- Arsenal v Brighton and the ref who has been sent for re-training
- Arsenal v Brighton tomorrow at 3pm, fitness, fouls and cards
By Tony Attwood
The Sun is up to its old tricks telling us that a supercomputer has predicted Arsenal will win the league and Wolverhampton will go down with the lowest number of points ever.
The trouble is the Sun does not have access to a supercomputer, and if they did they would tell us which one of the nine supercomputers there are in the UK had been purloined to work out the final points total. Especially as it would cost the newspaper about £500,000 to give them the answer they want, and take several hours to program in the data, and then check it before running the program for a millisecond. If you want to know more about supercomputers, just type “How many supercomputers are there in the UK” into Google.
Anyway, the match approaches and isn’t on TV, but there will be highlights from 5.15pm UK time on Sky and then extended highlights of BBC1 at 10.25pm It seems to be on BBC Radio 5 from 3pm as well so it could also turn up on the World Service too.
So what will the team be?
Google seems to be offering its own choice of players, and it goes with that is rather out of date! I wonder if they are deliberately trying to screw things up by publishing the list of players for the midweek game? And then saying “ha ha you copied this from us, that will be £50,000”.
Kepa,
Timber, Saliba, Calafiori, Lewis-Skelly,
Norgaard, Merino, Eze,
Martinelli, Madueke, Jesus
The Metro comes in with something more likely
Kepa,
Timber, Saliba, Calafiori, Lewis-Skelly,
Odegaard, Rice Zubimendi
Saka, Gykores Trossard
Here’s the Standard which is pretty much the same
Raya;
Timber, Saliba, Calafiori; Lewis-Skelly,
Zubimendi, Rice, Odegaard;
Saka, Gyokeres, Trossard
And a little bit down this page is the league table top, so you can calculate how things change. But before that, if you want to spot of tattle and titte, here is a little bit of news from SportsMole, if you would care to click the link.
However there is more news since, according to HandofArsenal, Gabriel was seen with the rest of the Arsenal squad on Friday evening, suggesting that the 28-year-old may be in with a chance of returning to first-team action on Saturday.
Arteta and his coaching team will “reportedly” (meaning one newspaper made it up and others are now copying it) decide today whether to include Gabriel in the matchday squad list. If so it will be his first return to the bench since the 2-2 draw with Sunderland on November 8.
Now here’s the table….
| P | Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arsenal | 17 | 12 | 3 | 2 | 31 | 10 | 21 | 39 |
| 2 | Manchester City | 17 | 12 | 1 | 4 | 41 | 16 | 25 | 37 |
| 3 | Aston Villa | 17 | 11 | 3 | 3 | 27 | 18 | 9 | 36 |
| 4 | Chelsea | 17 | 8 | 5 | 4 | 29 | 17 | 12 | 29 |
| 5 | Manchester United | 18 | 8 | 5 | 5 | 32 | 28 | 4 | 29 |
| 6 | Liverpool | 17 | 9 | 2 | 6 | 28 | 25 | 3 | 29 |
| 7 | Sunderland | 17 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 19 | 17 | 2 | 27 |
| 8 | Crystal Palace | 17 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 21 | 19 | 2 | 26 |
We’ll be back, perhaps tongiht, but more likely in the morning.
