Happy Monday Gooners, how we all doing?

As much as the Liverpool/Klopp Farewell tour is a little cringe, the upside of yesterday’s League Cup victory for them over Chelsea is at least that the ‘Billion Pound Bottle Jobs’ as Gary Neville put it, haven’t won a trophy and therefore the blue side of West London is waking up sad today. That is certainly an up side. What you have to hope now is that they will win absolutely bugger all else in terms of trophies this season, leaving the Premier League to us.

That might be wishful thinking on this here Gooners part, but the sheer volume of fixtures will hopefully catch up with them. There has already been plenty of noise made about their current injury plight and if they continue to keep up the cadence of games they have you have to hope that it’ll come back to them eventually. We talked about that towards the end of yesterday’s Same Old Arsenal pod as we debated who has the tougher run in of fixtures. If you look at the league fixtures only it is probably us; we play Brighton away, Wolves are a good side, we have to go to City as well as the Scum for the North London Derby. There’s also the annoying reality that no matter how bad United are, they always seem to beat us at Old Trafford. So we have a super hard run in, but the hope has to be that the leveller is the volume of games. Liverpool play Southampton on Wednesday this week, they then play Forest on Saturday, then Sparta Prague on Thursday before City at home on Sunday. The following week they also play in the Europa League in the second leg before playing Everton away. I think you’d describe all of those games barring City as ‘winnable’, but you’ve still got to play them and if they progress in the FA Cup as well as the Europa League, then there will be yet more games after that. Given their perceived easier games in the league, we have to hope that the relentless nature of being in as many competitions as they are in catches up with them. In a weird way, we have to hope that they progress in every competition, we just have to hope that they don’t win anything else.

It’s the same with City. They may have been knocked out of the League Cup at earlier stages, but they are still fighting for the FA Cup and Champions League and tomorrow they go to Luton, before playing United, then Copenhagen, followed by Liverpool. We almost need them to beat Luton to chuck another game in there, although what you would say about City is that they have shown they can cope, by virtue of the fact that they won the treble last year.

As for us, we have a week off now because we’re not in the FA Cup, so you have to hope that Arteta will get the players on the training ground and focused on the next opponent of Sheffield United away on Monday week. It would be easy to just dismiss a team with the worst defence in the league as a side that we will just swat aside without any effort; this is the Premier League and we know that anyone can beat anyone on their day, so whilst we have to be hopeful of another victory next Monday, the work still needs to be put in by those players. They have been brilliant of late and are bagging goals for fun, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll have it their own way at Brammall Lane.

What I would say, however, is that the focus that Arteta and his players appear to have is there for us all to see. Just think about the way the players spoke about the Porto defeat; 15 years ago it would have been some platitudes from players saying “we know it wasn’t good enough” but now when you have players like Declan Rice and Odegaard saying things like “we know what went wrong and how to fix it”, you believe them. Arteta spoke after the Newcastle game about the players “feeling it in their tummies” when referencing the defeat to Porto and how that spurred them on to perform the way they did on Saturday evening. That’s the focus that we need. There is no “Ahh, we’re a bit fatigued” nonsense, because that’s an excuse, which doesn’t wash with Arteta. The ‘estandards’ are high and that manifests itself in performances like that first half against Newcastle. Then when you deliver like those Arsenal players did in the first half, you get the benefit of being ahead and you can rotate players out like we did at the weekend and have done for the last few weeks. Which also helps to manage the fitness of those players. It’s a virtuous cycle and the hope is that it’s enabling us to win more matches and keeping us in the conversation. But we have to keep on going. That City game at the end of March looms high on the agenda but before then there are games to be won if we still want that match in Manchester to matter. We have to beat Sheffield United, then Brentford, before possibly Chelsea if that game doesn’t get moved because of the FA Cup. Hopefully it gets moved to the couple of days after the sixth round, because that will enable us to be fresh before we play them, although I suspect it’ll get pushed back to a date in April. Although if we’re still in the Champions League then it’ll get a little tricky to find a slot for sure.

But these machinations are for another day. Today and for the remainder of this week we can bask, soak up more glorious Arsenal content, feel happy that the team are playing so well and just enjoy our respective social media feeds. You have yourselves a good one and I’ll be back tomorrow with some more musings.