- Arsenal stand on the edge of qualification for the next round in the Champs League
- Arsenal v Dinamo. The allegations are utterly mind-boggling
- Arsenal v Dinamo Zagreb – the team with 19 consecutive titles
Arsenal will of course not have William Saliba for the match tonight against Dinamo Zagreb tonight along with Saka, White, Jesus and Tomiyasu.
And although five seems like a lot we must also remember that other clubs have far more players down – Bournemouth have ten for example and Tottenham Hots, never to be outdone by anyone on anything, have managed to get 11 players out according to the EPL Injury Table website
The issue, of course, is not just how many players are out, but how central they are to the team’s progress, and indeed, how many quality players there are available to replace them. And this brings us back to the old problem – if you have a really good first-teamer, then a good backup to him is going to get fed up if all he is doing is forever sitting on the bench.
Of course, that is why such a player might get games in the League Cup and maybe also the FA Cup, but even so, if he is good enough to be a first-teamer, he will want first-team games, and after a while demand a move to a club where he can play, even if the club is unlikely to win any trophies.
The only way around this is by paying everyone – even the backup players – utterly crazy salaries – salaries so big they will overcome the player’s upset at not getting many games. But of course, most clubs can’t afford to do that while staying in the financial rules of the Premier League. ManC are of course the big exception since they have no interest in staying within those rules (as we have just seen with the Haaland deal).
So far in the Champions League Arsenal have drawn away to Atalanta, beaten PSG 2-0 at home and then Shakhtar Donetsk at home, lost to InterMilan away (conceding their first goal of the competition), smashed Sporting CP 1-5 away, and easily seen off Monaco 3-0.
So we look around for any scrap of recognition of this success but find little, although Arteta is now quoted as saying that although Calafiori missed the last three games due to injury and Nwaneri has been out with a muscle issue both could play. Specifically, he said, “It’s very positive news, we’ve missed them for a few weeks and they returned today for training so they will be available for the game.”
And Sports Mole have come up with a rather nice piece of history saying that victory in tonight’s game “could not only guarantee Arsenal a playoff place at the very worst, but also earn them a slice of club history; having also thumped Sporting Lisbon 5-1 before hitting Monaco for three without reply.”
The point here is that if Arsenal keep up their goal-scoring feats of the last two games then that will mean the win three successive Champions League/European Cup games by at least three goals for the first time ever, which would be rather fun and worthy of note (by us, if not by many other commentators).
And they do come up with a point that I have to admit we missed in our previous run down of what the opposition have been up to. Namely, “Dinamo Zagreb have not yet made their domestic return from their Christmas break and have only taken to the field for a pair of friendly games so far in 2025, securing a 3-1 success away to Polish outfit Lech Poznan before a 1-1 stalemate at Jagiellonia Bialystok.”
So they are probably better off than Arsenal in terms of having the first-choice XI available but are less practised in real live games in the past few weeks than their hosts tonight.
And they give as their Arsenal starting XI for the squad:
Raya;
Timber, Gabriel, Kiwior, Zinchenko;
Odegaard, Jorginho, Rice;
Sterling, Havertz, Trossard
However, the Evening Standard comes up with a different approach in defence
Raya;
Partey, Kiwior, Gabriel, Tierney;
Odegaard, Jorginho, Merino;
Sterling, Havertz, Trossard
So we shall see. A win will take Arsenal up to third, behind just Liverpool and Barcelona, and all set fair for the next round.
However the doom-mongers are pointing to just one win in five for Arsenal, but that includes defeats in the FA Cup and League Cup. In the Premier League it is three wins and two draws in the last five. Or put another way (which of course the media never would) Arsenal have now gone 12 games undefeated in the League. This is something I suspect would be mentioned for any other club in the build-up to a European match. But not Arsenal.
