Arsenal face West Ham United at the Emirates Stadium in their third game of the 2018/19 Premier League season, with Unai Emery still looking for his first win of the new campaign.
Arsenal had an unfortunate start to the season, with matches against Manchester City and Chelsea, and didn’t manage to pick up any points from the two fixtures. As a result, this clash with West Ham is looking even more important, so Emery can prove the team are on the right track.
The Gunners should have close to their full squad available for the fixture. Sead Kolasinac and Ainsley Maitland-Niles are absent as left-back options, but Nacho Monreal is already first-choice in the position anyway. Carl Jenkinson is also out, but again he was a back up even when he was fit.
Laurent Koscielny is the only guaranteed starter who is still out, although he’s back out on the training pitches working on his recovery at least.
That being said, who will start for Arsenal this time around?
1Goalkeeper and Defence
At this point it seems to be an inevitability that Cech will continue to start in goal for Arsenal. Bernd Leno got a couple of chances in pre-season, but Emery seems to be keeping faith with the club’s number one for now.
That being said, if there’s ever a time to introduce Leno in a league fixture, a home game against the team in 19th place with one goal in two games wouldn’t be a bad option.
Nacho Monreal will start at left-back, since there are no other options, bar Stephan Lichtsteiner playing out of position again. On the other side, I’d expect Hector Bellerin to keep his place, as he combined well offensively with Henrikh Mkhitaryan against Chelsea, and Arsenal are unlikely to be put under quite as much pressure at the back.
With Laurent Koscielny out and Konstantinos Mavropanos seemingly not quite ready for more Premier League starts, Rob Holding is the only player who could come in to break up the centre-back partnership of Sokratis Papastathopoulos and Shkodran Mustafi. Those two will likely continue their run in the team though.