It’s a late one from me today, and probably a short one too, for I am not a well man. With about two hours worth of sleep, punctuated the whole time by needing to head to the loo, I feel like a bit of a shell of a person, so I may have to call time on today’s blog earlier than I normally would if nature calls.
Probably too much information for you on a Tuesday, but hey, I like to share. It’s kind of what I do on a daily basis.
Tonight we play Nottingham Forest in the EFL Cup and it’ll be a return of some familiar faces in the shape of Bendtner and Lansbury lining up against their former club. I guess you could also count Armand Traore in that, but I never really thought he would make it if I’m honest, so I personally only partially saw him as an Arsenal player.
But the Lord Bendtner? Oh boy, he was an Arsenal player, and Henri Lansbury had a decent goal away to the Spuds that he notched up, so he’ll always get thumbs up from me. So we’ll see all three I think, tonight, which will be nice. Until one of them scores against us, of course. We’re all expecting that, right? I mean, it just seems to be the done thing for ex-players to do that, so I’m anticipating them to be massively up for the game and probably want to get one over on their old club. I think this trend was started by Anelka. It feels like every ex-Arsenal player since him has pretty much ben given licence to cheese us all off, so I’m not expecting tonight to be any different.
What will be different, however, will be the team from the weekend. I’ll be particularly interested to see how the squad shapes up, because I don’t think we’ll see a bunch of youth teasers tonight. Ospina, Debuchy, Holding and Gibbs should all get the nod, whilst Gabriel could also start. That’s a pretty experienced back five and if Xhaka and Elneny get a shout in midfield, it should be a base of a team that is stable enough to cope with Forest. Last season’s defeat to Sheff Wednesday was embarrassing, so hopefully there will be a few players in there who will have seen that despite it being a rotated Arsenal team, we can’t take a Championship opponent for granted.
I think we’ll see Perez and The Ox given some time, but I wonder who will get the nod as the other wide player or in the number 10 role. I hope it’s Jeff and Chris Willock, because there have been great things said about both and if you can give them a platform surrounded bye players who are in the first team squad, it will only help aid their own development. If that is the starting line ups, it could be quite an exciting one to see, but Forest will be up for it, so what we don’t need is a similar start to the one in Paris. That evening last week we were ice cold until the second half and never really got going. The same happened when we were knocked out to Wednesday last year, so I don’t want to hear any stories about Arsenal being blitzed in the first 20 minutes.
I say ‘hear’ of course, because this appears to be the one competition in which streams are almost impossible to get hold of. It’s weird, because in this day and age you can pretty much watch any Arsenal game, from any device. Yet when it comes to the League Cup, those games that aren’t televised seem to be ignored. I wonder if there just simply isn’t the demand for it internationally, which is why the streams are so hard to come by? Whatever it is, I’d love to be able to watch it, but doubt i’ll get any chance to.
So I’ll have to contend with snippets of information from news sources, for which I can only hope that the information is good.
For those of you who are going tonight, have a good’un, and let’s hope we can keep up winning ways ahead of the Chelski game.
Laters.
The post Experience shouldn’t beget complacency against Forest appeared first on Suburban Gooners.
