Tis’ a curious thing, is hope. Whether you have your dosage delivered high, or whether yours is barely discernible to the naked eye, it can lead to a whole spectrum of different actions and emotions in humans. Take the Real Madrid fans and media right now; they are talking up anything and everything to suggest that they will overcome us. Whether it’s Carlo Ancelotti leaving the players on the pitch for 10 minutes after the game and giving them an ‘assertive’ talking to, to Jude Bellingham doing code for “we have the refs on our side at home” in his post-match comments last Tuesday, we’ve seen plenty from some of the Madrista social media accounts over this last week.

I get it, I really do, because they are a massive club and the expectation on their shoulders is big. They also regularly deliver and the hold they have on this competition is something that no other team has. The very fact that we have given ourselves a three-goal head start to progress and yet many of us (me included are still not counting our chickens ahead of this game, shows you just how big their grip is. But I spoke to a bloke next to me in Block Five just before kick off last Tuesday and he’d been in London pre-game where a congregation of Real fans were doing some pre-match boozing. He’d got chatting to them and on that night he’d said that they’d told him how worried they were about The Arsenal. When I heard that I scoffed. This is Real Madrid. This is an expensively assembled side who won the damn thing last season. This is a side with Rodrygo, Vinicius Jr and of course, Kylian Mbappe. They have the sort of players who can devastate any team and that’s all I was focused on, on that night.

Once again we will be focused / worried about them tomorrow night, but this time these Arsenal players will be buoyed by the confidence of that win and will be (hopefully) focused on keeping that home crowd quiet.

And I think that is going to be a big part of the psychology of tomorrow. If Arsenal go through that first 20 – 30 minutes without conceding, I think the hope starts to fade. The belief starts to fade. You can concede goals in a second in football matches and I remember being a kid in the 90s and seeing Robbie Fowler score a hat-trick in four minutes and 30 seconds against us. So I am old enough and ugly enough to know that after that first 30 minutes the job isn’t ‘done’. But the energy of the game tomorrow night might see some life sucked out of it and that’s what the focus has to be for those Arsenal players tomorrow. The life must be sucked out of the Bernabeu and we have to see our lads grow bigger and taller with every passing minute.

Conversely, if that first 15 minutes see’s Madrid score, then the nerves may well kick in for our players. They certainly will do for me. I remember the Hull City FA Cup final in 2014 and within the first 10 minutes we were two goals down. But I heard a few people around me in that stadium say “they’ve scored too early, we’re still in this. And we were. Because Cazorla scored that free kick on around 16 minutes and suddenly the pressure was all on Hull to defend a lead and we had more than two-thirds of a football match to win it back.

If Real score early tomorrow, then they will be thinking that they have a heck of a lot of time to claw back two more goals, whilst our mindset might have changed from the pre-match analysis and team talk by the manager. Because ultimately, Arteta will set up his team in a certain way, which won’t be for a low block. But he himself said earlier in the season when we had to defend the lead against Man City and essentially retreated in to an extremely defensive position, that it was not what was under instruction from his coaching staff. But there’s only so much they can do and the game state and approach of the opposition can throw all of your best laid plans out of the window. The famous example in Arsenal’s history is the Anfield 89 match. I’ve heard the players talk in seminars, etc, about how George had been quite calm, composed, set up with a game plan and had said to his players “just get to halftime at 0-0”. The players obviously looked at each other and thought “has he lost it? We’ve got to win by TWO clear goals??”. But George had obviously mapped out the approach and he knew that the psychology of those Liverpool players would play a part in this game. They would start to feel like the job is done if they played out a boring 0-0 and that meant that Arsenal had to lull them into a false sense of security before going for it in the second half. Of course it worked, we made history, the greatest ever final day of a domestic league season ever was complete.

It was all about football psychology, which is what tomorrow’s game will also be about, in absolute spades. Arsenal will have to manage the psychology of tomorrow perfectly. They’ll have to compartmentalise this football match into a bunch of smaller football matches, then win the battles for the early ones, the ones in the middle, then at the end. Or, if they can’t win  (and you can’t win ’em all), then just make sure that – like a boxer winning on points, you win enough of the battles to ensure you don’t get stunned.

I believe in this team and hope they can manage those battles.

Back tomorrow with some more pre-match thoughts. Catch you then.