Morning folks and welcome to Saturday. I was thinking this is a winter break weekend, but with Chelsea at home to Fulham and Newcastle playing City at St James’ Park, then Everton at home to Villa and United playing the Scum at Old Trafford, clearly that isn’t the case. So we have something to have a look at football-wise at least, as well as some teams to root for. It’ll feel a little dirty, but wins for Newcastle, Everton and Man United would be a treat, although I think the likelihood of all three happening will be quite remote.

City will beat a Newcastle side who have been pretty average this season and even when we came to town ‘got away with one’ with their goal.

Villa just keep on – annoyingly – picking up results.

The Scum play at Old Trafford and I doubt there are many United fans feeling particularly optimistic about their chances given their season so far.

So we are in a little bit of ‘hope’ mode this weekend. Let’s see what shakes out.

The hope is also that because the players are getting a winter break where the likes of Villa and the Scum aren’t, that it might come back to hurt them a little bit in the coming months. We’ve talked about how our players needed a rest after a busy schedule, but I wonder what Unai Emery, Klopp, Pep and ‘Mate’ are feeling, because it doesn’t look like they get one and with us out of the FA Cup as well, it means there will be a week off in March before we play City too. If City overcome the Scum then they’ll both knock them out of their major chance of winning a trophy – which will be fun – but they’ll also add games at the end of February and then hopefully the middle of March, which will be just before they play us. With us out of the competition my interest in it is purely for fixture congestion, so I’d like City and Liverpool to get themselves as deep as possible, hopefully not winning it, because that might give us some help when it comes to the league. We’ve all spoken about how Arteta isn’t using as much of his squad as we’d like and that has manifested itself as us all talking about how tired the current set of regular players are, so it would be interesting to see what fans of other clubs are saying, because for teams this weekend it doesn’t look like there’s much respite for them whilst our boys are in Dubai.

One word of caution we should all sound, however, is that I’m not sure this Dubai trip will be the panacea we’re all looking for. It’s great the players have a week off, warm weather is known to have more benefits than the biting cold we’ve got in the UK now, but I’m not sure we’re going to see the players return and suddenly start smashing teams up by six or seven goals. The mental problems that exist will still be there, but we have to hope that they have been able to shrink them enough so we can get back to winning ways. When you look at the goalscoring stats of our forward players for the season as a whole it doesn’t really make for amazing reading; yes, in the last three matches it feels like the problem has been compounded, but the season has been going on since August and Gabriel Martinelli has had 24 matches with which he’s only got four goals this season. We need to see a change there because players like him need to be hitting double figures. Odegaard, Saka, Havertz and Gabriel Jesus (if he can stay fit) need to as well.

On Jesus I watched the team training session on the official site this morning and Gabriel Jesus is there in his kit, training and looking like he’s ready to go, so that will be a bonus for Palace at home in a week’s time. Didn’t see anything of Zinchenko however, so I suspect that probably means that we’ll need to find another left back solution for Palace, which isn’t great. We saw that Kiwior struggled against Fulham and whilst he was better against Liverpool, it still wasn’t 100%. A match like Palace at home is one you’d hope he isn’t in as much trouble, but it is the sort of game you’d expect us to have plenty of the ball and pop somebody like Zinchenko in the midfield as we dominate both ball and territory. But with him unlikely to make it back if he isn’t training at the moment, Arteta still has a conundrum he’ll have to solve when they get back to the UK. I don’t think it’ll be Tomiyasu either; the Asia Cup is playing over the next couple of weeks and Japan will most definitely make it out of a group that contains Iraq, Indonesia and Vietnam. I suspect having looked at the teams in that competition that Japan will expect to be at least getting through to the quarters or semi’s, which means even if he remains fit we won’t see him until mid February.

Other than that there’s not really a lot else going on; I don’t really want to get embroiled in transfer talk and in any event I can’t see the club making any big moves as we’ve all been repeatedly told by the journalists, so it does feel like the hopes need to be that this warm weather training does at least some kind of trick on the players and we at least see a side with more zip and verve about it. In front of goal I mean, of course, because everything else has looked ok, it’s just been the end product that has been missing, as we all know.

Right, it’s The Management’s birthday today so I’ve got to go for a run and then give her some prezzies. Have yourselves a great day and I’ll be back tomorrow.