It is going to be very interesting to see what Arsene does with the line up tonight. Theo Walcott, Nacho Monreal, Hector Bellerin and Santi Cazorla will be left behind due to injury or knocks (that’s probably the same thing) so we are going to witness some degree of rotation anyway. Oliver Giroud sat alongside Arsene Wenger at the pre match presser yesterday and I swear Giroud indicated that he would be playing tonight, or perhaps I just read more into something that meant very little. That said, how many times has an Arsenal player sat alongside Arsene pre match and not started the following day
We lacked Santi Cazorla's creative passing from deep without question but I'm not entirely sure that was the main reason for our flat performance. I thought we got the ball into our front players in decent positions many times over the course of the 90 minutes, the problem was that our attacking players were just off the pace on the day. Alex Iwobi was pretty decent in the first half, probing and finding spaces in the pockets between midfield and defence as he does so well, but his teammates were off their game. Mesut Ozil who had struck a hat-trick a few days earlier was not at his best and neither was our main scoring outlet from the right Theo Walcott
