Good morning.
Firstly, congratulations to Arsenal Women who beat Hacken 4-0 in the second leg of their Champions League qualifiers last night. There was a bit of pressure going into this match as they lost 1-0 in the first leg, but the team took the good stuff and entered the draw to be held at noon today. Check out the goal in the match report and read Jonas Eidevall’s reaction on Arseblog News.
Mikel Arteta is scheduled to meet the media today ahead of tomorrow’s game against Leicester, and we sincerely hope there are no more questions about the ‘dark arts’. As I said earlier this week, you should take it as a kind of compliment that people make such a fuss. But now everything is very boring. Of course. You can make this the talking point after the big game against Man City and squeeze out all the clicks as engagement bait. But can we now return to reality?
Every team does that, every manager does that, every player does that. Leading people into thinking this is something unique to Arsenal is boring and patronizing. Everyone knows better. There were a lot of people throwing rocks at glass houses this week. The foolishness of some former pros putting themselves under the knife in their second-half displays on Sunday is off the charts considering some of the things they did during their playing days.
I actually think this is something Mikel Arteta will quietly enjoy as a way to further foster an ‘us against them’ mentality within his team. As we know, he is the person who keeps the receipts. Ivan Toney’s ‘good kick with the boys’ tweet festered with him until we next played Brentford, at which point he motivated his team. I’m sure there are countless other cases that have never been made public, and this could be one of them.
He might be worried that having these things constantly regurgitated in the media means we’re kind of playing in the spotlight. This isn’t always helpful, but once they have something else to accept it with, these things tend to go away. And it’s hard to believe that much of this has to do with scheduling. We had three really tough away games in a week, and at the end of the last game we were up against one of the hardest teams to play against in world football with 10 men, trying to hold on to them with everything we had left. . Every team would have done the same thing as us.
I think the manager will be hoping that a relatively kinder schedule over the next few weeks will allow us to play games, score goals and get points without fuss. This means taking nothing for granted, but some periods of the season have been more difficult and particularly tricky than others. There are three home games before the next Interlull – two in the Premier League (Leicester and Southampton) and one in the Champions League (PSG). Domestically at least, you have to think this is a very winnable game and PSG will certainly be a challenge, but home advantage could be very important on Europe’s big night.
I’m also sure the topic of conversation on the training pitch this week will be about discipline. There’s no need to reiterate how ridiculous it is that Declan Rice and Leandro Trossard were sent off and suspended for something as trivial as a ‘delayed restart’, but Arteta will make sure his players can’t do that. Give the judges some opportunity to do what they love best: making themselves the center of attention. So far this season, there have been 263 yellow cards and 6 red cards in the opening five games. I don’t know how it compares to last season or previous seasons, but it seems like a lot and the only thing we can control is what we do. I think that’s the message Arteta will want to impress on his players.
For further reading this morning, Tim’s column looks at how Arteta can adjust things after three tough away games. Below is the new Arsecast. This is about Bolton’s victory. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, you can join us in anticipation of tomorrow’s Leicester match over on Patreon shortly.
Bye for now.
