Given Arsenal’s abysmal away form I think a win in the home leg is absolutely crucial and we really need to keep a clean sheet too. The game at Everton on Sunday showed just how disfunctional we are away from home and it left our hopes of finishing in the top four in real doubt. With four of our last six Premier League games away from home we might have to depend on the Europa League as our route into next season’s Champions League and progression to the semi-finals would certainly be a great boost for the team.
If we’re going to progress I think we will need to get a few of the players who missed the Everton game back and hopefully both Laurent Koscielny and Granit Xhaka will have recovered from their respective injuries in time to play against Napoli. Lucas Torreira will of course be available as he was only suspended on Sunday and that domestic ban has finished so he can hopefully have an influence in the final six league games too. Aaron Ramsey didn’t start on Sunday either as he was carrying a knock, but he didn’t appear to show any ill effects when he came on.
Unai Emery surely has to go with his strongest possible line up and we are at least helped by not having our next league game until next Monday when we pay a visit to Watford. Petr Cech is our cup goalkeeper so he will start, but after that I hope to see a Koscielny and Sokratis Papastathopoulos combination in the centre of the defence with Sead Kolasinac and Ainsley Maitland-Niles either side of them. If he opts for three central defenders I would prefer to see Nacho Monreal get the nod over Shkodran Mustafi, but I imagine Mustafi would benefit from that decision.
I think he will go with three central defenders which will put an onus on the full-backs to do an awful lot of our attacking and try to get behind the Napoli defence in wide areas. If there’s a midfield axis of Torreira and Xhaka I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ramsey and Mesut Ozil in front of them with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang as the lone striker. The other option is to leave probably Torreira out and put Ramsey beside Xhaka with Alexandre Lacazette playing up front with Aubameyang.
All of those options would leave no place in the team for Alex Iwobi or Henrikh Mkhitaryan which would be tough on Iwobi who was one of the few players not to fail miserably on Sunday, but he only played for the final 15 minutes. Mkhitaryan hasn’t looked sharp since returning from his injury and he was in great form before it. Hopefully he can regain that form soon because there is no doubt we need his class before the end of the season.
We’re well and truly into the business end of the season now and Arsenal are still right up there in the fight for a top four finish as well as in the last eight of the Europa League. I still can’t say I’m overly confident of them achieving either goal due mainly to our awful away form and the amount of goals we concede. Before the last round we were second favourites behind Chelsea, but Napoli have moved ahead of us which gives you an idea of how serious a threat they are to us. The betting is very close though and anyone who has seen Chelsea in recent months would be equally apprehensive about their chances as I am of Arsenal’s.
What we need in the first leg is the sort of performance we saw at home to Spurs, Chelsea and United this season and those games proved the players have it in them. If we can keep that elusive clean sheet and get at least a couple of goals I think we have a real chance of making it to the semi-finals, but it’s going to take a monumental effort from every player from the first minute to the last. It would be great to make it that far though and maybe even welcome Santi Cazorla back to the Emirates if his Villarreal team can overcome Valencia in their quarter-final match up.
That’s it for today.
See you tomorrow.
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