Man City v Tottenham is next on the agenda and there is no doubt that there is a sense of doom and gloom among some sections of the Spurs fan base.
It is easy to see why that would be, City has just thumped Sporting Lisbon 5-0 in their own stadium while we have lost three on the bounce in the Premier League and not in a good manner.
However, there is still reason to retain some optimism ahead of the fixture.
This is not going to be a deluded article, for that go visit one of the many Arsenal fan channels polluting Youtube. No, this is a realistic look ahead and what we can expect.
First and foremost I will say straight away that I do not expect us to beat City but neither do I expect us to be on the end of a hammering as some are predicting.
Football is littered with one-sided looking fixtures that do not go the way stats and form dictate. For example, last season I recall Leicester City thumping Southampton 9-0 at St Marys and a few weeks later Ralph Hasenhüttl’s men went up to the King Power Stadium and beat the Foxes.
This season City has been beaten at home by Crystal Palace and drawn with Southampton and of course, lost away to us on the opening day of the season. These are individual moments in time but they do show that football is not one dimensional and it is certainly not as predictable as one would think, otherwise bookies would be going bankrupt left right and centre.
City are clearly a better team with better players and in all likelihood will claim all three points and probably in a comfortable manner but handing out a thrashing? I don’t think so.
There is also the bogey team effect and that does apply in this case. Over the last ten meetings, there have been five Man City wins, four Tottenham wins and just the one draw, that hardly screams dominance.
The biggest win in those ten games has been a City 3-0 win, however, the next two biggest margins of victory belong to Spurs, 2-0 each time.
City is brimming with confidence, Tottenham’s is in the gutter but that very same confidence can breed complacency and that has happened to Pep Guardiola’s teams more often than we may think. Same with arrogance, which City is full of, that can be their undoing as well, albeit only occasionally.
Man City v Tottenham is a mismatch on paper for sure but that does not equate to a humbling and I am quietly confident that we will perform better than what most people are expecting. Does that means we will come away from the Etihad with something, probably not but as I stated in the beginning, it does not mean a thrashing either.
