Morning Gooners – how we all doing on the eve of the Anfield expedition?

It’s probably just a me thing, but it feels like at this time of the year you have to whack the word ‘Eve’ on to the day before any big event, so we’re at Anfield Eve right now and I don’t know why, but I’m weirdly more excited than nervous this morning. We’ll see if that holds up for tomorrow, but right now I feel the anticipation is a good feeling in my gut, rather than an unpleasant one.

Perhaps that speaks more to the way that Arteta has built his team and squad up until this point. He celebrated his fourth anniversary during the week and we’ve gone from a team in a wretched run of form and towards the bottom of the table, to a side who last season competed for the Premier League until towards the end, as well as one that is looking pretty good to at least compete well in to the new year this season as well (note my caution about talking about the fact that we absolutely will compete until the end – the football gods have a way of kicking me in the nuts so I’ll not be as bullish as that just yet).

Sure, we’ve had some rough patches like the COVID season, but those that use “two eighth place finishes” as a stick to beat him with forget that in the first season he finished eighth he took charge of the team away to Bournemouth and we were sitting in 11th. So it’s not as if he did a worse job than where we were at and when that season eventually drew to a close with the FA Cup final, he won it and picked us up some silverware. The second eighth place finish was, granted, a tough ol’ season to watch but he corrected course halfway through and since then our trajectory has only been upwards.

And here we are, on the eve of a trip to Anfield, with a nervous and ‘glass half empty’ Gooner like me tapping away at my keyboard feeling excited to see how much this team has evolved tomorrow evening. We go in to this game tomorrow hopefully with a more fully fit squad than the last time we came to Anfield; William Saliba will hopefully replace Rob Holding from last season and sitting in front of our back four will be Declan Rice. Those two players instantly give us more stability and whilst Liverpool have been one of the electric teams going forward in the league this season, we have the defensive unit who hopefully can at least temper some of that. I’m not saying we won’t concede, but we have a solid foundation with which to maybe build on some sort of points accumulation tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Arteta will jump in front of the media today before he and his team head up to the North West and I’m sure he’ll be in good spirits after the week he’s had. A full working week on the training ground to assess who is ready, enough time to get specific instructions for this game in there, as well as the required rest an recuperation needed to make sure that fatigue and tired legs aren’t an excuse if we don’t manage to secure the points tomorrow.

And I guess what’s also helping me is that even if the usual does happen and we lose tomorrow, we’d be just a couple of points away from top spot having got anfield out of the way. If we were four or five points off Liverpool right now, it would probably feel a little more terminal for our Premier League title dreams than it does going in to this weekend’s fixtures.

And who knows, if/when Villa win at home to Sheffield United tonight, maybe the focus will start to shift to them as the ‘underdog story’, as well as being on Liverpool as the ‘they should win it now as the big guns’ story, leaving us to quietly just keep chipping away at winning games until it gets to proper crunch time in March.

The Ivan Toney stuff continues to trickle through as noise, but forgive me for sounding like too much of a sceptic, but I’m just not buying it. The stuff I’ve been reading online suggest Brentford want £100million and for a guy who scored 21 goals last season – of which six were penalties – that seems way too steep for me. He’ll be 28 next March and probably has three or four years in the top flight at his peak I would have thought, so why would Arsenal spunk that much cash in January? Or more importantly, how could they do it given the FFP rules that exist? I know they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on – just look at Chelsea – but Arsenal are still committed to them and that’s why we didn’t sign Raya. So I don’t see that deal happening.

I’m also not sure why we’d want somebody like Toney. I get the whole “another option” type player, but are you really going to spend £100million on a guy who you want to bring on from the bench if plan A Gabriel Jesus doesn’t work? Let’s not sleep on Gabby J either; this lad has been great for us of late and since coming back to a better level of fitness, so to suggest Toney walks in to this team ahead of him is a little insulting to the guy we already have if you ask me.

There’s also the fact that we’d have to change up our game with Toney. Gabriel Jesus drops deep, links play, brings the wide forwards in and if you look at his underlying metrics he is a player that knits moves together. Toney is the guy on the end of the moves, Granted, he’d be a better finisher than gabby J, but Mikel has never looked for that in his centre forwards. He rarely played Auba through the middle because he wanted to have his forwards score from wide positions. Ivan Tomey isn’t slotting in as a left or right inside forward, is he? At least I don’t think he would. So for me this Toney stuff feels a little wide of the mark and would be one heck of a deviation from what we have built and where we have got to right now.

Of course if we get him, if he signs, he gets my support. But until it becomes a reality I remain sceptical and probably a bit against the deal to be honest. But then again I was with Kai and it’s working out alright now as it stands.

That’s probably enough for today. Final day of work before I can clock off for 2023, so I’ll catch you wonderful humans tomorrow for a full match preview. Have a good-un.