So, Nwaneri & Havertz in front of Thomas? With Trossard or perhaps Sterling up front?
Makes me nervous, but would be pretty good fun to see that line up kick that lot up the ass.
Given the circumstances this sounds like the best possible lineup. Could be Nwaneri's time to really shine and stand his place in the starting XI. He surely knows the chaos of the NLD, so he should be ready to some degree.
I do so enjoy how no one ever bats an eye when City players feign injury to get out of meaningless (yes, meaningless) international fixtures but our boys are the "Pride of England" and constantly get fed into the woodchipper.
Predictably, every Arsenal podcast this week has been discussing depth and how much rotation is the right amount of rotation. City and Real are the two examples held up - while they both have great depth, the star players play star player minutes and they start the majority of matches.
I think the difference between us and them is a) 500M euros, but that's not important right now, and b) the desire/ability to win games early and shut up shop. The late winners we had last season were exciting, but the additional minutes put into Saka/Odegaard/White/Gabriel/Saliba's legs add up. That's why I'm so excited about Merino - say what you will about Route One, but it's significantly less physically taxing. I would really like to see more of that going forward. We might be able to do this vs Spurs, but we definitely can't against City. My hope, however, is that between Spurs and Atalanta, we'll see some different patterns emerge.
Last season, arguably. We had incredible luck keeping Saliba, Gabriel, Havertz, and Saka fit. Sadly, this season may be a regression to the mean. We might end up behind Liverpool, who also had terrible injury luck last season.
Fuck... Sounds like Odegaard picked up a pretty bad into in Norway's match. This is not good! We have basically no creative replacement for him for the NLD.