Manchester City were less than impressive against Bournemouth the other night. They could easily have drawn with Eddie Howe’s battlers.
Following on from a scintillating five-goal display at Brighton, the drop in form was surprising but also typical of a team secure in second place and looking ahead to more important matters. This FA Cup semi-final is one of them of course, though nowhere near as attractive as their Champions League challenge coming up next month.
For that reason alone, Arsenal could possibly go into this one with more motivation. Despite beating Liverpool on Wednesday, their chances of qualifying for Europe through a league place look fairly slim. As a result, winning the FA Cup looks like their best chance of using passports next season.
And that’s fairly crucial for the club’s finances. Missing out on Champions League money had already hit hard. Denied Europa League cash would box the Gunners into an even tighter corner. Mikel Arteta knows that only too well. That’s why he’s been vocal about the club’s spending policy over recent days. How frustrating for him to see vast amounts spent on someone like Nicolas Pepe without anything like a decent return on the pitch. He must privately wonder what’s going on in the recruitment department.
And that side of things has got to get sorted before Arteta can really start to make progress. Closing the chasm in quality between Arsenal and the top sides is hard enough as it is without getting hamstrung by bad decisions from others.
So what can we say since these two teams met in the first game of the restart? Has the gap closed just a tiny bit? Well yes, I think it probably has, due to Arteta’s work on team shape in the intervening weeks. Ignoring that slip up at Spurs, Arsenal look much more capable these days of sitting in to frustrate opponents. We saw that against Liverpool and we’ll need to see it at Wembley when Pep Guardiola’s boys start pinging the ball around.
