Arsenal v Southampton Preview

It’s been two weeks since we had to go through the torture of watching Arsenal player, but they’re back in all their glory tomorrow when Southampton come a calling. Since the players went off on their international break quite a lot has happened and not all of it in our corner of North London. That other lot up the road did what quite a lot of us fans think Arsenal should do when they decided to part ways with their manager.

Of course they managed to replace him the very next day when everybody’s favourite manager Jose Mourinho got the job. At least his appointment at Spurs means the rumours of him taking the reins at Arsenal if Unai Emery were to leave can be put to bed. On the face of it Spurs will hope he can bring them that elusive trophy, but I remain to be convinced that it’s a good appointment for them. They have bitten the bullet though while Arsenal seem determined to keep faith in their man despite results and performances indicating his time could and probably should be up.

I could take the results if the performances were at least showing some promise and of course just about any fan will take good results without the performances. We have only won twice in our last 10 league games though and haven’t won at all in our last four. We’ve dropped back to sixth in the table which isn’t the worst position to be in, but the eight point gap to fourth place is already looking difficult for us to make up.

In those last four games we have led in our two home games only to be pegged back by Palace and Wolves and we have lost our two away games to Sheffield United and Leicester. In those two defeats we were in with a real chance until the opposition scored first on both occasions and we were totally incapable of coming back. The exact opposite happened in both home games when the opposition managed to come back against us and Palace even pulled back a two goal deficit.

The combination of not being able to hold a lead when we have one or peg one back when we go behind is a very worrying one and it will cost the manager his job if he can’t change it. The rumours of player unrest persist with Granit Xhaka, Lucas Torreira and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang among those who could be on their way out if things don’t change. They all have different reasons for wanting to go if you believe the rumours and I’m sure it can’t be doing much good for the squad morale.

As bad as things are we have a chance to make up some ground and maybe even turn things around a little in our next four league games. We play Southampton and Brighton at home while we travel to both Norwich and West Ham and to be honest we quite simply have to take 12 points from those four games. Anything less and the pressure on the manager will be almost unbearable as we play three of the rest of the big six in our following five games.

Southampton are on a very bad run at the moment with only one point in their last seven games, but they have taken seven of their eight points away from home. They have conceded more goals than any other team, but 21 of those 29 goals were conceded at home. They are there to be beaten no matter how poorly we’re playing at the moment and anything other than a win would be a disaster.

The manager needs to pick his strongest team and end his ridiculous trend of picking seven defensive outfield players in every game. We’re at home against a team who concede loads of goals and the way to beat them is to play attacking football and put our best attacking players out from the start. Mesut Ozil has been back in favour in the last two games, but for some bizarre reason Nicolas Pepe was left out of the team in those games.

We can’t defend to save our lives no matter who we’re playing against, but at least we should be able to dominate teams like Southampton enough to make sure our defensive inadequacies are relatively unimportant. If we’re going to make any progress we need players other than Aubameyang to step up and get their fair share of goals. He has half of all of our league goals so far and that’s just not good enough from the rest of the team.

I’m not saying it’s going to be a walkover against Southampton and I fully expect them to give us some problems, but the manager and the players must know things cannot continue as they are. If we’re going to turn things around under the current manager it has to start now and we won’t get a better chance than against Southampton. Three points won’t exactly herald a new beginning, but it’s an awful lot better than any other alternative.

That’s it for today.

See you tomorrow.