By Tony Attwood
Last season, in the eight matches played in the mini-legue from within the Champions League, Arsenal came third with six wins, one draw and one defeat. At the top was Liverpool with seven wins and a defeat. This time around we have gone two better and come top with eight straight wins, including one last night in which a fair array of reserve and backup players were used.
Of cours we should also admit that this round of the Champions League has revealed once more the sheer dominance of English football in Europe at the moment, with five of the top eight in the Champions League table being Premier League clubs. Among those not making it to the top eight and being forced to play two more games in the extra knockout round, we have one more English club (Newcastle) plus the likes of Real Madrid, Inter Milan, PSG, Juventus etc etc.. The world of football, it seems, has turned in England’s favour. At least in terms of clubs.
And perhaps more to the point, Arsenal have Havertz back, and you will have noticed, he scored. (The BBC has a headline to the effect that “Mikel Arteta has said that Kai Havertz will be asking to start for Arsenal against Leeds United on Saturday after his performance against Kairat Almaty in the Champions League.” As the media inform us “Havertz was making his first start for Arsenal in 357 days after knee and hamstring issues.”
The simple fact is that the media, with the general agenda of saying Arsenal are not very good, found it far too embarrassing to offer the excuse of Havertz absence since that would open up discussion concerning the depth of the Arsenal squad and how Arsenal have been top of the league without him. Arteta said after the game, “”We realised straight away how much we missed him. What he brings to the team, his creativity, what he links with people, his intuition in front of goal as well. So very, very happy to have him.”
But now in Europe the focus is still on the Champions League as the draw for the next round is tomorrow, Friday, January 30. There will be ceremonies and all the pompous malarky which seems impossible to get rid of in terms of anything that takes place in the House of European Football in Nyon, as Uefa now calls its HQ, but the clubs don’t seem to have the taste for a revolution to sort out how football is run, so we are still stuck with them.
So, before Arsenal play any more European games, we have the extra round for the 16 teams that finished from ninth down. That will include Inter Milan and Atletico Madrid, and indeed other famous names such as Real Madrid, PSG, Juventus and the like. Those top clubs are seeded so they can’t play each other, and the draw happens on Friday.
But in terms of playing football, we can forget all of that and focus on Arsenal’s next matches, which are Leeds (who are 16th in the league) away on Saturday and then Chelsea (who beat Napoli 2-3 away, and who are current fifth) at home on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, of course, the transfer window rolls on, and it seems that Ethan Nwaneri: has gone to Marseille on loan. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have all the usual chitter chatter, such as “Arsenal want Alvarez,” and you can generally tell when a newspaper has made a story up because it places a couple of exclamation marks after the headline and is generally quite unclear where it is picking up such “information” from. Quite often, it turns out to be that a player has said to his agent, “Can’t you get me into Arsenal?” and the agent trots off and tells a journalist who dutifully writes it up, with the story coming as quite a surprise to Arsenal when it turns up in the media. But that is how it goes.
Elsewhere, we are continuing our work on referees, and in particular, have been looking at the oddity of how some referees see the same teams over and over again. Indeed it appears that a team facing the same referee multiple times can experience a certain level of pattern recognition and potential bias. There will be more on this later.
