- What Vieira has been doing as Arsenal continue to place emphasis on youngsters
- Arsenal transfer rumours: the accumulated rumour list
By Tony Attwood
As ever, the FA and those people who think that international matches are more important than the games between the league clubs that actually pay players’ wages, are mucking about with the dates to suit their own wishes. Us mere supporters are not consulted – of course.
So, leaving aside the opening game on the Friday, the rest of the early games are all listed as Saturday matches – but of course, these will change on the whim of TV companies. I would imagine the Villa game will move to a Sunday, what with Villa coming fourth last season. The Chelsea match is usually seen as a good TV fixture usually, and that could be Saturday lunchtime, which could help spread the load of traffic in London.
That might leave Sunderland away as one of our few Saturday 3pm games, with Brighton also away on a Saturday becoming a TV game on Sunday. But these are of course, guesses, and at present the fixture openers read…
- Friday 21 August – Coventry City (h) (Promoted)
- Saturday 29 August – Aston Villa (a) (4th)
- Saturday 5 September – Chelsea (h) (10th)
- Saturday 12 September – Sunderland (a) (7th)
- Saturday 19 September – Brighton and Hove Albion (a) (8th)
Obviously, the figures in brackets show the position of the clubs last season, so the Villa game is clearly the only game against a club that was doing particularly well last campaign.
This is actually a start that is quite a lot easier than last season, where the opening sequence of games included matches against Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City, and generated three wins, a draw, and a defeat with ten goals scored and two conceded.
The League Cup again starts in the third round for Arsenal – and that seems a very long way off since four clubs also have a Preliminary Round in that competition, made up of the clubs finishing in 21st and 22nd positions in last season’s League Two, alongside the two newly-promoted sides from the National League. The two winning clubs progress to Round One. Arsenal enters round 3 – at least there’s no mucking around with that.
Coventry City, who we play in our first game of the season, were champions of the Championship last season, 11 points clear of the second-placed Ipswich Town.
We can do a comparison of sorts between the two clubs by reducing the Coventry figrue to 38 games, as if they had been in the Premier League, although of course that doesn’t account for the different standards in the two leagues.
| Pos. | P | W | D | L | GD | PTS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coventry | 46 | 28 | 11 | 7 | 52 | 95 |
| Covetnry adjusted | 38 | 23 | 9 | 6 | 43 | 78 | |
| 1 | Arsenal | 38 | 26 | 7 | 5 | 44 | 85 |
Anyway, we will come back to this later as we get closer to the game. But we might like to note that Coventry were in the top division back in 2000/1 when they came 19th. They had been in the top league for nine seasons, and twice reached 11th in the league by the end of the season, but never higher than that.
But then by 2017/18 they had sunk down to League Two, and yet came back, starting by coming second and getting promoted. Then it was two seasons in League One, which they won in 2020, and then six seasons in the Championship, which they won last season, as we can see in the chart above.
So their reward for that is to kick off the season on Friday, 21 August with Arsenal.
Thus all things considered, it could have been a lot worse start for Arsenal. Indeed, I can’t help but remember my rather ungenerous thoughts about those people who arrange the fixtures when I saw that three of the opening five games in the last league campaign were against Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City.
You might recall an opening match away win at Manchester United by a single goal, then a solid 5-0 victory over Leeds United as our first home game, followed by a 1-0 defeat at Liverpool. What was interesting was that Liverpool got three corners to Arsenal’s eight, but still won by a single goal.
The media were very negative about Arsenal’s chances thereafter, but we won the fourth game 3-0 against what I thought was a rather poor Nottingham Forest side. Then we had the very acceptable home draw with Manchester City, which I think made many journalists think that we really could put in a fight at the top of the league during the season as a whole.
But here’s a thought: last season Coventry scored 97 goals. So they were certainly not one of those clubs that got promoted because no one else could be bothered.
However, this is all two months away, and there’s no telling what the World Cup will do to Arsenal players in the meantime….
