There’s still time for us to click into some form but, if we can’t score against West Ham, Sunderland, Spurs and Fulham, who can we score against? West Brom have conceded the most goals in the league this season and I’m not entirely confident we can put one past them either

So, new records for consecutive league games without scoring and consecutive goalless draws under Arsene. It’s about right in our worst season under him. The fight for fourth is all but over apart from a fat bint singing. If we were to extrapolate our points total so far this season up to the end of the season, we’d end up on about 65 points. There’s only 33 points left to play for so the most we could get is 78. Say we improve in form with the return of Fabregas, Walcott etc and push the extrapolated total to 70, at a bit of a stretch. That would mean that, for us to achieve a top four finish, Villa would have to drop 16 points from the last 33 available. That would mean, for instance, three losses and four draws from their remaining 11 games. Can we really see them only winning four of their remaining games, in a scenario where we only drop 8 points having just drawn five in a row? No, probably not. So the priority is now to hold Everton off, who are only two points behind and in far superior form to us, in the sense that their fans can remember their last league goal. At least there’ll be plenty of UEFA Cup places available.

There’s still time for us to click into some form but, if we can’t score against West Ham, Sunderland, Spurs and Fulham, who can we score against? West Brom have conceded the most goals in the league this season and I’m not entirely confident we can put one past them either. We haven’t won in the league for a month and a half, if we can’t beat the team rooted to the bottom of the table then it really is game over in terms of the league and we might as well concentrate on the cups and hope West Ham don’t catch us. This game really should be a win, just by the law of averages. And then we’ve got Burnley on Saturday, to whom we can hopefully do what we did to Cardiff, and we’re in pole position to qualify against Roma and if we manage that then maybe there’ll be a bit of confidence back in the team. At the very least, between now and next week I’d like to think we’ll score a goal. And that’s a good place to start. Hell, I’d take a goal against, just to break the monotony of goalless draws in the league. Although our clean sheet record is quite nice.

West Brom’s current form is pretty poor and they’re four points adrift at the bottom of the league, but they’ve still managed to score four goals in their last four league games compared to our zero, despite losing three of those games. They’ve also managed as many home goals as us this season, despite being rock bottom. But they have conceded seventeen goals in their last six matches, and going by some of their defending against Everton on Saturday we should have a chance of a goal. In the last six seasons we’ve faced West Brom nine times, two of those times in the Carling Cup. We won seven of those encounters, drew with them once in the league in 2004, and lost 2-1 at The Hawthorns when they were last in the Premier League. Hopefully we can do better than that on Tuesday, but we’ve not exactly eased past the newly promoted teams this season.

Team News

Wenger might be tempted to rotate a bit for this game, given the proximity to the Fulham game and the FA Cup and Champions League games next week. If he does rotate, it’s not like they can score any less than the current first team, can they?

Bendtner could come back into the team, this fixture is too soon for Walcott, Eduardo and Adebayor. Song could come back into midfield and Eboue could replace one of Arshavin and Nasri. Gallas is out with an ankle problem so Djourou will take his place.

Subs: Fabianski, Gibbs, Denilson, Ramsey, Wilshere, Arshavin, Vela.

Jay Simpson is unable to play against the team he is on loan from. Youssuf Mulumbu and Jonas Olsson are out injured, but Jonathon Greening could come back into the starting line up after injury. Ishmael Miller is out for the season.