Rotation To Go Into Overdrive?

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Morning, morning. The excitement has died down a touch since Tuesday, but I can’t imagine it’ll be for very long.

With flights costing around £500 (there’s nothing like an airline sniffing a profit, is there – you’ve gotta love capitalism), and the Eurostar flat booked, it’s a mad scramble for routes to Paris. Me, I spent £12 on my return journey, a roadtrip from Dunkirk to Paris. Should be entertaining. And tiring.

Dunkirk, eh? Something plucky and positive drawn from something that was essentially a humiliating defeat? Ah, balls. I’m not going to get superstitious just yet.

With just 20,500 tickets allocated to Arsenal too, you can imagine there’ll be a thriving black market. Assuming Barcelona have the same allocation, then just 41,000 – a smidgeon over half – of the tickets will have gone to the clubs, with 39,000 to hangers-on. How can that be remotely justifiable?

Anyway, something else got me thinking, and that’s the comments of Rodney Gullit following the game on Tuesday. He was wondering how we’ll approach our last three games of the season now we’re in the European Cup final. The players who can reasonably expect to start will absolutely not want to blow their chances of playing by getting injured, meaning – or so he reasoned – that some of them may play within themselves.

I think it’s inevitable, to a point, which is why Wenger needs to be a bit clever by shuffling the side. We’ve not got many injuries now – the hapless Cygan aside – so there’s ample scope for a re-jig. I think Monday will show that, with a whole host of players coming in – Cole, Clichy or both, Gilbert perhaps, Djourou, van Persie, Bergkamp, Adebayor, Diaby, Walcott, Almunia.

It’s going to be hard enough to beat Barcelona, and the least Wenger will want to do is approach it with a fresh first eleven.

Jim

Arsenal since about 1979. Thick, thin and all that.