Morning all.
We have our last game of pre-season today when we face Man City in the Community Shield. It is a little distinct from the other fixtures because it’s viewed as a season showpiece opener, and both managers described it as a ‘final’ in their pre-game press conferences, which tells you how seriously they take it. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter, but once you’re in a game like this, you want to win it.
It can demonstrate how ready you are for the new campaign which, in our case, kicks off on Friday evening against Coventry. Performances this pre-season haven’t been fantastic, for reasons I think we all understand with the staggered return of important players due to their World Cup commitments, so there’ll probably be a keener eye on this one than there might normally be. We want to be convinced – as the club continue to scour the market for new arrivals – that what we have is good enough against a team who are likely to be title rivals next season.
How Man City deal with the loss of Pep Guardiola will be fascinating. Typically when a manager of that stature and influence (and quality) leaves a club, there’s a period of flux, and they haven’t been especially active in the transfer market this summer beyond the £116m expenditure on Elliot Anderson. Enzo Maresca knows the Premier League well, obviously, and they still have plenty of talent in their squad, but how they navigate the post-Pep era will be very interesting. Not to mention the shifted dynamic of this fixture now, they’re the ones facing the Premier League champions, and that’s something we’re going to have to contend with throughout the new season.
From our side, there are players who would ordinarily be involved today who probably aren’t going to be ready for much more than a cameo. Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka, for example, have yet to play since returning from their breaks, and typically this pre-season any player’s first involvement is limited to just 30 minutes before they’re withdrawn. That’s easier to do in a game which is a real friendly, for want of a better term, so we’ll have to see how Mikel Arteta handles that today.
Asked about the potential involvement of those two in particular, and Martin Zubimendi, the manager said:
They will be available; they trained with us today, they will train tomorrow, and if they are in the condition we expect them to be in, they will be involved.
It would be surprising to me if they started, but certainly as second half options from the bench, I’d expect to see them at some point. I think we’ll see a start for Bruno Guimaraes in midfield, perhaps alongside Martin Odegaard as a glimpse of something I expect to see quite a bit throughout the season. Will Myles Lewis-Skelly be asked to anchor the midfield again like he has throughout pre-season? The back four more or less picks itself because we aren’t exactly replete with options bar a choice at left-back, while up front we’ve seen a lot of Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyokeres together in our warm up games, but I wonder if that might change today.
Havertz could be asked to do a job in midfield, of course, but if this game is more serious, at least in the eyes of the manager, then I’d prefer to see him configure his team with one or the other up top. My preference would be the German, but let’s see. We should see Christos Tzolis on the left, the new signing has impressed this summer and today is a chance to show what he can do against Premier League opposition. I’d like to see Max Dowman keep his place on the right, but Arteta has both Saka and Noni Madueke at his disposal and probably needs to find minutes for both. That said, the 16 year old has had that place on the right in all of our games thus far, and I genuinely think any minutes in a game like this would be more beneficial to us in terms of his development than getting Madueke slightly more match-fit.
Arteta says:
We’re going to have a really strong opponent, but we are really excited to start the season, to start with the first trophy as well. I sense a really good energy around the place; all the internationals are back, and we can’t wait to start competing. It’s a trophy that we can have because we managed last year to win the Premier League, and you can tell how hungry the players are, which is a good sign.
So, let’s see how this one goes. Kick off is 15.00 in this part of the world, and we’ll be dusting off the live blog so you can come joins us for that, as well as all the post-game stuff on Arseblog News.
Catch you later for the game, for now, have a good one.
