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“In the context of the season”

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo Went with the brother and Nephew yesterday to the London Stadium to see West Ham play Wolves. The wee man has only ever been once before and so despite the lack of quality on display at The London Stadium (as well as a ball ache of a place to get out of and home), it’s still nice to see the wonder in a kids eyes when they get to go to see their team play. I remember in the early 90s every time I’d get to go to Highbury to watch us play; it was magical and some of those memories will stay with me forever.

I guess now I’m a season ticket holder and I get to go to so many games every season, you forget just how magical the whole football experience is, but hopefully I’ll still have some of the positive thoughts in my mind when I make my way to The Emirates tomorrow when we take on Monaco.

Of course the more important thing to focus on is securing three points at home against a Monaco team who are only one point below us. I’ve had another look at that dastardly Champions League new format table and with us sitting precariously in seventh position (top eight qualify automatically), it feels like we’re getting to the crunch time in this stage of the competition when the table starts to make at least a small bit more sense. We’ve played five, we play a maximum of eight games, we have tomorrow night’s match at home before it stops until the new year. When we return we’ll play Zagreb at home on 22nd January and given that our last match is against Girona before we then play Man City on 2nd February in the league, these two next games feel so important.

A win tomorrow should mean that a win at home to Zagreb all but secures us automatic promotion from this format. It should also mean we should be able to afford to do a fair bit of rotation before we play City. A draw or defeat tomorrow night and I suspect that means we’re putting a strong side out in Spain. Man City are currently in 17th in this format on eight points and so for them they will be looking at this game away at Juventus as one that they simply have to win; a draw or defeat and they’ll definitely have to beat PSG away on match day seven but perhaps more interestingly for us, it means their home game against Club Brugge will certainly contain most of their strongest players as they battle to get automatically qualified and avoid extra games.

So whilst we might think our position is precarious – and it certainly is unless victory is secured tomorrow – City’s is one that could have a big impact when we come to the new year.

I’m glad we’ve got this game though, because let’s face it, there’s been plenty of ‘hot takes’ from the media on us from last weekend. We deserved to win, we didn’t take our chances, talk of mounting a title challenge needs to basically be on ice now and frankly, I’m a bit relieved. Because now we fans just need to focus on the next one coming up and for me personally I’ve been guilty of thinking too far ahead and what things mean in the context of the season as a whole. I’ve been too caught up in seeing Liverpool slowly edge away from everyone when in reality I should just focus on the next game coming up and so right now it’s all eyes on Monaco. And because of that, I’m hoping I can just take in football matches in isolation. For example, after the Man United game I remember thinking to myself on the way home “that’s great, but it means nothing unless we smash Fulham”. Maybe in the context of the whole season that’s the case, but as a football fan if you don’t at least sometimes live in the ‘now’, you’re going to spend very little time over the course of nine months feeling happy.

Perhaps all of that will change come tomorrow night and perhaps I’ll end up thinking “that’s great, but we should be focusing on Everton” come Wednesday night, but my overriding hope this morning is that I spend a little it longer on feeling a bit happier in the moment.

We’ll get an update from Arteta at some stage today on player availability and I think the key ones we’re all focused on now are Gabriel and Calafiori. Hopefully it is good news on both and we can recall them to the starting XI tomorrow so we get a bit more balance to us. And we’ll know a little more about Monaco too; they’re apparently missing Zakaria and Magassa from their midfield, but I don’t really know how much of an impact that will have on them. This is a Monaco team currently sitting in third in the French League and having looked at the team they put out on Saturday, I can’t say I have any idea as to how good they are, because other than Golovin and former player Minamino, I haven’t heard of any of them. Of course I’m not exactly a big French football watcher, so I can’t really talk to their tactics, but the fact they’ve lost three this season show’s that they’re not infallible. We certainly can’t take them lightly, but this is a game tomorrow in which we need to be asserting home dominance. More on them and how we might line up tomorrow though, after we’ve heard from Arteta on the squad situation.

Catch you then.

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Gooner born in 1982 from Harlow, Essex, now living in Uxbridge. I say what I see - frequently wrong, but hey, it's just an opinion piece, right? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.