What will Arsenal be facing in Bergamo on Thursday?

 

 

By Bulldog Drummond

• The long, long road toward football’s reform. Could these be the first tiny steps?

Since winning Serie B in 2011, Atalanta have been in Serie A and have (as far as I know) reached their highest position of third, three times in recent seasons.   There has been a bit of a slip in the last three years, but last season they did make it to fourth, and hence a place in the Champions League (Revised Edition).

Now again as far as I know, Arsenal and Atalanta have not played each other before – please correct me if I am wrong on that.   But if this is indeed so this is a bit of a blow because here is something that we are trying for the first time… giving as much information on our European rivals as we manage to get on the opposition in Champions League games.

Now I have to admit I don’t know if we are going to have enough information of interest for this sort of preview article of each game in the new Champions League format but at least we can have a nbah with Atalanta – and as far as we know, no one else is trying this…

The table below shows Atalanta’s home form for last season, and Arsenal’s away form for last season… and as you can see the two clubs are remarkably close.  Arsenal fractionally edge the points by one and the goal difference by four, but both clubs were performing very well indeed last season when we compare Atalanta at home and Arsenal away…

 

	Teams	P	W	D	L	F	A	+/-	Pts
2	Atalanta home	19	13	2	4	42	16	26	41
2	Arsenal away	19	13	3	3	43	13	30	42

 

But by way of further comparison, the two teams overall were much further apart when we look at the complete home and away record for last season…

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	GA	GD	Pts
2	Arsenal	38	28	5	5	91	29	62	89
4	Atalanta	38	21	6	11	72	42	30	69

 

Overall in the league, Atalanta came fourth – and the overall table shows just where their weakness was – it was with their away games where they came fifth in the league winning just eight games and having a goal difference of just +4.

Thus very simply all their power was at home, and they will be looking to beat Arsenal in this first round of the newly created extra double plus group stage in the Champions League.

But of course Atalanta playing away in London is for another day, so we look like we are going to see two supposedly well-matched teams.  

Except that while this season for Arsenal is carrying on where it left off last season in terms of domestic games, the same cannot be said of Atalanta.

 

		P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Udinese	4	3	1	0	7	4	3	10
2	Napoli	4	3	0	1	9	4	5	9
3	Internazionale	4	2	2	0	9	3	6	8
4	Juventus	4	2	2	0	6	0	6	8
5	Torino	4	2	2	0	5	3	2	8
6	SS Lazio	4	2	1	1	8	6	2	7
7	Hellas Verona	4	2	0	2	6	5	1	6
8	Empoli	4	1	3	0	3	2	1	6
9	Atalanta	4	2	0	2	8	8	0	6

 

So ninth in the league at the moment and a Goal Difference of nothing as opposed to Arsenal being in their tried and tested position of second in the league with a goal difference of +5.

Their matches so far this season have been 0-4 away win against Lecce, a 2-1 away defeat against Torina and a 4-0 away defeat to Inter Milan, followed by a 3-2 win against Fiorentina.

The reason for the first three games being played away was that for several years  Atalanta has been redeveloping its stadium including the part of the ground reserved for away fans.  This has taken the capacity up to 24,000 – meaning Arsenal’s stadium is two and a half times the size of Atalanta’s ground, but parts of their ground are quite a bit newer.