The string of positive results on the field just keep on coming! Week after week, match after match, competition after competition, the players have leveraged their training, their talent, their film sessions and their coaching and turned it all into the most impressive string of results so far this season. Six straight games unbeaten across three competitions, The Arsenal sit 4th in the table, a point clear of our rivals for Champions League places. The fans at the Emirates will be in stong voice Thursday evening, when the boys will take on the strongest Belgian side we're likely to face all season. Tierney, Bellerin and Holding will look to continue their integration into the first team and Emery will look to avoid making eye contact with Ozil, assuming he's rested enough to feature. I know all of you will be watching with your Bleacher Report subscriptions or with your Spanish language add-on packages freshly paid for (fuboTV / TUDN, whatever that is). Kickoff is 3:00pm ET Come on you Gunners!!!!
+1 for on-the-ball-thread-starting duty +1 for subtle sarcasm (I think) I hope to catch this one at O'Hanlons since I'm due to be in NYC anyway p.s. I guess this will be the first European match in a long while which is not carried on one of the regular spanish TV channels.
I take it back. My DVR says we're on TUDN tv channel at 2:50pm. That's a big plus, even if there isn't SAP English, which is usually hit or miss.
Can't see Ozil playing in this one. Emery is likely resting him for the big game against Sheffield United on January 18th, 2020.
IDK, it seems Ozil is relegated to the "secondary" matches, and UEL against Liege would seem to be one of those. Plus it's at home and on paper seems like one of the "easier" contests. So that's why I expect Mesut in the squad at least, and perhaps in the XI. p.s. I never expected him to make the trip to OT. In other team news... Laca is still out for some more time/weeks. ESR is still in recovery from concussion protocol. Tierney seems a bit iffy, based on recent comments about him not traveling to OT because of some minor medical issue? Bellerin may get some minutes but probably not a full 90... he's being eased back carefully.
Makes a lot of sense to me and many many others. If it doesn't make sense to you, that's fine. There's plenty of room in our world for differing opinions.
My plans changed so I'm just catching up on this now, watching in FFWD on my DVR. After first 20-30 mins my reactions were: 1) Can we PLEASE play in the league like the way we do in the cups*?! 2) Maybe Martinelli can help us forget about losing Gnabry? Still got 20 more minutes to watch, so let's see what awaits... *Yes I know we were only playing Forest & Liege but man that's the way I'd love us to play by default. Actually fun to watch... no shit.
Martinelli with some sublime finishing and movement in the box, even Michael Owen had to acknowledge it at half time. What was actually as impressive is when he went on the left wing after A14 came in as a second-half sub: Martinelli with some great balls into the box, skinning players and making great runs that were dangerous from a provider point of view. Joe Willock was a box to box boss, really showing strength combined with speed and skill . He has shown that he can be a midfielder who can also score, great finish today. Everything came from the left, Tierney with another excellent game and props to Reiss Nelson as well. We could’ve scored more, some of the passing wasn’t as crisp as it could’ve been, but the other team was hardly dangerous at all. clearly these are our starting full backs in the league. Martinelli and Joe Willock deserve serious playing time as well.
FT 4-0. Other thoughts: Torreira: Great to see him played as our deepest lying midfielder... the position many of us have bee pining to see him in... and I thought he did fine (albeit Liege didn't present us too many problems offensively, and also I watched the whole match on fast-forward, but still...) Ceballos: He seemed to have a pretty good match. Phew! But man have you seen a more one-footed player than this guy? Several times he was running down the left and it was screaming for a left-footed cross, but each time he had to pull it back to get his right foot on it... and all the dangerous momentum evaporated. Martinelli: Another great game from this youngster. With an early brace, which should've been 3 or 4. I was sure he was gonna match Gnabs. Oh well... all good. Pepe: Don't really know what to say about him. But clearly there needs to be some sort of reset. And it should keep Emery, Raul & Edu up at night.
Pepe was lucky he didn’t get booked for a dive. And then the shot that he attempted after a great pass for Martinelli was weak sauce.
Not sure if this was before or after the Auba introduction, but Martinelli's chip cross assist to Ceballos for his goal was inch perfect. And guess which boot Dani used to stud that one into the net?
Tierney and Martinelli looked fantastic. But....has anyone else noticed how ********ing massive ceballos feet are? I can't look at anything else, he's constantly falling over them. They're huge. It's like his legs are attached to giant kleenex boxes.
Yup!! As a result he runs like a duck... a bit like Pires. And no I'm not comparing his overall quality to Pires!!! It's always funny to see someone with such a big clumsy look actually be a bit of a finesse player. Crouch was a bit like that.
Might be a little early but Martinelli might be one of those special Brazilian talents. No one knew who he was when he came. I assume Edu told Raul to pick him up
Alright let's get this train rolling. Lean in, I'm only gonna whisper: Shkodran Mustafi has three clean sheets to his name so far this season
You see that one really bad giveaway that a non-crap opposing team probably would've punished? But other than that, he was decent. His bomb from +50 yards to set up the first goal was really nice. It also seemed like the crowd applauded his good tackles, etc., fairly loudly, which was cool.