Jack Wilshere was supposed to take his place on the bench once again today and come on late in the second half but a double dose of jaded bad performances may have left the manager with not much choice. Our team needs fresh legs, needs a spark to get it started once again and the members of the midfield who can do that apart from Wilshere are all injured.
Laurent Koscielny will return to the team which will thankfully push Alex Song further forward into the position he needs to be in. Koscielny will resume his partnership with Per Mertesacker and it will be down to Arsene to decide to start Andre Santos or Kieran Gibbs. Arsene would have been able to keep a close eye on their progress during the last week as both would have
Obviously first thing is first, I want those three points but I also would love to see our attacking game click because it hasn't so far and many Wenger teams are built on the momentum of our play, if that does not function then we stutter. Fluency is the key, quick combination passing takes time to get right, especially when you have to incorporate new players into the set up
Mikel Arteta has had much more time as he was not called up for Spain and has trained on a few occasions since his £10m move on transfer deadline day. Arteta will be an almost guaranteed starter today but his role in the team is yet to be known to Gooners. I am interested to know if we will go
Plenty of defensive and offensive responsibility will fall on the shoulders of Emmanuel Eboue this afternoon. A player who can be fantastic one moment and then shaky the next. I expect Liverpool to defend narrowly with special attention being made to Walcott on that side so Eboue could find himself as the spare man at times. His powerful running could give space to others and could also make one of
We have had the Emirates stadium to hold our hands when mass changes caused our level of performance to drop, this will not be the case this time so the players who are given the chance to play will have to hit the ground running. I would be very surprised if Arsene threw in many of the players from midweek as the game required a huge amount of physical and mental energy and when you look further down the line we have the small matter of Tony Pulis' thugs and then the Carling Cup final against an even bigger collection of thugs. That is actually quite a frightening prospect.
