Arsenal v Wolverhampton Wands: the Arsenal team and a prediction

 

 

• Arsenal v Wolverhampton: A referee who utterly favours the away team
• Arsenal v Wolverhampton: the last five seasons for each side, and current injuries
• Arsenal v Wolverhampton: how the financial issues of last season will affect this campaign

By Bulldog Drummond

The Express take a paragraph to tell us that Raya is going to be in goal.  It is pretty painful stuff so I’ll try and shorten the agony…  here’s the team.  Most commentators seem to agree, or alternatively saw what the Express had published and simply copied it without acknowledgement…

Raya

White, Saliba, Gabriel, Zinchenko

Odegaard, Partey, Rice

Saka, Havertz, Martinelli

And would you believe it?   The Metro has the same team.

Give me Sport puts Rice in the centre and runs the headline Consistency is key.  There is much to be said for consistency of course, but taking the opposition by surprise can also be helpful on occasion.

Arsenal adventures has a presentation of the team which then includes Calafiori in the halfback line in a video that takes a little time to get there.  But the Metro takes us back to the selected favourites above and that is pretty much all the variation we get.

Wolverhampton have won exactly half the number of games against Arsenal as Arsenal have won against them (32 to 64) and the last half dozen games have all been Arsenal victories with the goal difference of those six matches being 14 goals for Arsenal and two for Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Taking the average of that, should give Arsenal a 2-0 victory.  But should you like the negative story you might like to note that during Arsenal’s doldrums era between November 2018 and February 2021 of the six league games played Arsenal won just one, two were draws and Wolverhampton Wands won three.   The goal difference was nine goals to Wolverhampton and six to Arsenal, which is something of a surprise.

Indeed this is quite a shocking statistic, but if we look at last season’s table Arsenal had a goal difference of +62 and Wolverhampton of -15.

So how can these contradictory signs be equated?  The fact is that Wolverhampton is a team that has bursts of good form and bursts of bad form.   Last season for example they went through 13 league and FA Cup games from Christmas Eve onto the end of February, getting nine wins, two defeats and two draws.    But in their last 11 games they got one win and two draws.  The rest, obviously, were defeats.  And of those wins, all season, only three of them were by more than one goal.

Thus if Arsenal can knock in a couple of goals early on, then I suspect the opposition’s determination will go out of the game and they will just pull back and try to keep the goals against down.  Only four teams scored fewer goals than Wolverhampton Wands last season and in fact even Luton Town managed to put away two more goals in the league last campaign than Wolverhampton.  And when a club is outscored by Luton Town, that normally means trouble.

Indeed the last six games between the two clubs does show a remarkable contrast

 

Premier League Form (Last 6)

Pos	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
2	Arsenal	6	6	0	0	16	3	+13	18
20	Wolverhampton	6	1	0	5	4	14	-10	3

 

Clearly the end of the season couldn’t have come soon enough for them, but the boost they could have got from having a new player or three to help put the memory of that end of season out of their minds was not available.

Anything other than a comfortable Arsenal win will have the media exploding and returning to the theme of Arsenal needing a centre forward.

Thankfully I don’t think Arteta reads the English media, so we should be safe from any jerking knees.

Have a good game – I’m off now so will probably be back tomorrow.