news that once again, Big Mo is out for an unspecified amount of time. I really feel for him, he’s such a good guy, no one deserves the back-to-back luck he’s had. I think he’ll get renewed regardless, which is good news.
That leaves us in a double challenge.
- We need a midfielder that can carry some of the weight
- We’re now a distressed buyer and everyone knows it
Prices just inched up.
Our moves are looking ambitious. The story today is we’ve bid £60m for Caciedo. An outrageously good player, but at a club that seems to get expensively picked off every window. I’m not sure how they keep succession planning these talented players, but it would surely be a damaging move for them to lose such a key player at this stage of the season.
There are rumblings that he wants to hand in a transfer request to push the move forward, so who knows where this goes, but we have to be clear, Brighton dance to their own beat, their CEO will not be shoved around, and the player really doesn’t have strength at this moment in time.
What I like is we’re going big, what I’m worried about is we’re under stress now, and the stakes are high. This is when clubs make mistakes and end up with expensive diamonds that upon closer inspection are TAINTED with averageness.
It’s 100% clear we want to move on Declan Rice in the summer, it’d be incredible to move on him now, but West Ham is a total bag of shite at the moment and he’s the one player they can rely on to help them climb the table.
So where do we look?
Juventus are in deep trouble and will have to shed some of their players, we had interest in Locatelli before. Weston McKennie has also been on the agenda, but it’s unclear whether he could reach the heights we need after a fairly spotty career.
Good news is Mr Ornstein says there’s plenty of money to spend this window, Edu is good at spending, let’s see what they do.
The BIG game this evening is Manchester City versus Arsenal.
The job is to win or exit without a battering.
We lost last January and it was an epic loss. If that happened tonight, we can wipe the blood from our nose and live to fight another day.
If we lose 4-0, doubts creep in, it gives other teams a bump, basically, not good.
If we go there and win, well, you are really talking sexy times.
There should be rotation today, we have some top players that don’t have minutes in their legs.
Trossard has been training with the kids.
Smith Rowe hasn’t been getting high-quality minutes.
Fabio Vieira hasn’t been involved.
Kieran Tierney and Tomiyasu need a run out.
Those are all options we’d have been pretty happy about last season.
The question is whether our extremely competitive manager who thinks players should be able to play 100 games a week will agree that’s the path forward.
Our midfield is arguably the toughest conundrum.
Granit and Thomas are all we have if we want a sensible result.
They are also all we have for the season.
Lose one of those two to an errant ankle stamp and we are in deep shit and we’ve blown our season.
This game really does remind me of the United game in 1999. We lost to United in extra time in an FA Cup semi final replay. Ryan Giggs scored THAT goal. Dennis Bergkamp missed THAT penalty. We missed out on winning the league by 1 point after a loss at Leeds.
Arteta will know what this game means mentally. City, the last great challenge left. His old club. His mentor. The man he calls Daddy. If he can roll them tonight, then he can roll them in the league twice and become a legendary manager in the game.
If things go wrong, the season COULD unravel.
Man, this is a strategic nightmare of a situation for a manager who tends to only have one mode… GO BIG.
So let’s see what happens.
Ok, before I go, I have a VERY special podcast for you. I teamed up with Andrew from Arseblog on The Arsenal Opinion for the first time. It’s a great chat. It was a total pleasure to have him on. I’ve been writing about Arsenal for going on 16 years, he’s been going way longer. We’re kind of the last two daily bloggers standing, he’s the biggest fan media site in the world, it was cool to hang. Anyway, listen in, he’s awesome, and the chat actually inspired my belief that we’re definitely going to win the league!
COME ON ARSENAL!