- Arsenal v Leicester and the very curious case of Leicester’s yellow cards
- Are Arsenal turning into a dirty team, or is it the media that’s getting nasty?
By Bulldog Drummond
Arsenal only won two of their first 12 games against Leicester in the League. But then after a couple of years of to-and-fro Arsenal settled down and went 14 games against the club without defeat. Then in 1928 they went on a run of just one defeat in the next 27 matches.
Moving on to recent times Arsenal have won the last five games against Leicester giving a total of 72 Arsenal wins to 33 Leicester wins. In fact since 1973 Leicester has only once beaten Arsenal at Arsenal’s home ground.
On the injury front matters remain utterly horrendous and the fact that Arsenal are winning any games at all with this sort of injury list is pretty amazing.
Odegaard is out at least until next month, as is Zinchenko, as is Tomiyasu as is Merino as is Tierney for whom there is still no sign of a return.
Trossard is suspended. It is thought that Timber and White are ok, and David Raya has a 75% chance of returning for this match, all according to the EPL injury table.
According to the same source Jakub Stolarczyk, Patson Daka and Jannik Vestergaard are unavailable for the visitors.
In terms of Arsenal’s progress this season in the two games the club has drawn they have gone down to 10 men (against Brighton and ManC) – and in both cases Arsenal were ahead when the red card was waved. That must give a clue as to how to proceed.
But looking at things another way the BBC kindly informs us that “Arsenal have won 16 of their last 17 top-flight fixtures against newly promoted opposition (including all six last season by an aggregate score of 25-4).” It seems the only team to beat the run was Nottingham Forest on 20 May 2023 – and that was away.
And we must mention Kai Havertz. If he scores he will be “the first player to score in each of Arsenal’s opening three home matches of a Premier League campaign since Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in 2019-20.”
Meanwhile, Gabriel remains the top-scoring defender in the Premier League, despite UK’s TV stations going to enormous lengths to help opposition clubs by showing exactly how he does it over and over again. He’s got 16 Premier League goals in all, and as you will recall has scored in each of the last two games. In addition, Gabriel Jesus has scored seven goals in eight Premier League appearances against Leicester which seems like a rather good record to aim to keep up.
As for Leicester the BBC rather cruelly point out that they have not won a game “in each of their opening five games of a Premier League campaign” three times. On the previous two occasions, they were relegated.
They also tell us that the club has had one clean sheet in the last 28 fixtures in the league, and that was a goalless draw. They don’t add, but we can, that Arsenal have scored in each of their last 11 league games – the last time the club failed to score was at home to Aston Villa.
So we move onto the team.
Pain in the Arsenal come up with
Raya;
Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori;
Partey, Rice, Nwaneri;
Saka, Havertz, Martinelli.
Raya;
White, Saliba, Gabriel, Timber;
Havertz, Partey, Rice;
Saka, Trossard, Martinelli
Raya;
White, Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori;
Partey, Rice, Havertz;
Saka, Trossard, Martinelli
So I can think we can probably say it is going to be something among that lot.
But let us finish on a thought about Leicester’s run into promotion last season. In their last 14 games, they won six, drew one and lost five. Which is generally speaking middle-of-the-table stuff rather than a drive toward promotion. Of course, they did get promotion in the end but if we take a look at our regular friend, the last six games table, we can conveniently look at the top six and bottom six.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Man City | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 16 | 6 | +10 | 16 |
| 2 | Liverpool | 6 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 12 | 1 | +11 | 15 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 10 | 4 | +6 | 14 |
| 18 | Leicester City | 6 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 6 | 10 | -4 | 3 |
| 19 | Everton | 6 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 16 | -10 | 1 |
| 20 | Wolverhampton | 6 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 16 | -11 | 1 |
The last ten matches table has Leicester in 14th and Arsenal second, and given that a lot of those games from Leicester were played in the Championship, that is not overly impressive. But let us not get too excited. We’ll stick with the last six. For now.
