It’s match day, it’s p*ssing it down, but I’m as excited as always to have The Arsenal playing this evening. Sure, it may be at a slightly irritating time – what with it being a 6pm kick off and therefore straight after work, but it is still an Arsenal match and that means hopefully an enjoyable evening with the boys – fingers crossed – delivering three points and putting us ever closer to winning our group.

This won’t be easy though. As I spoke of yesterday, PSV are a good outfit and they will cause us problems. Cody Gakpo looks like a player destined for a Premier League team soon enough, whilst Ibrahim Sangare looks like the typical kind of athletic midfielder who could boss games. He’s tall, good in the air, is decent at retaining the ball and gets around the pitch. There were some murmurs of us being linked to him a year or two ago, but nothing materialised, so if ever there was an opportunity for a player to have himself an audition – even if not for The Arsenal, the for the Premier League – then this would be it.

PSV are a side used to winning and that is why this won’t be a rollover tonight. They’ve won five of their last six games, with just one defeat against Cambuur in the Dutch first division, but apart from that they’ve amassed plenty of good results and will come in to tonight’s game with a little bit of pressure off given that they are away from home, as well as a point to prove in trying to get one over Arsenal , one of the form teams in Europe. We’ve won 12 of our 13 games this season and we are riding high right now, but that could all come down with a bump if we are not fully focused on our opponent today.

PSV’s playing style is apparently short passing football, looking to control possession, going through the middle and trying through balls, so I’m expecting to see a patient but clever team who will probably create chances and a few big ones too. That means that Arsenal need to be on it from the off and as I said yesterday, I wonder if it means that Mikel Arteta will be looking at a stronger team than we think this evening.

For example, my starting XI were I to pick the team, would be:

Turner

Tomiyasu   –   Saliba   –   Holding   –   Tierney

Sambi

Fabio Vieira   –   Xhaka

Marquinhos   –   Nketiah   –   Nelson

Perhaps that front line is a little light, but with rumours that Martinelli is ill, I’d be really concerned about throwing Saka in if Martinelli isn’t ready for the weekend. So I’d gamble with that front line and have Gabriel Jesus and Saka ready to come on if we need 30 minutes out of them at the end of the match. But I wouldn’t fancy putting either in from the start. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that Arteta will go a little stronger this evening than this team and I wonder if we see no Holding, no Sambi, maybe Saka instead of Marquinhos. Perhaps the thinking is to get the nearly best team out there, get the job done, then bring players off if we want to save them for Southampton on Sunday.

So I have a feeling we might see Partey, Gabriel and Saka from the start. Just my hunch.

The positive news is that travelling distances are a lot shorter for the game tonight and the game at the weekend. So the time spent sat on a plane or travelling on a bus aren’t as much, which hopefully helps the players and their recovery time. With that in mind, providing we don’t pick up any knocks this evening, maybe going stronger from the off is a better opton.

What I want to see tonight is some players step up though. I’d love to see Nketiah demonstrate that he can do it against better opposition. He scored against FC Zurich and he scored in the home game against Bodo/Glimt, but I want to see him show that if something happens to Gabriel Jesus, we can rely on him. He is a guy who at the end of last season stepped up in some big games and became quite talismanic when Lacazette’s form started to drop off a cliff, but he hasn’t really seemed like he’s got going just yet and so I’m hoping to see him make an impact tonight.

I’d also like to see Sambi have a go at dominating a midfield, because he hasn’t really done that this season, if he’s selected to start tonight of course. He’s got it in his locker; i’ve seen flashes from him to suggest he could be a fantastic player for us, but we haven’t seen it in abundance this season and I think there’s work to be done. After his comments in the press this week now would be a perfect time to show the manager and the Belgian national team boss, just what they are missing, so I am hoping we can see a great performance from him. When he played against Villa earlier in the season after Partey was injured, I had a real hope and feeling he’d do good in that game and I thought he was excellent. We need to see more games like that and I’d love that to start tonight.

Our intensity needs to be upped tonight. At the weekend we just had to grind out a result against a team who had a week off, who hadn’t travelled, had a week to prepare for our arrival. We’d travelled to Norway, back to London, then up to Yorkshire, so perhaps a slightly sluggish performance could be expected. But not this evening. The home crowd will be vociferous again as it has for most of the season, and the expectation and belief will be there that we can get the job done.

So let’s go out there and get the job done.

Annoyingly I won’t be there this evening, because I was on holiday when this game was originally pencilled in, so my ticket has been nulled for the game. But I’ll be there in spirit and I hope it’s a good’un under the fading autumn light in North London this evening.

Catch you all tomorrow with a match preview.