Thursday 9 May 2019

It’s Do Or Die For Arsenal Tonight

After last night’s events in Amsterdam the impending sense of doom as an Arsenal fan increased by at least ten fold. What Spurs did to come back and win that game was something that is so far beyond Arsenal that it’s not even comprehensible. It means they will play Liverpool in the Champions League final on June 1st while we have our chance to make it to the Europa League final tonight.

I for one will be wholeheartedly behind Liverpool on that night, but Arsenal need to do their part too. If we can progress tonight we will play the final in Baku three days before the Champions League final and it would give us a chance to get something on the board before Spurs play. For us to end the season with a European trophy when they have had their best season in 58 years would be some consolation and it would be even better if Liverpool beat them.

I’m fairly confident of Liverpool doing just that, but my confidence in Arsenal living up to their part of the deal is considerably less. My confidence in them progressing to the final isn’t even all that high and who can blame given our recent performances. Four points from our last six games against teams below us in the league has blown our top four chances and left us with the Europa League as our only realistic route to Champions League football for next season.

Third place was well within our reach with all the other contenders faltering too, but we blew it big style. With United playing at home to already relegated Cardiff on Sunday the chances are we will finish sixth if we don’t win our game at Burnley at the same time. My confidence in the team winning that game is hovering somewhere around zero at the moment and it could go even lower after tonight.

Unai Emery has made some big mistakes in team selection, tactics and substitutions recently, but he has a chance to make some amends tonight. We went to Napoli in the second leg in the last round with a two goal lead and progressed after winning 1-0 on the night. We have a two goal lead tonight too, but crucially for Valencia they managed an away goal at our place last week.

There is going to be an awful lot of pressure on the players tonight to put in a performance to get us to that final, but pressure isn’t something they have coped with well recently with the exception of our European games. Valencia aren’t a bad side, but Napoli were better and we rose to the challenge in both legs against them. Even in the home leg against Valencia last week we came back from 1-0 down to win 3-1 despite almost always falling to pieces when we have gone behind in games recently.

We need to be really tight at the back tonight and it’s something these players struggle to do on a regular basis. With Valencia needing to push on we can hopefully exploit any space behind their defence with the pace of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Despite missing his fair share of chances he is still right up there with the leading scores in the Premier League and the goals both him and Alexandre Lacazette have scored this season have gotten us out of a lot of tricky situations.

It’s the lack of goals from our midfield that has been our real attacking problem for me, but our biggest problem is undoubtedly our defence. When the same players make the same stupid mistakes time after time it beggars belief, but it just keeps happening anyway. The penalty Granit Xhaka gave away against Brighton on Sunday was a case in point and there can’t be too many of us who didn’t know exactly what was going to happen when he attempted to break up the Brighton attack. Sure he wasn’t helped by the terrible pass from Henrikh Mkhitaryan to gift them possession, but he didn’t engage his brain for a single second in how he dealt with it.

Shkodran Mustafi has the ability to do exactly the same thing to us at any given time, but I have no doubt both of them will be playing tonight. To be honest the manager has very few options due to the squad size and the players he has absent through injury so we all have a fairly good idea which players will be playing. Maybe he’ll pull something out of the hat, but with so much resting on this game and I would be very surprised if he did.

As I said already my confidence isn’t high, but I live in hope. The events of the last two nights have shown us anything can happen in football and maybe that will include us making it to the final. I know Valencia will take heart from the comebacks of Liverpool and Spurs, but I choose to hope for those games giving us hope of what would be a reversal in our fortunes. 

I really worry how we will react if they score first, but last week did show we are capable of keeping our heads at least. Our reaction to going behind in away games has been different though and it has made us all question the mental strength of the players. Maybe they can show tonight that it is something that they do possess. I had wondered before last week if the players had been saving their best performances for the Europa League and they showed as much in that game. It’s time for them to show us how much it means to them again tonight and maybe raise our hopes just a little after such a dismal end to the season.

That’s it for today.

See you tomorrow.

No comments:

Post a Comment