It’s FA Cup weekend this weekend and whilst most of our rivals have basically been given free reign to rotate and rest key players by playing teams further down the football pyramid, the footballing gods saw fit to once again do us a dirty by having to come up against relatively strong opposition in the shape of Man United. it means an already injury-plagued squad is going to have to be pretty strong.

That’s our game tomorrow afternoon and yesterday Arteta was in front of the press dolled up in the No More Red white kit campaign attire, to talk about what lies ahead for us in this tricky home tie.

There was the usual plaudits for the opposition manager, designed to give no opportunity for sticking his comments up on the away team changing room walls, as well as the usual “we’ve won this competition 14 times so we have a great affinity with it” type stuff. Nothing really to write home about.

Neither too, unfortunately (but not unexpectedly), was there anything particularly ground breaking about what he said when asked about transfers. You wouldn’t expect anything concrete, but in recent weeks he’s subtly suggested that we do need to re-enforce our squad and so for me personally, when I read his comments or watch his videos, what I’m hoping to get a hint of is more subtle undertones on buying this January. There wasn’t really any of that yesterday and he stuck to a well-trodden Premier League manager path of talking about how difficult it is to sign players in January, how we need quality not quantity, as well as how we have to get more from existing players.

And we certainly do, because there’s no doubt that the form of some – particularly in attack – has been patchy. But even defensively we have looked the tiniest bit less imperious this season I think. Perhaps I’m suffering from recency bias off the back of the Newcastle defeat, but we looked shaky, although given we were so blunt in attack I don’t think defence is the biggest of our concerns when it comes to recruiting. Mikel was asked outright if an attacker was on the shopping list and he kind of just waved it away, saying “No, the circumstances change because we have certain injuries for some big players, so it’s always a possibility but always it’s about somebody that is really going to make us much better.”

I get that, I suspect he just didn’t want to answer the question, but if you read that in isolation it makes you wonder whether he thinks another left back might be the solution!

I’m jesting of course, because there’s no way he’s looking at some of the profligate performances of our forward players and not wondering if a freshen up is needed. It’s just whether they can pull the trigger on an opportunity this January, or whether it has to wait until the summer. He did drop a stat about goalscoring not being a problem for us because we’ve scored the most goals in the Premier League in the 2024 calendar year, but he’ll know as well as we do that it is a statistic that can – and is – misleading. It’s better to win ten games 1-0 than two games 5-0 and lose the rest. We’ve had plenty of games in 2024 where we’ve battered teams and that’s because the football match has been opened up. Unlocking stubborn low block defences is still a big problem for us and the internal solutions we’ve got haven’t been able to do it as much as a team fighting for the title should be able to. Hence why the focus is on the attacking output and freshening it up. But he knows that.

He was also asked about Ødegaard’s form and him missing Saka, which is something we’ve all obviously spotted because of the great connection those two players have, but I think a little more is being made of Ødegaard’s form that is necessary, personally, because in the last week or so he’s a) had a kid and that might have impacted him a little with some initial sleepless nights, and b) had an illness that Arteta referenced in his press conference has kept him out for a week. In the midweek he was really poor, but that’s probably because he was getting over that illness and by now hopefully he’s recovered, with my bet that we’ll see a different Martin tomorrow and certainly in the North London Derby in midweek next week.

We need to. There needs to be more from the likes of him and there needs to be greater goal output from across the team with Saka. That means Jesus, Havertz, Trossard, Martinelli, Ødegaard, Merino, Rice, Partey – as well as our defenders like Gabriel and Saliba – all need to be upping their game now and, more than ever with Saka missing, the output needs to be upped. We can’t keep affording the types of misses from Havertz and Timber from midweek. We have to be more clinical – from players all over the pitch.

There’s not really a ton of other stuff from the press conference worth talking about really, so I’ll put a pin in today’s ramblings and be back tomorrow with some thoughts on how the game might pan out from a tactical perspective, particularly given United’s impressive performance at Anfield last weekend and how differently the match might be since we played Amorim’s United a couple of months back at the start of his tenure.

Catch you wonderful humans tomorrow.