Rennes v Arsenal: team news

Posted on by Tony Attwood

By Bulldog Drummond

Previously we had a look at the recent form of the two clubs involved in this game in

  • Rennes v Arsenal: the predictions

Now here’s the update on what the journalists report as the issues – and the teams.   There has been quite an attempt to get Mr Emery to suggest that Arsenal’s schedule in the League gives them a disadvantage – but it seems the manager has been advised as to the media’s tricks – any answer would be manipulated in being a set of limp and weak excuses trying to cover up imagined cracks.

As a result while Messers Pochettino and Sarri have been making noises about the problems of playing a league campaign and playing in Europe the Arsenal manager won’t go down that route although we are playing five games in 15 days.   As he said, “The Premier League decide the schedules and we adapt.   It is not an excuse for us, we have the habit to play a lot of matches week by week.  You ask me if I prefer sometimes more time to prepare for one match, then yes, but for example in this match we don’t have an excuse.  We played on Saturday, rested Sunday and started to work on Monday. Tomorrow I think we are going to be okay to play every player.”

So that’s knocked that one out, although I suspect some journalists will now start saying that he should have complained.   Anyway, not being able to quote the manager, and not being able to make anything up (given that the press conferences all shown live these days so we know if the boss has said anything or not) instead we have the “Arsenal fans unhappy with Rennes first-leg switch” which basically feeds into the “same old Arsenal always moaning” story.

Rennes defeated Real Betis 3-1 in Spain to secure their place in the last 16, following a 3-3 draw at home.  In the group stages Rennes beat Jablonec 2-1 at home, lost 2-0 to Astana away, lost 1-2 to Dynamo Kyiv at home, and then lost to them away 3-1, before winning away at Jablonec, securing second place in the table by beating Astana 2-0.

In the round of 32 the score was Rennes 3 Betis 3, and then Betis 1 Renne 3.

In their team Rennes have ex-Newcastle winger Hatem Ben Arfa who joined Rennes as a free agent in September.  And the other connection of course is that Petr Cech spent two seasons at Rennes before moving to Chelsea.

On the positive side for us, Rennes have forward M’Baye Niang and defender Hamari Traore suspended.   Lacazette is out for us again because of the red card against BATE, and Eddie Nketiah is in the squad.

We have a great record against French teams, never losing away in a European tie to a side from France.  And it should also e noted that we are in the last 16 of a European competition for the 16th successive season.

Here is the French League table, which is interesting not least because Monaco have started to win games and drag themselves away from the foot of the table with three wins and two draws in the last five.
.
Team P W D L F A GD Pts
1 PSG 26 23 2 1 79 15 +64 71
2 Lille 27 16 6 5 44 23 +21 54
3 Olympique Lyonnais 27 14 7 6 45 31 +14 49
4 Olympique Mars… 27 13 5 9 43 35 +8 44
5 Saint-Étienne 27 12 7 8 36 33 +3 43
6 Reims 27 10 12 5 29 26 +3 42
7 Montpellier 27 10 11 6 36 29 +7 41
8 Nice 27 11 7 9 20 27 -7 40
9 Strasbourg 27 9 10 8 41 31 +10 37
10 Rennes 26 10 7 9 35 34 +1 37
11 Nîmes 26 10 6 10 37 38 -1 36
12 Angers SCO 27 8 10 9 31 31 +0 34
13 Bordeaux 27 8 8 11 26 29 -3 32
14 Nantes 27 8 7 12 31 34 -3 31
15 Toulouse 27 6 10 11 26 42 -16 28
16 Monaco 27 6 8 13 28 43 -15 26
17 Amiens SC 27 7 4 16 22 42 -20 25
18 Caen 27 3 11 13 22 36 -14 20
19 Dijon 26 5 5 16 20 40 -20 20
20 Guingamp 27 4 7 16 18 50 -32 19
.
As for the teams, The Standard and 90min both go with the team below…
.
Cech,
Maitland-Niles, Mustafi, Koscielny, Monreal,
Guendouzi, Torreira,
Mkhitaryan, Ozil, Iwobi,
Aubameyang

As ever we shall see.

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41 Replies to “Rennes v Arsenal: team news”

  1. Come on Arsenal… after a rubbish week so far with the spuds & jammy mancs progressing…. I’d love a 3-1 win!!

  2. WE can see so clearly from last night’s PSG performance the biggest problem for the better teams is complacency.

    How they managed to lose 3 1 at home against a team full of reserves with 72% of possession is beyond normal comprehension.

    How many times have we seem our team do the same? Bate anyone?

    I hate the statistics that we have never lost away to a French team because quoting such a statistic usually means that we end up losing

  3. UEFA has their coverage going for quite a while already. I haven’t waded through all of it, but the “Arsenal reporter” has read The Guardian (oh joy, they are such a pro-Arsenal newspaper!) to us, and has said that the spuds proved to the world that they no longer bottle things by managing to tie us in the NLD. Does this make him an “Arsenal reporter”?

    Anyway, L’Equippe has a lineup (in the UEFA coverage).
    Cech
    Maitland-Niles Mustafi Sokratis Kolasinac
    Guendouzi Torreira
    Mkhitaryan Ozil Iwobi
    Aubameyang

    COYG!

  4. Official lineup

    Cech
    Monreal, Kos, Socrates, Mustafi
    Xhaka, Torreira,
    Iwobi, Özil, Mkhitaryan
    Auba

    Subs

    Leno, Kolasinac, Maitland-Nile’s, Suarez, Guendouzi, Nketiah

    COYG

  5. @jigsol easy to win when the ref gives a non penalty. If that was a deliberate handball we should have 10 penalties a match.

    Still UEFA VAR is showing us how PIGMOB will use it.

  6. I’m playing math games when the game is on?

    How to go Iwobi! Nice work Monreal!

    COYG!

  8. I think this is the first card of the game (34m) to Sokratis. Possibly for persistent infringement?

    COYG!

  13. How wonderful for UEFA to mention that Stewart Robson is still being paid to bad mouth Arsenal.

    COYG!

  14. Arsenal used to be a top club that wanted to win the top trophys but that was 20 years ago.We were fed the Bull about moving from Highbury to compete with the very best in football ,but that was just a lie for the owners and club to fleece the fans and make the owners money.

  16. Europa league is now our level and Stan is happy with that as long as the profits keep rolling in and the share prices keep rising.

  18. I can’t believe we just lost 3-1..I seriously doubt we’re coming back from that… so we’ve gone from being knocked out by Bayern to Rennes what the hell..

  19. Sue
    When you play as badly as that you will be beaten by any well organised side. Two nil next week will see us progress – all isn’t lost yet.

  22. Never throw in the towel but until Kroenke loosens the purse strings and we also get rid of some more dead-wood I think this is what we can expect. Not a good feeling.

  23. We’ve been unexpectedly well beaten by Stade Rennais by 3 goals to one at fulltime of the match after we’ve taken an early goal lead in the match. But what has caused this our unexpected lose to Rennais tonight despite Emery having what looked to be the best Arsenal first XI Gunners team starting the match? Is it the sending off of Sokratis after he was booked twice that caused it? If that be the case, then, let Emery start coaching the Gunners in training sessions at London Colney on how to play 10 against 11 for the just should in case it happens to Arsenal in games. But at any rate and despite our feeling disappointed seeing Rennais took us to the cleaners, our hopes to qualify for the round of 16 of the competition are not lost but could still be in place. For, Arsenal can bounce back in the return leg match to also take Rennais to the cleaners too beating them 2 nil or 3 nil at the Ems in a week’s night time.

  24. Didn’t expect Arsenal to lose that much but the away form haven’t been good all season so I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’m confident the team will lift in the next match at home and go through.

  25. I’m disappointed in the result and disappointed in some of the comments. Or at least one of the comments.

    —-

    Above, I mentioned I was playing math games. The caretaker manager of Fulham said he thought they would be staying in the EPL.

    In one respect, you expect every manager to be optimistic about things like this. But, let’s say that a team sacks the manager with 1 game remaining, and they are more than 3 points below the relegation zone. There is no place for optimism; they will go down no matter what.

    In statistical physics, formulas for calculating probabilities are often approximately known. And it is considered possible to account for all possible states. So, if you sum these probabilities over all possible states, you should get an answer of 1. If you get an answer this is different from 1, you go along and divide all the probabilities you initially calculated by this sum; and now they all sum to 1. This is vaguely a description of renormalization.

    In football, the probability of winning is a function of how many goals you can score. The probability of losing is a function of how many goals you give up. How many points you have in the league, is a measure of how efficient your team is.

    So, a first guess at the probability of winning by team 1, is how many points team 1 has multiplied by how many for they have divided by the same product for the opposition. And do the same thing with goals conceded to come up with a first approximation to a losing probability.

    The problem is how do we calculate the probability of a draw? Well, looking at some data for larger data sets, it seems that if you are playing at home, the probability of a draw is about the same as the probability of a loss. And if you are playing away from home, the probability of a draw is about twice the probability of a loss.

    I don’t think that finishes the problem. What happens if the team in question, has a goal difference of 0 (they score as many as they give up)? What if the opposition is like that? What if they are both like that.

    A Gaussian probability distribution has a formula, you probably don’t want to see it. But, for a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1, the height of the Gaussian at the maximum is just under 0.4. I am going to add 1 to that.

    So, I look at my first pass for a losing probability and whether the game is home or away, and I calculate the probability of a draw. And then I adjust that probability for how close both teams are to a goal difference of 0.

    Our system only has 3 states (win, lose, draw), and so summing over all possible states is easy. For the case of what is left of Fulham’s season; the lowest sum is 1.64 (Man$ity) and the highest is 2.68 (for Leicester).

    Fulham’s least likely win is against Liverpool at under 5%, and the most likely win is 32% for Cardiff. Fulham’s least likely draw is Cardiff at 34%, and most likely draw is Watford at 66%. Fulham’s most likely loss is Liverpool at 47%, and least likely is Watford at 23%. Anyway, with a win giving 3 points and a draw giving one point, Fulham should probably see about 8.48 points (or really, 8 points).

    —-

    The spuds are 4 points ahead of us now, and throwing this process at our and the spuds finish, it seems likely that they will get 1 more point in the final games than we will. So, no St.Totteringham Day this year.

    Sorry. 🙁

  26. Oh man, what a bummer ! While I do think that we should progress further ,that last goal was quite the killer punch.
    Hope we pick up form and beat Man Utd first , and then get the job done next week.
    Up the Gunners !

  27. Gord… I’m sorry if it was my comments you were disappointed with… I was and still am really gutted & disappointed!

  28. It’s hard to take when soft cards are dished out to one side & not to the other but Arsenal have this now on a regular basis. Our finishing has begun to get poor as chance after chance is spurned.

    That, however, does not give fartface the reason to pick on the owner or our progress to a new stadium. The stadium is our rightful possession & our club is worth every penny of its cost, together with our training and medical facilities. The project was implemented before the sale of shares to Kronke. It will be wonderful if it is all changed with nationalisation of sports clubs.

    The next couple of matches will give us a better view of our season but despite it all our progress will be measured at the end of the season.

  29. Sorry that I couldn’t write a match report as the early kick off meant that I was still at work and was driving home during the match.
    Picked up a few things. Soft yellow cards for instance that cost us Sokratis. I couldn’t understand the changes made by the coach but that is probably because I am not a genius in this. 😉

    The good thing is that we are capable of scoring a couple of goals at home. And even letting Rennes score a goal would not mean disaster if we manage to play our full attacking potential and finish off the chances when we get them.

    If we would go out Emery will have a big task to make sure we finish in the top 4 or else the chasing out of Wenger has proved to be a big mistake.

  30. I can’t believe nobody has mentioned that at 1-0 PEA was clean through on goal and wrongly given off side. if that had been a correct decision it’s a totally different game.

  31. The referees literally gave everything for Rennes. Auba at 1-0 was one example, second yellow card for Papa was another.

    We still have enough quality to turn things around next week but I’m more worried about Sunday afternoon. United are the best team in the league in terms of form since Mourinho was kicked out and they seem to be extremely dangerous away from home. Our defending is still poor as we leak too many stupid goals while our two elite strikers are supposed to score from big chances (Auba has 32% of conversion, Lacazette 27…compare it to Aguero who is on 59 or Kane who is on 55). Auba – for all goals he gets – has a really poor record in big games. Not what one would expect from the guy who arrived at Arsenal with 5 goals in 5 games v Real Madrid, for instance.

    Just imagine if Seo hadn’t had that brainfart at Old Trafford (two points), if Xhaka hadn’t fouled Zaha v Palace (two points), if Auba had scored his penalty v Tottenham (two points) or if he scored at least one of his big chances v Chelsea at Stamford Bridge (one point at least). With those seven points we’d have been fighting for the title.

  32. I saw the highlights and thought that the red for Sokratis very soft.

    I don’t expect anything else from UEFA referees. The performance by Collum in Frankfurt Inter was0 one of the worst I have seen.

  33. Where was VAR when we played Rennes? The officials ran riot to ensure Rennes was not overrun. They then went one better by ensuring Arsenal was handicapped.

    We can expect the same on Sunday with Pigmob deciding the tie.

  34. @Menace

    Mate, you’ve been talking about problems with shooting technique in our team for years. What do you think what lies behind poor conversion rate of big chances from both Auba and Lacazette? Both of them have shown they can make fantastic shots (i.e. Auba v Spurs, Laca v Liverpool, Cardiff etc) but too often they miss big chances around six yard box or one-on-ones. Auba did it in Dortmund too. Do they just take a shot without aiming, do they aim too much or something else?

  36. @Menace – no VAR in Europa League till 2020/21 season I think.

    If UCL VAR is anything to go by not holding out much hope for fairness

  37. Above, I mentioned I was playing math games. The caretaker manager of Fulham said he thought they would be staying in the EPL.

    …

    Using Points with Goals For is good for calculating probability of winning. It is not good for calculating probability of losing.

    Goals Against are still the thing to use. But a perfect season is 114 points (38*3), so what we want is (114 – Points) for calculating losing probability.

    Our system only has 3 states (win, lose, draw), and so summing over all possible states is easy. For the case of what is left of Fulham’s season; the lowest sum is 1.64 (Man$ity) and the highest is 2.68 (for Leicester).

    Fulham’s least likely win is against Liverpool at under 5%, and the most likely win is 32% for Cardiff. Fulham’s least likely draw is Cardiff at 34%, and most likely draw is Watford at 66%. Fulham’s most likely loss is Liverpool at 47%, and least likely is Watford at 23%. Anyway, with a win giving 3 points and a draw giving one point, Fulham should probably see about 8.48 points (or really, 8 points).

    With that change in weighting factor, we see that the team with which Fulham has the smallest renormalization constant is Cardiff (3.2). Probably the team most like Fulham. The two teams with the highest renormalization factors are Liverpool (19.2) and Man$ity (14.7).

    In any event, the probability of win/draw/lose and renormalization factors are:

    Leicester _ _ 0.0603 0.6265 0.3132 _ 6.2145
    Liverpool _ _ 0.0053 0.4973 0.4973 _19.2085
    Man$ity _ _ _ _ 0.0058 0.4971 0.4971 _14.7479
    Watford _ _ _ _ 0.0307 0.7141 0.2552 _ 8.4863
    Everton _ _ _ _ 0.0594 0.5485 0.3921 _ 5.3548
    Bournemouth _0.0733 0.6178 0.3089 _ 4.7246
    Cardiff _ _ _ _ 0.2281 0.3860 0.3860 _ 3.2201
    Wolves _ _ _ _ _0.0353 0.6543 0.3104 _ 8.1741
    Newcastle _ _ _0.1189 0.4406 0.4406 _ 4.7897

    Fulham 6.83317459724773

    And the end result, is that we expect Fulham to get 7 points out of the rest of this season.

    —-

    The spuds are 4 points ahead of us now, and throwing this process at our and the spuds finish, it seems likely that they will get 1 more point in the final games than we will. So, no St.Totteringham Day this year.

    With updates, now expecting the spuds to get 19 points (largest renormalization was for the team least like the spuds (Huddersfield at 16.9). Arsenal are expected to get an additional 18 points (so 1 less than the spuds). Our largest renormalization was against Newcastle.

    —-

    Next possible change, would be to use a larger value for the “standard deviation” in how the Guassians handle zero and near zero goal difference.

    —-

    Sue, not you.

  38. Possibly a step after adjusting the Gaussian smearing of zero goal difference, would be to look at what happens if this is applied to every team of the EPL. Applied to the EPL as a while, it has to be a zero sum game. So that would bring about another level of renormalization.

  39. @Josif – several chances are missed because of proximity of defenders when shot taken allowing deflection. Also poor control makes shot difficult. Shots from 20 yds when in space should be converted by both Laca & Auba using technique to place the ball away from keeper. Rebounds should be followed up by the free forward.

    Power shots from midfielders or defenders, rather than close passing in a crowded defencs will bring better results specially when penalty area choked with players.

  40. Bravo Menace my special friend.You have actually managed a post without reference to cheating referees.Its still a pile of Sh1te what youve written but its better than the norm..Youre the gift that keeps on giving

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