The boys are in Prague, a beautiful city at any time of the year and certainly so in Autumn. Of course it is just a flying visit to the City of 100 Towers for the Gunners between two important PL away games in Burnley and Sunderland, but hopefully the boys get a few minutes to take in the sheer romantic beauty of a city that has housed greats like Jan Hus, Milan Kundera, Havel, Franz Kafka and of course our most beloved Czech who donned the red and white, Tomáš Rosický.
Tomáš embodied something at Arsenal that every football supporters loves: that desire to play the game beautifully and effectively at the highest possible level. Other teams might have dominated in the PL over the past twenty years, but no other team has had as many nr10-magicians as Arsenal had during that period, and Tomáš Rosický was certainly one of them.
Talking about magicians, we are still missing our current day one, Martin Odegaard. Eze is doing just fine of course, and what a great signing he is proving to be, but when it comes to finding the chinks in the defensive, lower blocks Martin remains our main man. In fact, we are missing an entire attacking lineup today of Jesus, Havertz, Madueke and Odegaard. All injured, and now Viktor (and Martinelli?) is/are also out. It is getting a little bit thin up-front. The risk of all these long injuries in the same area of the pitch is that we never really recover from it as players get overused, Gyo being being the prime example.
Luckily there is an international break soon, and hopefully a few will be available again after it. But Arsenal will have to grind out a couple of results before then, and Slavia Prague will no doubt give us a game. They drew twice to have two points out of 3 games, and other than that I don’t know anything about them.
I think we can predict our defence and midfield pretty accurately, and our attack is pretty straightforward too. The only real question is: who will play as CF? Will it be Leandro, Merino or a youngster – and if the latter, who will it be? I’ll go for Merino.
Well, all will be revealed in a few hours time. Remember it is an early kick-off for us tonight.
**By TotalArsenal.**