After the six-goal hammering of a staggeringly naive Lens side in midweek, I think we can expect to see a return to more usual service on Saturday.
In all of our Champions League clashes this season, teams from the continent have attempted to mix it with Mikel Arteta’s men and, aside from an aberration in our opening fixture, every one of them has come badly unstuck.
Whatever you believe about the Premier League being home of the best in the world, it is certainly home to far smarter sides.
You can bet every penny you have that Gary O’Neill wouldn’t be half so foolish as to turn up at the Emirates this weekend and attempt a high line and nor would almost any other side for that matter.
Aside from the league’s very best outfits, and even they are thinking twice, teams can’t afford to give this Arsenal side space. If there was any lingering doubt on that score, Lens blew it apart on Wednesday.
As frustrating as it undoubtedly is, you can see why teams have shown such a lack of ambition against us for the last six-to-eight months. It’s far less risky to sit deep, stay in shape and await those two or three moments in every match in which you can spring a surprise.
And while European competition is providing us with a nice throwback to last season’s cut and thrust, swashbuckling football – our domestic campaign is more about simply finding a way to win.
Unless we score goals early – and it will need to be more than one – we can expect Wolves to slip into what is becoming an increasingly familiar pattern of attritional football. In that sense, there will at least be no surprises.
From Arteta’s point of view, it will be about preparing his players to find that chink in the armour that will hand his charges the points.
Thankfully, owing to Lens’s implosion, we were able to shuffle our pack quite heavily in the second half in midweek and offered some much-needed rest to the likes of Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice. That will, hopefully, leave them a little fresher for the Saturday, 3pm coming their way.
Overall, though, I don’t really see much need to change any of the XI that started in Europe. They played well they are in good shape and there is the possibility of some rest to come in the final (dead rubber) Champions League game in a week or so.
That said, December is a notoriously busy month in the Premier League calendar so perhaps the manager will look to tweak one of two things in order to take advantage of being at home this weekend. Given the burden placed on a lot of these players, and the testing run ahead, I wouldn’t be averse to it.
While there’s no knowing what Arteta might do with his squad ahead of time, you can be almost certain what O’Neill will do with his. It’s very much New Kids on the (deep) Block.
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