League position not a factor as we face another tricky away day

Morning all.

After our midweek exploits, it’s another away trip today, this time to the City Ground to face Nottingham Forest. On paper, this is one of those games where people might look at the Premier League table, see that it’s 1st against 17th, and think it should be routine. It doesn’t really work that these days (see Wolves at home back in December, for example), and I suspect it will be trickier than some people imagine.

Forest’s last game was 8 days ago, in the meantime, we’ve played twice. The game they played saw them go out of the FA Cup to a lower-league team, and the added rest, coupled with Sean Dyche demanding a positive response from his players is what we’re going to have to deal with today. We know fine well his teams tend to be difficult to play against, but I bet he read them the riot act after the Wrexham game, and that’s going to be a factor.

The fact they’ve had that extra rest makes me wonder if there’s scope for Mikel Arteta to add one or two players to our starting line-up who haven’t played as much of late. Some fresh legs could be very useful in that sense. Whether you bring in Eberechi Eze for Martin Odegaard, for example, or shift things around in the front three a bit, I don’t know for sure, but I think I’d like to see a little rotation which takes into account the hectic schedule we’ve had so far this month. We keep hearing about the big squad we have, today feels like a day where we might need to it, and the bench, to the fullest extent possible.

At the back, options remain limited although there was a slight hint from the manager that we might have someone back today. Maybe Cristhian Mosquera is closest to a return, but if not, I do wonder if we’ll see the same back four that started at Stamford Bridge. The midweek game against Inter is a challenge, but in terms of overall importance it doesn’t come close to this one today. With a big game next weekend, that Champions League tie  provides the real opportunity for Arteta to rotate, and unless there’s an injury issue we don’t know about, I think we’ll see that back four again today.

The boss says of today’s challenge:

Winning away from home in the Premier League is extremely tough. They are a team that we have beaten over the last few years, and we have done a lot of things right to beat a really good team. With Sean, they are different, very, very efficient in what they do, very clear identity and that’s what makes them very dangerous.

Our record away this season has been a bit up and down. Obviously the two defeats we suffered in the league came at Anfield and Villa Park, and only once have we won away with a margin of more than one goal – the 2-0 win at Burnley. So, there’s definitely room for improvement in that sense. I think I said this about our trip to Bournemouth as well, but these are the days where you have to really dig in and demonstrate your title credentials.

With Man City playing before us today, and likely to score about 10 against United in the Manchester derby, the pressure will be on us to respond. It’s been the other way around in the last few weeks, and while it’s not necessarily extra pressure above and beyond how a title race normally goes, it’s another factor we’ll have to deal with come kick-off. As I said though, the quality is there, the depth is there, the options are there for the manager to use from the start and off the bench, and fingers crossed we can bring all three points back to North London.

Right, I’ll leave it there for now. We have a preview podcast over on Patreon if you need something to listen to, and as ever we’ll have live blog coverage and all the post-game stuff on Arseblog News later.

Come on Arsenal!