It looks like it’s shaping up to be a glorious few days of weather here in London over the next couple of days, but will the football tomorrow evening match that, given what we saw on Tuesday and the fact we have our second leg of the Quarter Final of the Champions League against Real Madrid next week?

I’m not so sure. That ‘Jones Knows’ fella on Sky Sports has backed Brentford to get all three points on Sunday and whilst at first that raised my eyebrows a bit on hearing it, when you see his reasoning you can kind of understand it. This game tomorrow will be like the Everton game I suspect, in that Arteta and Arsenal will be prioritising Real Madrid in the Bernabeu. So we might see a fair bit of Arsenal rotation. Plus, as he pointed out, last season we got our noses bloodied by an Aston Villa side who were out of most competitions and played us slap-bang in the middle of our two-legged tie against Bayern. There’s definitely a correlation for Champions League teams’ performances in between these types of legs too, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that we come down with a bit of a bump tomorrow.

It’s only natural. The high of a game like Tuesday night cannot be achieved in a home match against Brentford, in a competition that we cannot win, but one in which we still have to fulfil another seven fixtures. It might feel very much ‘after the Lord Mayors show’ tomorrow evening. The fans won’t be as loud as Tuesday I don’t think, so if that’s what happens and that’s how we feel, why wouldn’t the players, manager and his coaching staff feel even a tiny bit like that?

Of course he will say he is focused, the team is focused, he’s not thinking about Madrid yet and his mind is on Brentford and that’s the right mindset and things to say. But he, like we, is only human.

As for Brentford, I’ve done my usual look at what the opposition fans are saying, as well as see what some of the stats tell us about what we’re up against tomorrow. Firstly, the fans, who I think are pretty bullish about tomorrow, all things considered. They are in 12th at the moment, they’ve hit the 40 point mark this season, there’s no chance of being embroiled in any kind of relly scrap (even if they had less points they still wouldn’t go down, because the three promoted teams are straight back down and it’s some of the worst numbers from three teams that I’ve seen for sure), so they are just playing for positions and big days out. So they are happy to be bullish with little to play for other than maybe a nice evening in the sun against an Arsenal team with perhaps an eye elsewhere and rotation almost sure to happen.

From a data perspective their away form leaves them in 13th in the league, so about par for their season, having won five of the 15 they’ve played. They’ve scored the 11th best in the league and conceded 12th best, so that doesn’t really tell us much of a story. What does tell a story is the number of shots on target they allow. They right towards the bottom there, with only Southampton worse for them, so they do give up chances to teams. They also lump it forward from their ‘keeper a lot, so we’re going to get a very different game to Tuesday night’s one against Real (obviously). They launch the ball long the second most behind Everton in terms of launched passes completed. They also face the second most crosses in the league, so that tells me it’s a team happy to concede the wide positions to remain in a compact shape.

Their overall team passing numbers paint a similar picture; they go long the fourth most times in the league behind the likes of Everton, Bournemouth and Fulham – so what we’re going to get on Saturday is a Brentford side looking to get the ball up field through long ball distribution, which I think makes sense when you think about the pace they have in Mbuemo and Wissa and whilst Frank has said he wants to adopt a medium and high press, I suspect they won’t go too high because they will know that high press is what Arsenal want teams to do so we can play/pass our way around it. I suspect what we we will see is more of a mid-block from Thomas Frank’s side, looking to catch us out on transition and play those long passes into the channels for those wide forwards that they have.

In attack here’s an interesting stat: they have the best shots on target percentage ratio of any team in the league. But they sit 14th in terms of the total number of shots that they’ve taken; this is a team who don’t shoot often, but when they do, they tend to get goals from it. When you think about the composition of this Arsenal team, who don’t give up many chances at all, this very much feels like a game in which Brentford won’t get much of a sniff at all, but like West Ham, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do something like score with their only bloody chance of the game.

We’ve got Arteta’s press conference today and so we’ll get teams news, so tomorrow I’ll pen some thoughts based on what he talks about today. But until then, you lovely people have a great day and I’ll catch you in the morrow.