Arsenal host Liverpool on Wednesday night, and while most Arsenal fans are expecting humiliation, Mikel Arteta is hoping to get some momentum going.
“I believe that it’s very important to have energy and momentum going into important matches, and in order to do that you have to go game by game,” Arteta told reporters ahead of Wednesday’s game against Liverpool, knowing full well we blew most of our momentum against Leicester before spilling our final drop against Spurs at the weekend.
“Today and tomorrow we will assess the players and how they are, and obviously they’ve been hit and a lot of them have played some crazy minutes up until now, and again we’re going to have games every two and a half days.
“We will try to put the strongest team out as possible here and as well on Saturday, and to do that we need to know how everyone recovers from the game.”
“You look at the last game and the way they’ve [Liverpool] played and the line-ups they’re putting out, you can tell that they’ll be coming here with full commitment to try and win the points,” he said when asked about Liverpool trying to achieve a record points total.
“The result that they had at Man City, when you look back at the game it could have been completely different and you cannot question the attitude or energy of that team in any game or any minute.
“That’s probably one of the non-negotiable that they have and you can see that in every game.”
Whether Liverpool turn up to try and win the points is neither here nor there really. Spurs didn’t turn up on Sunday to win anything, so we just handed the points to them.
The lack of players with which to rotate is also a concern, as is the fact that Arsenal have had less time to prepare than their opponents for every match since the restart, except one – the game on Sunday where we could have really used a player like Eddie Nketiah, serving a suspension, or Gabriel Martinelli, out for the season with an knee injury.
As for the defence, do we have to even talk about it?
How will the players fair on Wednesday night? You’d hope better but that’s no guarantee of anything.