Arsenal v Sporting 8pm Wednesday, and the problem of accumulated minutes.

As we have already noted, only the top three of this season win the league in Portugal (although twice over the decades two other teams have each won it once – but only once).   

But Porto did win five consecutive games up to the Arsenal win in Portugal.   And it seems there is a general expectation that Arsenal will go through, not least because of the comparative strength of the two leagues and hence the two squads.

Although… I begin to wonder if that comment is quite fair since only two clubs have won the Premier League in the last eight seasons, which makes the Premier League look even more predictable than the Liga Portugal.   And it is not just my support of Arsenal which makes me think that this is a very bad thing.   

However, even I have to admit only five clubs have won the Premier League since Arsenal last won it, which I am not sure if a sign of hyper competitiveness.  It is also why the old Football Pools that used to dominate gambling now only exist as a little backwater.

Of course this is not just a Premier League thing since in the latter stages of the old First Division of the Football League there were just four different winners in the last four years of that competition, so maybe in the days of hyper-money in football, that is the inevitable consequence, but I do look back with some sadness to the time when I started watching football and we could have eight different first division winners in a single decade.

But still, we have what we have, and all we can do now is wonder whether next season the fight against Manchester City and their 100+ deviations from the rules can finally result in a suitable sentence.  I favour ten points deduction for each deviation, but I am not sure many others see it that way.

However, this wouldn’t be a football match without one of the teams “sweating” on something or other, and Football London kindly tells us it is Sporting who have the excess of moisture at this time.  For it seems that they have “a few injury problems to contend with,” which could be good news for Arsenal.   And yes, they are “sweating on the fitness of two stars” although that generally seems to mean that they will suddenly cool down and repair themselves.  

The players concerned are full-back Ivan Fresneda, (who was once allegedly on Mikel Arteta’s transfer shortlist), and teenage midfielder Joao Simoes.  Both are “doubtful for the contest.”

This is the first time Sporting have reached this stage of the Champions League, and they have done this by beating Paris St Germain en route.  Also, (the media tell us) they will be encouraged by having beaten Arsenal in 2023 although I am not sure that makes much odds.

But it is worth noting there is a shortage of information coming out of Portugal in English ahead of this match, so it is possible that the opposition has something up their sleeves apart from their elbows.   Although the news that when Estrela da Amadora went off at half-time in a recent league game, it was just because he was tired rather than injured, hasn’t made it to the popular press, who prefer to tell us that he had “accumulated minutes.”

And that I am told can be nasty.