For Spurs, Saturday’s game is the North London FA Cup Final.
For Arsenal, it’s the game before Sevilla.
Spurs have four points and Arsenal have 10 points, and if Arsenal win, Spurs will have four points and Arsenal will have 13 points with a game in hand. So Spurs are under a lot of pressure to avoid defeat.
And if you believe the tabloid hype, which I don’t, they’re playing for Martin Jol’s job.
Noises from Darren Bent, saying Arsenal didn’t get enough money for Henry, and from sporting director Damien Comolli, a former Wenger scout, suggest that, as usual, Spurs are far too preoccupied with their successful neighbours down the Seven Sisters Road.
While I firmly believe that Arsenal will win this game, it’s not that important.
What matters is how good this new team is and how good it can become in the next 50 games and beyond.
Last season Arsenal played 59 games and if this team develops swiftly they will play more than 59 this term.
However, we haven’t seen much yet, so we don’t know much yet. We can see that Arsene was right to replace Eboue with Sagna, right to give Fabregas an eight-year contract, right to drop Lehmann for those blunders.
We know that at least 27% of Arsenal is owned by two billionaires who are not on the board.You have to be invited onto the board.
And we know that the happiest Arsenal supporter this week is Danny Fiszman because his manager has signed up for three more seasons after 2008. I was the first pundit suggest that Danny would not want to be around if Arsene wasn’t.
On a wider horizon, Vladimir Putin steps down next year, so he is now doing an Arsene Wenger.
Putin wants a smooth succession with the same policies as he has now, so he is building a new team by promoting some reserves. He wants to see how they handle power and pressure. He wants to see them in harness now, not later. He needs to see how they perform before he steps down.
Like the Professor, the Russian president is a developmental manager.