Morning Gooners and happy Friday to you and yours. We’ve got Mikel up later today at some stage and he’ll give us a  team update, so it’ll be interesting to see how he handles the inevitable ‘Big lad Merino up top Mikel?” questions from the journalists. It could go a few ways; he could pour cold water on it and say “only for emergencies, not a regular thing”, or he could say “yeah we might give it a try more often”, or  – what is more likely – he’ll just give some answer which is a little more difficult to decode in an attempt to throw off any West Ham staff watching for hints as to how we’ll line up.

I said it before and after the Merino appearance on Saturday, but it feels like we won’t have a lot of time for us to be a bit of an ‘unknown quantity’ in terms of opposition and analysts. The Merino ace-in-the-hole by playing him up top worked well in the end, but West Ham will be mindful of that for this Saturday. Sometimes it takes a few games for analysts of opposition to suss out what you are doing and that’s certainly my hope between now and the international break; we’ve got four games between now and then (West Ham at home, Forest away, United away and Chelsea home) and we just need to stutter our way through these by hook or by crook to pick up wins, so if we can use this Merino experiment in the short term and it achieves those objectives, then happy days.

The first hurdle is this weekend of course and I did my usual ‘have a look at what opposition fans are saying. The West Ham match forums don’t have their fans showing much confidence, it has to be said, but there are a few in there suggesting that it could be one of those games in which they dig out a heroic victory. It doesn’t even have to be a sparkling West Ham performance, as we know from last season, so my hope is that we don’t get a repeat of that huff and puff game. Given how difficult we made it for ourselves against Leicester until those closing stages, I do wonder if it’s going to be a bit of a slog tomorrow. West Ham will have seen how Leicester set up and be thinking “we could do that” i.e. be difficult to break down, look to hit Arsenal in transition and bloody our noses like they did last year. Having watched the two goals we conceded last year though, it was calamitous defending for the first and nobody marking Mavropanos on a corner, so you’d hope we’ll cut out that nonsense tomorrow.

If Arsenal are hoping for a bit of the ‘unknown’ in how the team lines up, West Ham are a little bit similar in terms of their approach under Potter. He has been there since the ninth of January and so there’s a good five games to have a look at them, but it hasn’t been the best start for him. They beat Fulham in a bloody weird game (West Ham scored three goals from four attempts, with Fulham amassing 21 – shades of us last season against them), they lost to a Palace side who outshot them at home, drew away to Villa (a good point), lost to Chelsea and then the Brentford game last weekend (which I’ll talk about below), so they’ve had a bit of a mixed bag. You can hardly call that a new manager bounce. But they have changed under him. They’ve supposedly changed their approach under Potter, plus I’m pretty sure that during his Brighton days he always seemed to do well against us. Just looked it up – four wins from nine games, so we need to be very wary of how he sets up. I feel like there are certain managers who always seem to get the better of Arteta (annoyingly Eddie Howe seems to be one of them) so let’s hope that’s not the case this weekend. Apparently they’ve increased their passing ratios and apparently their final third presses are up too. So if we get a West Ham side will to press further up the field, that will hopefully – fingers crossed – lead to more space across the pitch for us to exploit. He’s also been playing a back three on occasions too I think and I’m pretty sure we’ve more-often-than-not played well against a back three. That means they also go with wing backs and given West Ham look to deliver the most switches in the league, it wouldn’t surprise me to see those two wing backs – think it’ll be Wan-Bissaka and Emerson – getting forward as West Ham try the long diags.

In their last game they lost to Brentford in what – statistically at least – looked like a pretty even game. Before that they went to Chelsea and Chelsea bagged the second half goals before Bowen had put West Ham up in front. He’s their main threat I think, as we know, but West Ham struggle with getting their shots on target. They’re bottom of the league in terms of goals per shots and have the lowest percentage of any team – 27% of their shots lead to a goal – behind Villa (30%), Southampton (32%) and Leicester (32%). So we have to hope that they are profligate tomorrow as well.

They are disappointed about Paqueta – understandably so given his importance to this West Ham side – and I think that will rock the team a bit. At least I hope it will. He’s their third highest goalscorer this season with four goals in the Premier League and is third on xG for West Ham – which you’d expect given he’s bagged some goals and a couple of penalties. Along with Wan-Bissaka he’s their most progressive passer in the team and is the guy that tends to split teams – leading their side on through balls with 10 (the next person to do that is Bowen with seven). So they will miss him, but they will still have enough from other players like Bowen and Kudus to cause us problems.

I’ll be back with more tomorrow looking at what Arteta said and how we might line up to counter West Ham’s threat, whilst unpicking them at the back, so until then you have a good one.