Morning folks and welcome to the weekend, in which we face yet another massive game tomorrow, so yesterday and today becomes all about the build up to that.

Although having said that I do think the Villa situation is interesting. I listened to the Arsenal Vision podcast yesterday whilst out on a walk and I heard Elliott talking to Paul about the potential Watkins deal. Yesterday I said I give that Watkins deal a 1% chance of happening, but that was before I’d realised that Villa’s wages to revenue ratio is 96%. Most Premier League Clubs operate at around 55 – 70% I think. Arsenal’s is at 53%, City’s is at 57%, United’s is at 56% and Liverpool’s is at 63%. That enables more wiggle room when it comes to the deals you can do, but also PSR. Villa next year will get the bump of Champions League money, so their number will will fall, but not significantly in terms of that wage ratio I don’t think, which explains why there have been noises about them needing to sell. To be fair to them they have sold Duran for a cool £64million, but they’ve signed Malen for just over £20million (was he a type of replacement for Duran? I know he’s a right winger mainly but he can operate across the front three and has done for Dortmund this season), they have made a loan enquiry for Rashford and there’s some tenuous links to Marco Asensio (value on TransferMarkt of €20million) before the end of the window. Sky Sports were reporting the Rashford loan had gone in last night. They also are looking to sign a centre half too apparently, which will cost them around £20million.

So that’s:

  • Malen = £20million
  • Asensio = £17million
  • Rashford = big wages loan
  • centre half = £20million

That’s a lot of your Duran money gone. Now, that in itself you’d say is fair enough, but if they do have to sell to avoid PSR problems in the summer – especially if they don’t get Champions League football (They’re currently in eighth) – then you do think that there might be a reason that they won’t fully close the door on a Watkins deal, for all the reasons I talked about yesterday (age profile, going to have to give him a big deal in the summer to ward off other clubs, etc).

It does make you wonder.

I do think it still is highly unlikely now though. The Villa fans would go crazy if they sold their two strikers this window and no amount of new signing adrenaline shot with the likes of the above mentioned players is going to get them to not point some fingers at the Villa board. Never underestimate the value of good fan PR and Duran and Watkins gone in the same window doesn’t feel like it to me. Let’s see what shakes out this weekend and on Monday, but I still think it’s highly unlikely, so I am hoping that Arsenal are exploring options.

Arteta was once again asked about this – and specifically Watkins – at his press conference yesterday and of course he remained tight-lipped. He reaffirmed that the club are doing everything to find a striker before Monday night’s deadline and that he’s very confident with the work that the club is doing. It’s a bit of a ‘catch all’ statement because it doesn’t suggest that he’s confident we’ll sign somebody, but that we’ve got lots of people working very hard to try to do something. We’ll save the discussion for after the window closes, but there will be big questions asked about why we didn’t move sooner – for Watkins or anyone – in January if we don’t get something over the line.

On City he obviously dolled out his usual platitudes so that he doesn’t give them any motivation and even when the press tried to have a nibble at him regarding the game earlier in the year (talking about ‘unfinished business’, or a ‘point to prove’, or his comments about how he ‘knows City’ when he was asked about Arsenal doing ‘dark arts’ earlier in the season), he didn’t really budge and was able to do some classic cricket-style ‘blocking’ to protect his wicket, so to speak. You’d expect nothing else from him at this stage, with a game of this magnitude, with the potential of Arsenal’s season hanging on victory at home against the Champions.

He was leaning in to the crowd a little bit when asked, which you’d expect and I think we’ll be playing our part tomorrow, but for me personally I am really starting to get nervous about this. Yes, City haven’t been the same City as in previous years and yes, we had Pep yesterday declaring his team to be ‘old’. But this is a wily outfit and not as old as he would have you believe. De Bruyne doesn’t need pace to set Haaland in behind, Marmoush is 25, Foden is 24, Savinho is 20, Gvardiol is 23 and even Bernardo Silva who has been around ages, is 30. So they have plenty of legs in them and they will cause us plenty of problems tomorrow, for sure.

I’ve had a little look on a few of the fan forums to get where the City fans’ heads are at and they all agree that City should win this – which I kinda get given their pedigree – but that defensively they are all over the place. If Guardiola is right and there’s no Dias in their back line that’s a boost for us, but we all know Pep has a trick up his sleeve for these types of games so I’m expecting something unusual tomorrow. More on that in the morrow I think. They seem to want to see a Savinho, Haaland and Marmoush front three and that’s probably the line up that I would be most worried about. Plenty of pace, trickery and in Haaland’s case power and finishing in there, so it will be interesting to see how we line up defensively. Let’s just pray Raya is fit and with Timber playing 45 minutes against Girona in a job share with Partey at right back on Wednesday night, you’d hope he’s fit and good to go against City. Feels like we’ll need him.

A final piece that is interesting though, is that some City fans are saying that De Bruyne is ‘done’. I can’t believe that, surely? But we’ll have to wait and see what Guardiola goes with. Apparently they’re all looking at the likes of Kovacic and Bernardo Silva as their deeper midfielders and a few have suggested that new lad Khusanov playing at right back. After his couple of shaky moments against Chelsea last weekend you’d hope that whoever plays left wing for us will test the youngster if that is indeed the line up.

Tomorrow I’ll look a little more at what we have to do and the team I’d like to see us play, but for now, let’s just enjoy Saturday and hope Bournemouth can do us some kind of favour.

Catch you all tomorrow.