- Arsenal v PSG: the problem of simply buying more and more superstars
- Arsenal in the Champions League: there is always something going on at PSG
By Bulldog Drummond
The BBC tells us that Luis Enrique, the manager of PSG considers Mikel Arteta to be “one of the best coaches on the market at the moment” before Tuesday’s Champions League meeting between the sides at Emirates Stadium.” The two men played together at Barcelona and Enrique added that Mikel Arteta was “a very young player, but he was in the first-team squad.”
In the pre-match conference, he also said of Arteta that, “He has had a great start to his coaching career and it will be a great pleasure to chat to him tomorrow, even if it is just for five minutes before the start of the game. He is one of the best coaches on the market at the moment. He changed Arsenal’s fortunes from a somewhat winless streak to one of the best teams in the world that is competing for titles. I would go as far as to say they are the best team in Europe playing without the ball. He is a great coach and a great person.”
The other point of note that Enrique made was to confirm that Ousmane Dembele has been dropped over a matter of “not meeting the expectations of the team.”
Elsewhere we are of course getting a re-run of the report that Arsenal had fewer touches of the ball in the opposition penalty box in the game with Atalanta of any game since they played Bayern Munich. In both cases, the total was nine. Arsenal lost 1-0 to Bayern but drew 0-0 with Atalanta, which suggests the tactic is now better developed – although of course, the media don’t report that tiny detail.
However, Arsenal might be helped a little this time by the fact that PSG have a number of injuries to contend with. As Sports Mole points out the “French champions… have a handful of long-term absentees in their ranks such as Goncalo Ramos (ankle), Lucas Hernandez (knee) and Presnel Kimpembe (Achilles).”
As a result, they give us a possible line up of
Raya;
Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori;
Havertz, Partey, Rice;
Saka, Trossard, Martinelli
And having selected that line up they then tell us that the most likely scoreline is an Arsenal win at 2-1. After that working down the probability charts (although I am not quite sure what mathematical model they are using here) “the next most likely scorelines for that outcome are 1-0 (8.21%) and 2-0 (7.06%). The likeliest Paris Saint-Germain win is 1-2 (7.17%), while for a draw the most likely scoreline is 1-1.”
Football.London of course brings out its negativistic armoury for this game, without all that tedious notion of using any maths or calculations, as they always do, telling us that, “Though there are six more matches to play, the pressure on Arsenal to deliver positive results is immense.”
And how do they know this? Well, it seems they just made it up. But they continue…
“Luckily, Arteta’s squad has shown remarkable form at home, which might give them an edge. Anything less than a win against PSG could jeopardise their chances of advancing to the top eight.” And note that “Luckily” comment. How is it lucky to have good home form? Sadly they don’t explain, which normally means that this was just a sentence thrown together and put online without any good reason.
Overall however the statistics give us Arsenal to win at 46.87%, a draw at 23.59% and a PSG win at 29.54%.
And that is about it, but before we set off for the ground, here’s one more thought: which of these two clubs was actually the best last season? It is a question worth pondering since the media don’t bring the matter up, and that normally means there is good news hiding in the figures, for Arsenal.
So to work out an answer we have obviously started with last season’s league tables in which Arsenal got 89 poinits to PSG’s 76 points – the big difference coming from the number of games that PSG drew instead of winning.
But the fact is that PSG in the French league only play 34 games to Arsenal’s 38. So we thought we would do a bit of extrapolating to see what PSG’s figures would be if they had actually played 38 games, and for the remaining four carried on with the same win rate and same scoring level. Where answers were fractions we upped the figure in PSG’s favour.
The details are below… PSG Actual is the actual results of last season, while PSG rounded is what happens if we assume that four more games would follow the pattern of the 34 actually played.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PSG actual | 34 | 22 | 10 | 2 | 81 | 33 | 48 | 76 |
| 1 | PSG rounded | 38 | 25 | 11 | 2 | 91 | 37 | 54 | 86 |
| 2 | Arsenal | 38 | 28 | 5 | 5 | 91 | 29 | 62 | 89 |
So what we see is that even giving PSG three more wins and one more draw in their “missing” four games (which is a generous approach) they would still be three points behind Arsenal. We’ve also given them ten goals in those four phantom matches and let them concede one in each game. But Arsenal are still on top.
There is indeed a good reason to be positive tonight.
