Manchester City-Arsenal Preview

It’s the greedy bastards vs. the cash-strapped, plucky underdogs!… except it really isn’t, since Arsenal are a multi-million dollar organization.
Whatever, City still sucks.

Manchester City
League Form: 1st, 12-2-1 (yay!), 49 GF, 15 GA, +34 GD, 38pts
Home Form: 10P, 10W, 24 GF, 4 GA, +20GD
Last Meeting: Arsenal 0-1 Manchester City (November 29)

Ah… City. No team has experienced such a quick rise to stardom- and hatedom- than these oil-rich Mancunians, funded out of the pocket of Emirate Sheiks. The multi-million dollar budgets have contributed to City’s new status as a nascent English- and European- power, at the expense of the countless of other team’s fans who now have a legitimate reason to hate the blue team from Manchester.

No team has bought more players from us in such a short period of time than City, either. Kolo Toure, Emmanuel Adebayor, Gael Clichy and Samir Nasri are the players that have joined City since 2009. And if The Sun’s exclusive is to be believed, then Robin van Persie will soon be a Blue next summer- of course, The Sun released an exclusive 30 minutes before that claimed our captain would be joining Real Madrid. Make up your mind, English Waste of Paper!

Back to reality, van Persie is still an Arsenal player and a quite good one at that. He has become our talisman since Cesc’s departure this summer, and has become indispensable for his club. The same cannot be said for Samir Nasri. His highly-publicized move to the Etihad earned him the ire of all Arsenal fans, and in a delicious ironic twist, he has found himself to be mostly a squad player in his career in Manchester thus far. In fact, out of the 4 players who ditched Arsenal to move to City, the only one who could be said who has tasted anything close to continuity is, surprise surprise, Gael Clichy. The left back has been Manicni’s preferred choice for LB but won’t play tomorrow, receiving a red card in City’s first league loss on Monday, a 1-2 reverse at Chelsea. Kolo Toure is firmly behind Vincent Kompany and Joleon “Star Trek alien-lookalike” Lescott, and Nasri is busy warming the bench to come on at the 60th minute for James Milner and David Silva. Ah, the curse of leaving Arsenal for another big club-

HE’S THE EXCEPTION, OK!?!

Anyways, back to tomorrow’s match. There is no doubt that, on paper, Manchester City are the most dangerous team in England right now. A strikerforce containing Aguero, Dzeko, Balotelli, Silva, Milner, Nasri, Yaya Toure, and others is going to be a pretty good team. They suffered their first league loss of the season last Monday, a testament of their quality, and gave Manchester United a mighty spanking at Old Trafford, a 1-6 victory that gave Mancini his first public taste of likability. Nevertheless, for their monetized rise to success, Mancini’s general douchiness, and the fact that City loooove to take our best players from us, Arsenal fans rightfully hate City. So tomorrow’s a great chance to silence the approximately 1,000 real City fans and the 30,000 ex-Chelsea/United/Liverpool fans at their own stadium with a big victory for the Arsenal.

There’s no denying it- tomorrow will represent the biggest test of our season so far. A litmus test, if you will, to determine the true ability and potential of our new team, assembled at the end of August. Yeah, some will point to our 5-3 victory over Chelsea as an example that we’ve already shown we are capable of big things, but remember that Chelsea were a mess back then, and they underestimated us. City won’t- they have seen our dramatic rise these past few months to become CL contenders again, and watched as our second string came so close to beating their high-priced millionaires at the Emirates a few weeks ago. They know that, overused media cliches aside, we are a very, very dangerous team. So I’m sure they will give their best to beat us and send us packing (and show the likes of van Persie that they should leave Arsenal and join City. Is that thought plausible? Obviously not, but that won’t stop The Sun and the other tabloids from peddling it.)

Thankfully, history slightly edges to our side. No team has won more at the City of Manchester Stadium/Etihad than Arsenal. We gave them a mighty whooping last season, a 3-0 victory in which Nasri, back then a good guy, scored a good goal in. They haven’t scored against us in league play since their 4-2 win at home back in 2009/10- although I’ll put that down to Mancini setting his team up to be defensive pansies whenever they visit the Emirates (two 0-0 draws in a row in that respective fixture.) However, City’s home form this season is tremendous- 10 played, 10 won, and only 4 conceded goals to show for it. We would be the first team to take something from the Etihad should we win or draw tomorrow, so let’s prove our tradition of a groundbreaking team by winning. Or drawing, but that would be anticlimactic.

Team news are more or less the same. There are no new injuries from the Everton game, or any hypothetical training ground scuffles this week. Gibbs is a week away, so sayeth the manager. Good, can’t wait to see him get injured again. Sagna is doing some light jogging as he starts continues his rehabilitation, but he’s still injured and won’t be back before mid-January at the earliest. Jenkinson will be out for a further month since his back scan wasn’t very good. Oops. Wilshere, in the words of Wenger, is making “Exceptional” process. Still, he’s out till Mid-February. The word around was that Jack would be back by the end of January, but I suspect this is a classic doublespeak by Wenger. If Wilshere does return before February, then we’ll be cheering the medical team and how awesome they are. If Wenger had stuck by the late-January deadline, then Jack would have inevitable not come back by then, and we would all be calling for Colin Lewin’s head. In a vicious fashion.
Also, as far as I now Fabianski is back. Who cares.

Pretty standard line-up for tomorrow, methinks:

Szczesny

Djourou    Koscielny    Mertesacker    Vermaelen

Song  Arteta

Walcott   Ramsey   Gervinho

van Persie

Subs: Fabianski, Miquel, Coquelin, Benayoun, Rosicky, Arshavin, Chamakh

I’m interested in how City will approach our lack of fullbacks for this one. The likes of Djourou and Vermaelen, our most sensible options for the fullback spots, just won’t get up front as much as Sagna or Andre Santos do- it’s not in their system. That being said, Vermaelen is a pretty adventurous defender by default, so he’ll probably go up front a bit. Still, it would be logical for City to target our fullbacks and play wide, but this season their wide midfielders have shown a tendency to cut inside. It would be good if they did that- they would be congested at the middle and that would allow Gervs and Theo to wreak havoc to City’s respective fullbacks. As for our actual team, it has to be the same 11 who beat Everton last week- no way Wenger experiments at all in such a massive fixture. On the bench, we’ll see the usual guys- Arshavin, Rosicky, Chamakh. Don’t expect them to do much if they’re called upon- so it’s important that if we win this one, we do it with our starting 11. In other words, strike early, boys! I suspect we might see one of DEENCH/Coq/AOC on the bench, but I don’t think Wenger will be privy to playing them in such a match. As for defensive reinforcements, Miquel is the way to go- he can play LB or CB if needed (if the unthinkable happens and Djourou gets injured, Kos can switch over.)

Well, this is it. Chelsea play Wigan today, so that’s an assumed 3 points for them. And Spurs play Sunderland, so don’t expect any surprises there either. A win for us would not only be psychologically pleasing, but it would keep us in the chase for those CL spots. A loss, or even a draw, would be disastrous. So let’s go out there and show what we’re made of win. Winning. We’re made up of winning. And van Persie’s left leg. And Song’s brain. See? Not a one-man team.

Finally, last but not least, the results of the CL draw were made known yesterday, and we drew….. AC Milan. A bit disappointing that we drew such a tough opponent after our great Group Stage campaign, but as they say, you play the big teams first to prove you can win it. Barca beat us in the R16 last year, Inter beat Chelsea in that respective fixture in 2009/10… you get the point. As anyone with half a brain can point out, we beat them in our last competitive encounter, a 2-0 win at the San Siro in this exact fixture, way back in 2008. Both teams have changed since then, and you can argue that Milan has changed for the better, while we are, for various reasons, still a bit sideways in our progress. Anyways, let’s enjoy a great European clash and move Forward. (And watch Chelsea get spanked by Napoli)

Come on Arsenal!!

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Category: Fixtures, Manchester City, Premiership, Preview, Vito Mannone