Around this time last year, Arsenal caught a lot of us off-guard with a brilliant win on the road at Selhurst Park.
Despite it being the Premier League curtain-raiser, under the lights and away from home, the Gunners defied the odds with a performance that really set the hare running on what was to be an excellent season.
Though we may look at the fixture through slightly rosier spectacles now, it was a match that filled me with a lot of foreboding. It was no accident, I’m sure, that the Premier Legue’s ‘random’ fixture generator somehow conspired to give us the first game of the season, a London derby and away from home too.
I confess, I wasn’t expecting a positive outcome.
And yet, that night, Mikel Arteta’s men were fired up and matched an intensely physical Palace side blow-for-blow. Boy, could we do with more of the same on Monday night.
Though they are now a well-established Premier League side, Palace can blow hot and cold and, if you catch them when they’re on it, it makes getting a result supremely difficult. Coming away from south London with three points on Monday, therefore, would be a huge boost for our confidence in the early part of the his campaign, particularly as our rivals have tricky encounters of their own to content with.
Our opening day fixture against Nottingham Forest showed that the manager is willing to tinker with his tactics and formations this season in a way we won’t have been used to seeing before and I expect that will again be the case on Monday.
With a near full squad available to him, the Spaniard has the luxury of unpredictability so don’t be surprised to see something completely different to what we saw last Saturday which, in itself, was something of a novelty.
Personally, I don’t want to see Thomas Partey deployed at right back too often this season and, given Palace’s running power, I think it would be foolish to try it again on Monday. I understand why the manager tried it against Forest but this will, I think, be an entirely different game. For one thing, Palace will have more than a passing interest in trying to win it.
It may still be too soon for the return of Oleksandr Zinchneko, in a starting capacity at least, so I would expect Takehiro Tomiyasu to deputise at left back, with Ben White restored to the right-hand side and Gabriel returned to the centre of defence alongside William Saliba.
The conundrum, if there is one, will come further forward. After his goal against Forest last weekend, will the manager stick with Eddie Nketiah up top or will he prefer the height and movement of Kai Havertz against what is likely to be a robust home defence?
However the manager approaches it, I expect it to be a bruising night. Palace in front of the cameras on a Monday night are a completely different beast to Palace at 3pm on a Saturday and that is going to take some dealing with. For all that, though, Palace have their vulnerabilities and their inconsistencies and, if we can exploit them, there’s no reason we can’t come away with a positive result.
Hopefully, as they did last year, the Gunners can spring another surprise.
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