PSG EXTRA THOUGHTS

JUST A SHORT ONE BEFORE WE TALK TRANSFERS LATER.

We’re back up, people—and I’m feeling less bad/raged/teary than I did two nights ago.

We’re 1-0 down at the halfway point against a team that’s shipped BIG goals to Aston Villa. Will it be hard? Sure. Is it impossible? No way. DO NOT EVEN THINK THINGS LIKE THAT ENTER YOUR CRANIUM. I do remember being young and my dad telling me that even considering a bad result in my head was a crime against Arsenal.

Champions League is hard. Teams suffer. Big teams go 2-0 down in the first leg and remontada that shit. Upsets are part of the mixer. Our upset isn’t that awful.

It’s also a mad part of the competition: the four best teams in Europe, in fine-margins games where goals are scored off quarter chances and saves are made from impossible situations.

Seven goals were scored across the two games, and Arsenal had the highest xG in the semi-finals. That doesn’t mean we were the better team—it just shows you that at the highest level, you can end up 3 goals down off 1.1 xG and it’s totally normal because you have Yamal’s running around.

My general issue with Arsenal this season is that we’ve mostly been bang on our xG. We don’t have freak results. If we get 1 xG, we score one goal. We should have scored off the chances we had the other night. Two glorious one-v-ones, and we were a whisker away from Gabi M connecting at the back post.

Roll the dice again, and maybe it’s a better outcome. The good news? We do roll the dice again next Wednesday—and the outcome has to be different.

One goal and a clean sheet, and we’re taking the game to extra time.

PSG have been massive bottle jobs historically. They’ll be nervous in front of a home crowd, they don’t know how to deep block, they’ll try to kill us—and we will have chances.

Can this Arsenal squad offer something better with Thomas Partey in midfield and the big lump that is Merino as a 9 again? I hope so. I like that the team can look totally different.

When you’re in the biggest competitions, you have to expect some hardship. You have to accept that over two legs, you might have a poor result. PSG are a very expensively assembled team. They have a brilliant coach, and they split the game with some very sexy individual brilliance.

But… we have those tools. We’ve scored a lot of goals against big teams this season. So let’s see what we’ve got for next week.

Short post—we’ll talk about transfers and things like that tomorrow.

Check out the Therapy Session. We’ll do a BTW a bit later.

HERE IS A VERY SPECIAL OFFER AVAILS ON THE SHORT TERM if you want to access those pods. x