I have just had a piece of toast. I don’t know if this augurs well for the day ahead and Arsenal’s trip to Hull, but I just thought I’d mention it anyway. There’s no such thing as lucky toast, so I doubt it. I suspect what transpires today on the pitch will be much more down to the performance of 11 millionaire footballers and possibly three substitutes.
It might also have something to do with the way those 11 footballers are put together and told to play. What kind of team will the manager select today? I think there will be changes from the side that drew 1-1 with PSG, but not too many. With the news that Olivier Giroud won’t make the trip because of a toe injury, which is probably a toe injury but could also be a ‘toe injury’ wink wink, we could see Alexis Sanchez up front again.
I would like to see new signing Lucas Perez get a run out because he is an actual striker and I feel like we play better with an actual striker, but then the manager might be thinking of what we did away from home at Watford with Alexis up front and hoping we do that again. It might depend on who is available for the wide positions. Theodore P Walcott was back in training yesterday but the manager said he had to make a late decision on him.
He could return to the right, meaning Alex Iwobi could play left, and thus Alexis up top. He might also feel that having a striker on the bench could be a good thing in case we need to change something late on. It’ll be interesting to see if he, in the absence of Giroud, adds Chuba Akpom to the squad for some extra firepower.
All eyes will be on midfield though, with the manager expanding to some degree about his decision not to use Granit Xhaka very much so far this season. What it boils down to at the moment is early season caution, Wenger going with partnerships he knows and which have, in the past, worked well for us. Maybe they’re not functioning quite as well as we’d like at this moment in time, but it’s very much a case of better the devil you know.
On the Swiss international, he said:
He has the stature, the power, the strength, what we want is that for him to use that in a very efficient way. It’s short you know, we are September, we only started in August. It’s one month, for many players it took them some time to get into the team and he will do that without any problem. Every week he’s stronger and better, and he will have a huge impact as a player.
And on his role in the team, he continued:
I personally prefer him as a box to box player, because he has the engine, the power, the long pass, he likes to come deep and distribute the game. I think as well he has the engine to make an impact with his runs.
Perhaps at odds with people’s idea of Xhaka as an anchorman, sitting deep and spraying passes over the top for speedsters to race onto. The truth is we just haven’t seen enough of him in an Arsenal shirt to know what he does best and how he does it. It certainly doesn’t sound to me as if Wenger has any reservations about him, it’s just a case that he’s easing him into the team – a bit more slowly than we might like perhaps – but nothing more sinister than that.
I fully expect him to play today. I have no idea who he’ll be playing with. The manager had nice things to say about Mohamed Elneny too, so maybe he’ll get a run-out. Xhaka did well enough against Watford to keep his place, in my opinion, but hopefully today he can make a similar impact on the game and with the benefit of a few more weeks of training and adaptation under his belt, he can start to become a fixture in the team.
As we mentioned during the week, addressing some of the defensive instability we’ve seen in the last two performances would be very welcome today. Let’s not present them with chances to make our life much more difficult than it should be. My feeling is that if we can do that, the chances of us controlling the game and being more dangerous from an attacking point of view will be greater as well.
This is a game from which we should be taking nothing less than three points. Let’s hope that’s what we do today. If you can’t see the game, remember you can follow it live on the Arseblog live blog. Check back for a post later with all the details or bookmark our default live blog page and updates will begin automatically (we’re still working to get the chat side of things fixed, so thanks for your patience there).
In the meantime, make sure you check out this week’s Arsecast, chatting PSG, Alexis up front and lots more with Paolo Bandini.
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Catch you later for the match, all the post-game stuff as usual on Arseblog News.
