- How Arsenal benefit from realising this is a team game
- How to deflect from reality: refereeing figures for the league cup are bonkers
By Tony Attwood
There are good times and bad times, and for Nottingham Forest, we can certainly say these are not the best of times. Their recent form in the league contained four consecutive defeats before a win in the last league match. But the pleasure of that was dented by the fact that they have just been knocked out of the FA Cup by Wrexham who until ten years ago were playing in the Conference. True that defeat was only in a penalty shootout, where the opposition goalkeeper came out of Arsenal’s academy. Worse for them, the club has already been beaten 3-0 by Arsenal in north London.
And it is worth having a look at those recent games between the two sides…
If we go all the way back to 1991 (which I know seems a bit extreme but it makes for an interesting read) we find just five Nottingham Forest victoriese against Arsenal. That is not very many out of 26 matches (19% in fact), and with no wins in the last five games, they might look on this with some trepidation. One of those wins was by two goals, the rest by just one goal. Arsenal on the other hand, have won 15 of the games. The last Forest win against Arsenal was six games ago in 2023.
And of course, in facing Forest, along comes the thought of Edu who I personally really rated as a top player, was delighted to find him working alongside the manager at Arsenal as the first sporting director.
So I was indeed sorry when Edu left Arsenal in November 2024 to work with the network of clubs that Nottingham Forest now find themselves in (which includes Olympiacos, and Rio Ave FC, as well as Forest). They are under the direction of Evangelos Marinakis, while Edu now has the over-the-top title of Global Head of Football. Olympiacos is currently top of the Greek league, so presumably things are looking quite good in the world of Marinakis on that score, although perhaps not so much in terms of Forest. And also maybe not so much with Rio Ave who are tenth in the Portuguese league.
In approaching this match against Forest, we must, as ever, take into account the injuries – although to be fair, no matter what injuries the club get these days, things still seem to work out ok.
Arsenal are currently declaring six injuries, and although that sounds pretty awful, in fact only Manchester United with four, and Nottingham Forest, West Ham United and Wolverhampton, each with five, have fewer men out.
Better still, Trossar and Saliba are in that list and both are being shown as having a 50% chance of playing, so the number of men down could be even lower.
Those who are certainly out are starting to look very familiar: Cristhian Mosquera, Max Dowman, Riccardo Calafiori and Piero Hincapie. And there will undoubtedly be in Arteta’s mind the fact that the fourth (and thankfully final) away fixture in this run of consecutive travelling games, is against Inter Milan on 20 January.
The media have noted with some sarcasm that Viktor Gyokeres scored against Chelsea, ignoring still the different way in which he is being used, and the fact that Arsenal are second in the goal-scoring league, so he will probably stay in the team, although it surely must be time for a return of Gabriel Martinelli to the starting XI.
He has scored nine goals this season, and I would hate him to start getting fed up with being a substitute and begin looking for another club that plays him from the start. On the other hand, Nottingham Forest are not allowed to use Zinchenko, who is, of course, on loan from Arsenal. Although, actually, there has been talk of him coming back to Arsenal this month.
But beyond the detail of the players, there is the overall psychology of the team. One sometimes sees teams that go on long winning runs, almost to expect to be beaten at some point, and so become resigned to the fact. But Arsenal’s psychology appears to be that they know every game is going to be tough, they expect the referees to do little to protect them, and they know they will have to fight for every victory.
So we are now seeing a team that fights all the way through every match – and if there were any doubt about the need for that, the very late goal conceded against Chelsea will remind the team of the need for that.
