Morning all, welcome to a brand new week.
Arsenal Women were in action yesterday, coming from 3-1 down to beat West Ham 4-3 in the end. Vital points in the WSL campaign, and you can find the match report – including the goal clips – and the post-game reaction over on Arseblog News.
Obviously now attention turns to our Champions League tie with PSV tomorrow night. Mikel Arteta won’t be holding his pre-game press conference until this evening, and I don’t think there’s going to be much in the way of team news. At this point, all we can hope for is that we don’t have any more issues, and that everyone we currently have remains healthy.
Then it’s about how we set up, and what way the manager thinks the best way to approach this tie is. PSV have just one win in their last six games, so not exactly in flying form, but the opposition and the occasion can do funny things. I guess you would ordinarily say Arsenal are favourites, but with the issues we have up front, it’s probably a little more even than it would be.
We’ll hear more from the manager later, I can’t imagine he’s going to be too open about his plans, and the reality is his options are so, so limited until we get Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka back. So, unless he’s had a brainstorming idea on the training ground over the weekend, prepare yourself for something very similar to side that drew with Nottingham Forest last week, and keep fingers crossed we can do a little better in front of goal.
Looking a little further ahead, it’s a trip to Old Trafford next in the Premier League, and even with Man Utd in the doldrums, the playing field is levelled by our own issues and lack of attacking availability. It’s interesting to look at the fixtures that surround this game though. We have our two legs against PSV to contend with, while United face Real Sociedad in the Europa League.
I do wonder if, perhaps, they might prioritise those games. Which isn’t to say they won’t want to win on Sunday or put out a massively weakened side, but for them the Premier League is only for pride now. If they want European football next season (and they’ll need it or Sir Jimmy will lay off another couple of hundred people and make them real eat stale crusts and gruel from a van in the car park), then the Europa League is now their only pathway to that.
They went out of the FA Cup yesterday to Fulham. I watched a bit of that in a pub, but I was distracted by a 3 month old Bernese Mountain Dog puppy called Bjorn who was far more interesting than the game itself. His fur was so soft! And then I looked at Bruno Fernandes and I bet his scraggeldy beard stuff is like the bristles on an old broom. Anyway, the FA was another avenue to Europe which is now gone, so it’s all in on the Europa League for them.
I realise I’m trying to dream up scenarios which are beneficial to Arsenal (it feels like we need all the help we can get right now), but a first leg which leaves United in the tie but with a lot of work to do in the second leg would be ideal. It might have little impact on our game on Sunday, but perhaps if there are team selection decisions that need to be prioritised for one game over the other, United having to focus on their second leg could be helpful. Let’s see.
Not a lot else going on right now, so I’ll leave it there for today. The podcast schedule is a bit messed up this week because James is away, so we’ve moved the Arsecast Extra to Wednesday for a post-PSV chat rather than put something out today. However, what we’ll do is make our Patreon preview podcast available to everyone on the main Arsecast feed to ensure you have something to listen to. There’ll be an Arsenal Women Arsecast a bit later too as Tim and Jamie discuss the aforementioned win over West Ham.
For now, have a good one, and we’ll look ahead to PSV in more depth in tomorrow’s blog. Until then.
