Good morning from London.
It’s Aston Villa today, just three days after their big performance in the North London derby, so it’s going to be a tricky game against a decent team. The fact that games start so quickly one after the other means there is little news about the team. Just play, recover, play, recover.
There were some encouraging snippets about Ben White, but maybe it’s too early today, so it’s basically the same group that beat Sp*rs on Sunday, with maybe a little freshness here and there. Minor adjustments have been made for this purpose. I would be surprised if Gabriel Martinelli benched Raheem Sterling and didn’t start him, perhaps with either Jorginho or Mikel Merino in midfield, but beyond that, I’m not sure where or how he would change things up. I don’t know.
Arteta said of the match:
We know the difficulty of their team, that’s why they are performing so well. They have a good coach, very good players, a really good organization and we are used to that in the Premier League. There’s not much change every three days, so tomorrow we need to be really good again to win the game.
We know they have good players and there’s also the factor of Unai Emery coming back, but I like the fact that last season’s defeat to Villa still stings. Captain Martin Odegaard says:
This is also a big test for us, but we beat them earlier this season and we still have that feeling when they beat us here last season. We want to get it right and show what we learned from it. We must prepare for that and win this time.
I think we’ve seen signs over the last few games that he’s getting closer to the level that we know he can play at, so I hope he can continue that trajectory today. The injury obviously affected him, and I don’t think he was completely 100% after that, but he did well in the FA Cup against the North London derby, so if you look at it today, he definitely contributed with an assist (or assists). If you can. 2) And goals, that’s very welcome.
By the time we play Liverpool will have finished their away game at Brentford, so there will be a bit of extra pressure regardless of the result. We need to win to catch up with them, or if they drop points, we need to win to make up the difference. I don’t think the focus will change much, but that’s another aspect of today’s proceedings.
Anyway, hopefully you can produce the correct results. I think physically I need to dig deeper, so let’s hope I recover enough from Wednesday to do what I need to do later this afternoon.
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Elsewhere, here Arteta is in good form as he talks about transfers and the support of the fans at the stadium, and Tim speaks exclusively to Rene Sleggers after he was officially appointed as Arsenal Women’s head coach. are. It will also be available as a podcast a little later this morning.
Well, I’ll leave it there. Arseblog News will bring you all of our usual coverage with live blogs and post-match content. For now, I’m going to go get some coffee (and maybe *boil* some painkillers) and hopefully meet some of you before/during/after the game.
Come on, red people!
