LE GROVE

LE GROVE

Blog

MONDAY DEBRIEF: INJURIES ON THE MIND

ONLY ONE PROBLEM WITH THIS ARSENAL CHALLENGE

Pedro's avatar
Pedro
Dec 08, 2025
∙ Paid

Ok, we have all had a little cry in the toilet this weekend, but it is time to dust ourselves down and deal with the reality that sometimes Arsenal will not win games, and it will be painful.

The Aston Villa outing hurts mostly because it is Unai Emery inflicting pain on us and that has become a bit of a pattern over the years. He just finds some extra gilet infused sauce when it comes to Arsenal and we fold. It happens. Pep Guardiola had similar issues against Spurs. It would not matter how shite they were, somehow off 0.2 xG they would score three goals and beat them.

I am also not willing to get too dragged into the hysteria over Man City sitting behind us in the league. I wrote that this was very likely to be the case because they are going through a run of fairly easy games and we are going through a run of very hard games. It has been quite incredible to watch people bed wet over City catching us despite them being far from convincing. They lost to a weak Newcastle side, were beaten by Leverkusen in the Champions League, and they narrowly squeezed past Leeds after creating a stir with a fake Donnarumma injury that allowed them to have an in game team talk. They scored five past Fulham in the week but also conceded four in the process. Yes, they beat Sunderland, but come on… this is a newly promoted team that had a flying start to the season, now they are crunching three games a week and they just had to play Liverpool and Bournemouth.

If you can envision City going on a major run, which I cannot, then why are you so sure an Arsenal team that just clocked an 18 game unbeaten run cannot get back into consistency mode?

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to LE GROVE to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2025 LE GROVE MEDIA LLC · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture