One more day to go until the big showdown against Liverpool and the managers have both had their say. So, what have we learned?
From Arteta
As usual on the injury front, not a lot really, but I think none of us expected to get any real detail to be honest. On Saka, Timber and Calafiori it’s probably varying percentage chance of availability, but I think you’d probably clearly say Calafiori is about a 1% chance of making the match day squad. It’s not 0% because Arteta didn’t rule it out and said there needs to be more tests that the club needed to do, but I suspect that’s code for “no chance”, even if he did say that they thought he had a bad injury before and he ended up only being out for a couple of days.
Next up is Timber, who you’d probably say is 50/50 for the match day squad. He has trained, but Arteta said that he’d only had one training session so far. He’s been out since the PSG game on 1st October, which is now three-and-a-half weeks, so he might need to be given a few more days of training, but not many I’d expect before he’s back and available from the start. I have a hope he might make the bench, but as I mentioned above, it feels a bit 50/50 on that one.
The one I think we can be a little more hopeful on is Saka. He’s been out for two weeks, but Arteta said he’d had a few more sessions. The benefit of his age is that he won’t need many sessions before he’s back up to speed and so my guy feel on that feels like he’s probably more than 75% likely to be in the squad. It’s a massive game, he’s a massive player for us, the chances are that unless he’s had another one of those moments like last weekend when Arteta said he ‘felt something’, he’ll be in that squad. And hopefully if he is he will also start.
He had his usual plaudits to hand out to Arne Slot, as you’d expect, plus he talked about enjoying a ‘beautiful’ day on Sunday, which made me crease my face a little for a wry smile when I heard it; I don’t know what you experience with these matches Mikel, but they don’t feel beautiful to me until the game is over and the points have been secured!
His ‘no excuses’ attitude is good though – culture is dictated from the leaders at the top of any organisation and the mindset Mikel has always adopted at The Arsenal has been that feeling sorry for yourself because of injuries, bemoaning luck, generally just being down, is not something he ever wants to entertain. That permeates down to the players and so you know their mindset tomorrow is not going to be of a team sad that they are missing key players; this will be a collective of players up for the fight.
Arne Slot
He was very similar to Arteta in giving plaudits to Arsenal, but also started off by saying he doesn’t know if Chelsea or Arsenal will be higher in the table, so I can’t quite work out if that was a little bit of a subtle dig at us, or if he was just saying nice things about how far Maresca has taken Chelsea. What is clear, however, is that he made it obvious that they have studied us. It’s not really super detailed and unknown to talk about our style of inverting full backs and having them come inside – everyone knows that about Arsenal by now – but I just got the vibe that he already knows how he is going to set his team up and he has a plan to counter us.
He also spoke about their defensive record and how a lot of that is down to dominating and controlling the ball. That’s a little insight to how Liverpool are slightly different under Slot, I reckon, because under Klopp they were back to front quickly, transition and rapid-strike football. Slot has them a little more patient in the build up. Tomorrow it will be interesting because you’d expect possession to be a little more 50/50.
In terms of their injury news he did confirm that all of those players already out will stay out, which means no Jota and given his record against us – eight goals in 15 games I think I read somewhere – that is a bit of a blow for them and bonus for us. They are missing players like we are, but their players aren’t as pivotal as ours. If Saka, Timber, Calafiori, Saliba and Odegaard aren’t playing, that’s like Liverpool missing Salah, Trent, Van Dijk. That would have a massive impact on how they play. But whilst Jota is an important player for them, they have a load of equally quality attackers to replace him. What they can’t replace is Salah, which is why we need to cross everything that Saka is fit and available.
I think I’m going to leave it there for today. Saturday will be a day of chores at home, probably avoiding football because I don’t want to see City pound Southampton, then tomorrow is the big one.
Catch you wonderful humans then.
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