Well folks, here we go again.
It’s Wolves at home to kick off the new season, and on paper I guess you could say there are probably more difficult games we could have had. Which is to take nothing for granted by the way, but home at 3pm on the first Saturday of the season is exactly where you want to be.
In terms of team news, Jurrien Timber is available after a foot injury kept him out of our last couple of friendlies, and beyond that it’s only Takehiro Tomiyasu, Kieran Tierney and maybe Fabio Vieira who aren’t available. That gives Mikel Arteta plenty to choose from, and there are a few questions about who might play and where.
I think Oleksandr Zinchenko will start at left-back as we ease Riccardo Calafiori into life in the Premier League, with the rest of the defence (and keeper) picking themselves. In midfield, I’d be very tempted to play a trio of Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and Martin Odegaard, with Gabriel Jesus up front, but I suspect the manager might add Thomas Partey to the mix, with Havertz starting further forward rather than Jesus.
We know he’s going to play Bukayo Saka on the right, and just based on what we’ve seen in pre-season, Leandro Trossard just looks a little bit ahead of Gabriel Martinelli, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see him start. If it is Havertz as the 9, that’s a relationship that worked well for us throughout last season, and it leaves us with the two Brazilians (among others) on the bench should we need something a bit different as the game goes on. Whoever he chooses though, we have a strong first XI, with some excellent options on the bench.
One of the big questions about this season is how we do better than we did last time out? It’s possible we might have to improve again to win the league, and that was something Arteta addressed in his press conference. He revealed the motivation of his players, saying:
On the last day [of last season], we had a gathering together with all the club players and they were coming to me and saying: ‘We are going to do it next year, we are going to be better, we want more.’ And when you see that you accept they’re the ones driving that ambition so that’s always possible.
And spoke of his own feelings going into this new campaign:
Again, very excited! It’s like you’re trying to climb the highest mountain. It’s the most difficult league in the world and you feel surrounded by a lot of people who have the same ambition every single day to achieve it. We’re certainly going to try.
Wolves will be a decent test, certainly no walkovers, and Gary O’Neil has had a full pre-season this time around to prepare his side. They will be without Pedro Neto, of course, who has been hoodwinked into moving to a club where they have more players than a cigarette factory, but we can’t take anything for granted. They still have some threat at the attacking end of the pitch, and the fact they can just come and have a go gives them a freedom and lack of pressure we definitely don’t.
That said, if we can click the way we know we can, then we can cause any team in this league problems. Set-pieces got us our win over Lyon last week, but we probably just need to be a bit more efficient with the opportunities we make from open play. There was just a little bit of pre-season in some of our play, and hopefully that little bit of extra sharpness will be present in our play today. An opening day win would help settle nerves, in a season where expectations are going to be higher than ever, so let’s keep fingers crossed that desire and motivation to go better than last season is reflected in the performance and the result.
For more on this game, you can listen to our preview podcast over on Patreon right now. The Arseblog live blog returns as well, so if you can’t see the game, we’ll have up to the second live text commentary, plus all the post-game stuff (report, player ratings etc) over on Arseblog News.
Right, let’s leave it there for now. Welcome back to those of you who take the summer off, and come on you reds!
