Tip of the hat to Arseblog, but here's the lineup that smashed Bate last season when they were in the middle of their season and not just coming back from a break --- Ospina, Mustafi, Mertesacker, Holding, Nelson, Wilshere, Elneny, Willock, Maitland-Niles, Walcott, Giroud – the subs were: Macey, Da Silva, Dragomir, Gilmour, McGuane, Akpom, Nketiah. Admittedly, I don't follow the Belarusian league very closely, so I don't know if Bate has upgraded player-wise.
Not playing Auba and Torreira until the 68th min tells me Emery wants top 4 over Europa League. It tells me he doesn’t believe we can compete in both. Ok, you don’t want to play Ozil or Ramsey...I understand, but why wouldn’t you play Torreira and Auba?
I don't understand your post. Why would they have to be prescient in order to have dropped Welbeck (injuried November), Holding (December) or Bellerin (January)? Here's the regulation as far as I can tell: Unless the reason for leaving all of those 3 in the knockout stage roster is the home-grown requirement??
He's saying that can't be the group-stage roster because it includes Suarez. We don't have any homegrowns to replace those players with, so we didn't bother removing them.
Aha, now I get the Suarez reference. As for why we didn't drop Danny/Rob/Hector, the lack of homegrown replacements was my best guess. But still, with all of our British/academy youth, I would've hoped that we'd have been able to swap someone else in for them. Or alternatively that our previous roster wasn't on the bare minimum homegrown number so we could've swapped in a non-homegrown. Apparently neither of these hopes is true. In the end, maybe the roster is so big anyway that they just weren't worried about retaining this dead wood?
Youth players are on a separate list and don’t need to be named to this particular squad to be eligible.
Then I wonder why so many of them showed up on this list? (I don't know where he got this from but I took it on faith)
Okay, let me clarify. That particular post combines the senior list and the youth list. Note how many players are there: far more than 25 (we list 24 due to lack of homegrowns on the 'a' list).
Saw a notification of a new MD thread started by somebody 3hrs ago, but when I went to open it I got an error. And then when browsing the Arsenal forum I don't see any thread. No idea what happened but maybe the person who made that thread can check into it?? I was going to post a comment about Galavision. I saw on my DVR guide that Gala said "teams to be announced" which gave me a little hope. Then I went to LiveFootyTV website which said they are going to air AFC-Bate tomorrow. If I were a betting man... Anyone have any better info?
Not gonna help me any, as I have DISH and since Galavision is owned by the Univision owners it is still BLOCKED to us DISH customers, besides, right about now I think Jason Belmonte has a better chance at winning another PBA bowling major sooner (even though he lost the PBA Players Championship live on FS1 to Anthony Simonsen this past week) than we DISH customers do of ever getting any of the Univision networks back up for us to watch (it also costs extra as they are part of the DISHLatino package, another way TV providers screw us all in the arse.). As for our chance of winning the 2nd leg, as long as we don't concede anything and win (if we give up one we need to win by 2 clear goals, kinda like Liverpool did at Anfield against Olympiakos in the 2004-05 UCL group stage when they conceded one and had to get 3 in the second half to move on to the knockout stage, in which they did, the rest after that, is history.) by 1-nil or better, we will move on to the last 16, I hope we win, but right about now I'm getting kinda giddy about starting some shit up in time for the Derby thread on March 2nd at New Shite Hart Lane (I could give 2 shits and a f--- what its name is even for sponsorship reasons, hey it's built on the very same shit ground where the old one once stood, and we will soon clinch the League again on it in the short future just like 1971 and 2004).
I'll own up. I screwed up and binned it. For some reason I thought someone had already started one. @MilesW can you make another? Apologies and thanks.