Carabao Cup semi-final 2nd leg action tonight as we face Chelsea at the Emirates. The first leg ended 0-0 at Stamford Bridge, so it’s winner takes all tonight, with a place in the final against Man City to play for.
Bar Petr Cech, who will sit out as he usually does in the cup competitions, we should be playing our strongest possible side tonight. We don’t have a league game this weekend so we don’t have to consider fatigue, or pick a team with that on the horizon, so there’s no reason to rest players beyond the aches and strains we have to contend with for every selection.
It looks as if Nacho Monreal is fit, so he’d obviously start if that’s the case, but it’ll be interesting to see what formation Arsene Wenger uses. He returned to a back four at the weekend for the win over Crystal Palace and it helped bring about some of our best football in quite a while. The four goal flurry in the early stages was in no small part due to the fact Monreal was deployed as a left-back and able to get forward, but we’ll have to wait and see if we stick with it.
We’ve lost just one of our last seven games against Chelsea, and in five of those games we’ve played with a back three. On the other hand, the last three fixtures have been draws (two 0-0s and a 2-2 a few weeks ago), while a 1-1 in the Community Shield was settled with a penalty shootout. It’s a game we’ll have to win, as away goals come into play in extra-time, and the manager is expecting this game to be a bit more open than the first one:
I think the two teams know each other very well. The first leg was very blocked, the second leg will certainly be more open, because at some stage, the teams will have to open up to try to win the game. It should be much more spectacular than the first one.
I’m on board with that really. It’s a cup tie, a semi-final, let’s have a go and see what happens. We’ve certainly still got the attacking talent to cause them problems, even without Sanchez and the fact that Henrikh Mkhitaryan can’t play because he’s cup-tied, but let’s see what kind of a defensive performance we put in too.
When you get this far in a cup competition, regardless of its prestige or how it’s perceived, you want to get to the final so let’s hope we can do that.
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Meanwhile, back to the far more important subject of TRANSFERS, Arsene Wenger completely downplayed the links with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang yesterday. Asked if he was confident about securing a deal for the Borussia Dortmund striker at his press conference, he said:
Confident or not confident, I don’t know. At the moment we are not close to any deal, is it Aubameyang or anybody else.
It was then put to him that Olivier Giroud could be used as part of the deal, to which he continued:
The negotiations are not as far as that. You never know how close you are. At the moment this is one of the possible movements, buy we have other things in mind as well. We have plenty of opportunities in different positions, you know, so the final decision is not made.
As ever comments about transfers not being done, or not close to being done, create some consternation, but how far away can you be when your Chief Executive, Head of Recruitment and Contract Bloke have been in Germany since the weekend for discussions? It’s not as if we’re sending them the odd fax here and there, and there’s no way they’d be there just on the off chance.
They’re there because Dortmund are open to selling, and stuff is going on. To me, there’s definitely an element of Wenger refusing to say anything that might spark a reaction from the Bundesliga side after the way they took umbrage to some fairly innocuous comments he made last week when asked about Aubameyang.
Obviously the longer things go on without an agreement being found the more you tend to worry, and if there aren’t any significant developments today then I’d start to get a bit anxious that the two clubs are at something of an impasse, but let’s wait and see what goes on. Things can change very quickly one way or the other when it comes to transfers, as we saw when late developments allowed Sanchez to go to United, so hopefully we can satisfy the requirements when it comes to this one.
Is it interesting that Wenger said ‘We have other things in mind as well’? Is it a message to Dortmund that we’re prepared to look elsewhere if they continue to play hardball? Is it typical Wenger obfuscation about transfers, akin to him saying we’re open to signing anyone who can make us better? Are we looking at players in other positions?
Links to West Brom defender Johnny Evans have surfaced again this morning, not exactly a deal that would get everyone going or anything, but there’s too much smoke around this one for there not to be any fire. Quite how much difference he might make to this team is open to question, whereas you could certainly see how a clinical, prolific goalscorer would give us an attacking edge we lack. Anyway, let’s see what happens, and that the men in Germany can do what’s required.
We’ll have a live blog of the game for you later on, join us for that and all the pre and post-match stuff over on Arseblog News. Finally for today, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, after being unveiled as the new number 7, could wear two different shirt numbers for us this season, find out why here.
Until later.
