- So much for Arsenal to celebrate, but where to begin?
- And will the media apologise about their prognostications? Of course not
By Tony Attwod
It seems a very strange time to have a football match, but 3pm on Saturday it is. So let’s start with the injury news
Arsenal have five men down, West Ham four, according to the EPL Injury table Top of the table is Chelsea with nine missing players – which looks like carelessness.
Gabriel Jesus won’t be seen until next year, Kai Havertz is progressing well and may be seen in late Nobvember, Chuk Madueke is out for a few weeks, Reyna has a groin injury whch will see him out until toward the end of this month, and Gabriel Magalhaes is probably ok but “needs to be looked after”.
Which brings us on to WHAM at home and their performance away this season.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Arsenal home | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 9 | 1 | 8 | 7 |
| 7 | West Ham United away | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 4 |
Obviously, the advantage is Arsenal’s – most certainly when we look at the goal situation. But as the number of games is small, it is still worth considering in addition last season’s figures….
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Arsenal 2024/5 home | 19 | 11 | 6 | 2 | 35 | 17 | 18 | 39 |
| 14 | West Ham United away | 19 | 6 | 5 | 8 | 23 | 28 | -5 | 23 |
What is interesting is that Arsenal were 63% better than WHAM last season and are 75% better than WHAM this season – although of course, we are only measuring three games thus far for each club.
What’s more, Arsenal, as we know, have played Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City and Newcastle United, and although the first of that list seems to have fallen into the well of lost plots, the last three are still up near the top, and tough nuts to crack. Additionally, Arsenal have had two Champions League games (both won).
West Ham, however, have had Chelsea, Tottenham and Palace at home, leading them to complain about their match selection, but away they have had Sunderland, Wolverhampton, Forest and Everton. They got a draw with Everton in the last match, and their single victory this season was away to Forest. Forest, complete with Edu, are in 17th.
Anyway, all of this shows us why Arsenal have a goal difference that is eight goals better than WHAMs.
West Ham’s last three games without a win were a 0-3 home defeat to Tottenham Hots, a 1-2 home defeat to Crystal Palace and that Everton draw. And it has been interesting (although somewhat unpleasant) to see the West Ham fans revolting against their stadium, while still going to it for each game – the attendances being just over 62,400 for each match. I suspect they feel they are not getting value for money, but having bought their season tickets, can’t do too much about it. (Interestingly, the WHAM stadium is still officially the London Stadium, as they have been unable to get anyone to take on the naming rights. Why is that I wonder? Is it that you can’t fool all of the sponsors all of the time?
Looking at the two clubs against each other across the years (figures as ever from 11v11) we can see that Arsenal are clearly the dominant force, winning 74 and losing just 38 games, with 41 draws.
But of late WHAM have done rather better than average against Arsenal, for reasons that I am not quite sure about. In fact, over the last six games, starting on 16 April 2023, Arsenal have only won two, West Ham have won three and there was a draw in 2023. Now it is true that one of those games was a League Cup match in which WHAM will always play a strong team, having not much else to consider in terms of trophies, but even just counting the Premier League games, it is three wins to Arsenal and two wins to West Ham. Worse, both those wins were at Arsenal’s stadium: 0-2 in 2023 and 0-1 in 2025.
Now this is interesting, because it was exactly this type of result that got the entire media saying that Arsenal could not win this week’s Champions League match, which of course we countered throughout the preview stage (quite rightly as it turns out).#
So two questions arise: will the media notice again how things have been going, or have they all been down the pub. Just reminding us that Arsenal lost 0-1 at home to WHAM last season is not a complete picture. I do wish journalists would learn that.
That result came in a run of just two wins in seven games – one of the “dips” that we wrote about several times in the last campaign. Arsenal are very much not in a dip just now (five wins and a draw in the last six) so we should be fine.
More anon…
