Saturday miscellany: Tactics, strikers, archives, fundraisers

Good morning.

It’s Saturday and there’s a big game tomorrow, but I don’t really want to talk about it today. I can’t lie and say it’s not at the very forefront of my mind, but I also have to preview the game in tomorrow’s blog so I don’t really want to get into it too much today.

So, this is gonna be a short/different one today. Primarily I’m going to point you in the direction of other stuff to read and watch. First, Lewis has a great new tactics column about how Man City set up against us at Wembley and in subsequent games too, and what Arsenal can try and do about that if it’s the same tomorrow. The big question is: will this be a classic Pep Guardiola switcheroo? Everyone expects him to do one thing, but he then does another. I guess we’ll find out in due course.

Over on Sky Sports, the always excellent Nick Wright makes the case for Kai Havertz to start up front at the Etihad tomorrow. This isn’t just personal preference, this is based on the stats and technical level of Kai versus Viktor Gyokeres. The Swedish striker remains an ongoing topic of conversation despite being our top scorer this season, but in a game where we absolutely have to make the most of our possession, his lack of technical security doesn’t seem like the right fit. Perhaps the decision will come down to fitness more than anything else, but if I were picking the team, I’d look at Gyokeres as a better option for the latter stages of the game, for sure.

Back to Lewis, and yesterday he pointed me in the direction of a new feature on the Premier League website, which is an archive of all the games going back to its inception in 1992-93. You can go back, via it’s somewhat fiddly search function, and watch highlights of any game from any season. Maybe you want to watch Mikel Arteta score a late winner against Man City in 2012, or the full replay of a 3-0 win there in 2010 when City had a man sent off in the first few minutes (what I’d give for a repeat of that tomorrow!), or the 5-1 win at home last season when Myles Lewis-Skelly got that goal and stayed so, so humble with his celebration (some classic Conor McNamara comms on that one too). Take your pick of any of those, or anything else that tickles your fancy!

Finally for today, Elliot has a message about the ongoing fundraiser for the Arsenal Foundation:

A very special update, and a message of gratitude. ❤️

— YankeeGunner (@arsenalvisionpodcast.com) 2026-04-17T13:11:31.273Z

If you want just the details, we had a goal of £200,000 to reach before the end of April, and as of this date and this time of writing, it currently stands at over £220,000. As Elliot explains in the post above, a wonderfully generous donation of £150,000 is still to come (🙏), and who knows where we’ll end up by the end of the month.

Arsenal fans online get a lot of stick, some it deserved to be fair, and you can barely move these days without reading opinion pieces about our supporters, how they behave and are perceived. What I’ll say is this, and I do think it’s important: almost all of those are based on the interactions the writers see or are involved with on Twitter and other platforms, which may be representative of that particular section of Arsenal fans, but not Arsenal fans in general.

Every year the communities at ArsenalVision Podcast and Arseblog come together and support this fundraiser in the most amazing way. The generosity is incredible, and the consistency of their support is mind-blowing to all of us. We live in a difficult world, where everything gets more and more expensive, the cost of living is being driven up by lunatics doing mad, unnecessary shit that impacts all of us, and yet people are still prepared to give what they can to support this brilliant cause.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like that side of ‘Arsenal fans’ is far more worthy of mention than people who spend all day fighting with fans of other clubs, random blue tick wankers, and even other Arsenal fans on the worst website in the world. I get it though, it doesn’t really create the same kind of engagement, but next time someone bleats off about our fanbase, please remember that – in this slice of the Internet at least – those criticisms do not apply in the slightest.

Finally finally, which I promise is the final finally, we have a deep dive in tomorrow’s game on our Patreon preview podcast which is out now. Remember that in April Arseblog will donate every penny of our Patreon revenue to good causes, and on top of the €25,000 donation we made to the fundraiser, we’ll announce details of further donations next week. If you want to sign up for even a month, you get instant access to this pod and all our Patreon content, and you’ll know that subscription is going to help people who really, really need it.

It costs $6 per month plus sales tax if that’s applicable in your country, and you can do it at patreon.com/arseblog.

Have a great Saturday folks, back tomorrow for the big one. I can feel the nerves already.