Before we begin with our business, here’s some interesting things that has happened around the world of football. Madrid and Mbappe humbled the great Pep Guardiola and Erling Haaland. Aston Villa made sure Liverpool lost 2 very important points at this stage of Premier League. We won, thanks to a double from Mikel Merino, against Leicester and things are looking a wee bit better at the moment. Lets dive into it.
Liverpool dropping points against Aston Villa has put us back into the mix. We are 8 points behind them with a game in hand against West Ham. And they have to play Man City away next. If things go our way and City decides to take Madrid’s revenge against Arne, we can bridge that gap to 5 points with a game in hand. To top it off, the next to next game of Liverpool is against Newcastle so yeah, lets hope the stars align.
We have been given several lifelines throughout this season, and the season before and we have always failed to capitalise. We can fix it by winning our game against West Ham. We must remember that we will visit Anfield in the last stage of the league, and we need to make sure that we accumulate as much as points as possible. If it goes down to getting a win at Anfield, that lot can make it very difficult for us.
Champions League – Round of 16
The draw for round of 16 is today, 11 AM English time. As we finished third, we could only play against the winners of PSV v Juventus or Milan v Feyenoord. PSV eliminated Juventus on a 4-3 aggregate while Milan lost Feyenoord in a penalty shootout. That narrows it down either PSV or Feyenoord for us. Considering that there’s Bayern, Madrid, PSG in the mix – I am sure every one of us will be happy with our next fixture.
If we managed to win against one of the Dutch sides, we will be facing one of the Madrid, Bayern, Leverkusen, and Atletico in Semis – so yeah, round of 16 is the easiest one we could get. Road ahead will be much tougher.
Injury List
Ben White is back. That’s some relief in the defence considering we were walking on a thin line and had to reach out to a 17 old MLS to save us. MLS has been very impressive though keeping Calafiori on the bench.
Tomiyasu finally went for the knee surgery. I was cheering for that lad because he was very good defensively, was a work machine and had those runs in him but the injuries has not let him play at Arsenal. Unfortunately, he won’t be back before the summer window, just like Jesus and we are stuck with 2 players costing us 350k+ / week wages for the rest of this year.
Martinelli and Havertz are still far away from a return, so we have very limited options upfront. Nwaneri is holding one side, Trossard the other and we discovered a CF in Merino. Sterling has been so poor, we needed to move a CM in front of the goal, and he scored 2 in 30 min. It sums up our problems in the attack.
Arsenal financials
Not that it’s my money or I am too concerned, but we did well financially this year. Thanks to the Champions League money and finishing 2nd in the Premier League, we have managed to lessen our losses. Our revenue increased by 31%, broadcasting revenue increased, profit on player sales increased, and we didn’t need to spend 18m GBP for letting players leave. Even after all these, we made a 18m GBP loss, thanks to the increase in wages from 234m to a whooping 328m. We had renewed some contracts (Martinelli, Saka, Ben White) and we brought in players on higher wages. It’s still okay, if we shed some of it in the summer. Zinchenko is a candidate, Tierney will leave and lets see what else happens.
Having a positive net spend on transfer means we will have money to spend in summer. Mikel and the club already confirmed they want to keep the money for the summer and for the right person. That’s a positive for the next season, while we manage with Merino as our local Mbappe.
Right, that’s me done. I hope I didn’t miss anything. I will be back with the match day blog tomorrow. Hope you are having a good time.
My position on City Liverpool is more based on City just look lost at the moment.
Maybe they’ll raise their game against Liverpool (like the Spuddies used to on occasions against us back in the peak Wenger years) which would of course suit us – I’m just not convinced it’ll happen.
Of course I’ll be happy to be wrong come 6.30 tomorrow evening.
Marc
You’re right. I’m happy to admit to being a Marxist as I have many times on here. As an economic system (which despite historical labels has never seen the light of day) it is incomparable to the mess you support which breeds hate, inequality, unchecked power and misery (including among those po-faced miserable billionaire cunts you idolise). It speaks to your personality perhaps and the awful environment you’re immersed in in the home counties.
There…I’ve said it…again! You seem to think wanting a better society for all is a fucking weakness, or wokeness! Why don’t you take the time to proudly admit to being a neoliberal reactionary with a penchant for fascist dictators….
Can you hear Marc-y sing? No-o no-o
Etc. etc.
I can’t hear a fackin thing..no-o-oo-o.
Keep on keeping on mate. I know you’re a massive commie at heart. We all are!
BTW…I think City may get something out of their game.
Hola KP, Gracias por el enlace del futbal. Todo va muy bien por aquí.
Hoy nos vamos a las montañas para filmaron poco con nuestro nueva amigo. Amigo pinto de drones DJI.
No brain ache KP with my amazing linguistic Spanish skills.
Not so amigo my trusty Timekettle fluent-talk is very cool I talk and it’s corretomundo according to the Spanish I talk with though it.
The mountains should be fun to finally get filming and using my new X2D 100C for the first time. I may miss the match but I need to de-stress with all that’s going on and has been for the last 5 years.
The professionals I’ve hired are doing a stellar job not least James from Palmdale motors who have sorted us a really cool car that would have cost really silly money in Thailand I would never have bought for.
Ditto our shipping company.
Thanks I’ll check there link out later and I can see us coming to Madrid often, as junior really likes it here, too. Hi’s picking up Spanish really fast…..
Marc
It isn’t me that wants the state to crash…have you been in my medicine cabinet? I noticed I was down in my Quaalude supply …it’s either you or the cat.
I have a funny feeling in my gut City will take a point at least from Pool as they have 4 key players out. Depends whether Harland plays.
TRVL
I’ll reply after the mountain trip where I know the score and have read your’s and LIR’s comments – well all but one……….
Tony
Impressionante! Have a good day.
What’s the motor you’re looking at? Do you think you’d be able to burn off my Volvo V70. Marc, it’s a low emission tree hugging one I promise! Only 35 quid tax!
Harland’s availability will make a massive difference to tomorrow.
Will Pep throw him in if he’s only say 50%?
Kroenke
You really have an issue with other people’s views (its strange that the left always call out those on the right for crushing people’s freedoms when its the left who look to cancel people or suppress freedoms) – why do you hate another person doing well through hard work? I don’t know what happened to you to create this twisted hate of success – I’d guess it because deep down you know that for your political system to work (it doesn’t, hasn’t and never will despiste your claims of it never been tried – if it hasn’t and its so clever why hasn’t it been tried somewhere is clearly beyond your thought reasoning) it needs hard working decent capitalists like me to actually do the hard work.
Breaking news (brace yourself lads)
VAR got something right!
looks like MA’s still going to force action to the left side first and foremost, with Cala sitting higher and Timber starting much deeper than usual…MA can claim all he wants that he’s all in on Ethan, but his actions continually suggest otherwise…it will be interesting to see how he will be deployed once Saka has returned…I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he found himself with a far more minimized role once again, unless more injuries were to occur
we should be ultra aggresssive against this 16th place side with Bowen up top and no Paqueta, but i would suspect our blunt instrument of a manager will have us throwing 400 crosses into box in the hopes that his fake ass Merino experiment pays off…how apropos would it be if another shoehorning luxury buy became our regular Striker…only in Artetaland
Tony—enjoy your day bud
good to see some more intentional activity on Ethan’s side…you can feel the energy in the stadium rise when we start include our best offensive weapon in the build up
not sure if Potter is the kind of manager who can ween this side off Moyes’s tit..they’re so fucking negative they make Arteta seem almost Klopp-like in comparison
this Hammer’s side is so non-threatening that Gabriel has now been a wingbacker on both sides of the pitch…I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that before from him…well at least not in a league fixture
not worried about the slow start, especially with all those bench options lol
Rice proves once again why he can’t be a viable option in more advanced spaces
that’s why Cala’s not a real LB…love him going forward though…that said, I would have loved a proper forward option instead last summer
1-0 down
Rice was inadequate there, which otherwise is his better idiosyncrasy
But
Before all should have been bloy by Cala as RVL implies correctly
Same old same old from Arteta – its all just a bit flat and uninspiring. The problem today is our bench basically has no attacking options other than Sterling (has he has a good appearance for us yet?) or N. Butler-Oyedeji who’s never kicked a ball in the PL.
Drop points here and even Wicksy will have to admit Arteta’s a bottle job.