After scraping past Leicester on the opening weekend, the next two games were horrible with defeats on the road to overwhelming underdogs Stoke City, and another bogey-side Liverpool.
This has been partly remedied with an entertaining win over Cologne in the Europa League and then a gutsy 0-0 away at Chelsea last weekend.
Liverpool completely annihilated the Gunners with a demoralizing 4-0 victory that left Arsenal reeling, but is the 2017-18 Premier League season done and dusted already for The Gunners? We believe otherwise.
Alexis Sanchez back with a bang
Alexis Sanchez might have made the headlines after looking to get away from The Emirates during the transfer window, but the move apparently broke down and the 28-year-old Chilean is letting his football do the talking, scoring a wondergoal against Cologne last week, and hopefully back in contention for a start against West Brom this weekend.
Due to the recent internationals, and injuries to our key men, there’s no doubt that he’ll do a pretty good job together with Alexandre Lacazette and Mesut Ozil.
These elite big three players linking up could well ignite a very good comeback in the league once they get firing together and with Danny Welbeck’s injury this could now happen sooner than we thought.
Tightening up the defence
Arsene Wenger and Steve Bould have seemingly shored up the defence given the resolute display at Chelsea. The side conceded eight goals in three straight games leading to the two defeats, and let’s face it after going behind to Leicester we were even lucky to win that one.
Letting in so many goals so early in the season with the likes of Shkodran Mustafi, Laurent Koscielny, and Per Mertesacker in our squad isn’t good enough if we want to prepare an assault on the league title and the players know that.
With Chelsea’s opening day loss against Burnley, and other key results since then for the big sides and Tottenham, we’ve not been left too far behind luckily, so all is not lost by a long way.
The bounce back we’ve all been hoping for
Arsenal have proved time and time again that during periods of adversity, they have the capacity to dust ourselves off and get back up. One situation that proves this is when they started out a rocky 2016-17 season.
The team’s first two games resulted in just a single point, and what happened next? Well, the Arsenal embarked on a 19-game winning streak in the Premier League and Champions League to silence the doubters.
Even the freak 3-0 defeat against Crystal Palace was succeeded by 10 straight wins; they’ve done it time and time again so it’s safe to say that a comeback is very much possible with this group of players.
Perhaps this is the reason why Arsenal were the overwhelming favourites for their recent game against Bournemouth. Bookmakers were giving Arsenal 4/11 odds contrary to the Cherries’ 7/1. The Gunners get -1.0 handicaps while Bournemouth has +1.0 to spare and the game ended in a 3-0 easy win for Arsenal.
Having missed out on the Champions League, it’s safe to assume that the Gunners have plenty of energy in reserve as Wenger used some of the fringe players, and what does a team need to win the Premier League? It’s stamina. Alexis Sanchez was sub against Chelsea and probably won’t feature in this week’s League Cup game against Doncaster Rovers so should be fighting fit for the West Brom game this weekend.
Arsenal’s third game after the international break this time the bookies had us down as the underdog, with Chelsea at just 5/6 to win the game and Arsenal at 16/5. This game finished 0-0, with Arsenal unlucky not to take all three points.
Arsenal’s game against West Brom this weekend has us as the favourites, at 3/10 while West Brom are less fancied at 8/1. This shows that there’s a lot of potential for Arsenal to use this as a game to show the rest of the Premier League what we are about and if you fancy these odds, then you may want to pick up a Coral free bet and bet on it.
Write Arsenal off at your peril…
It’s still far too early to dismiss Arsenal as serious contenders in this season’s Premier League also given that we fully deserved a point at Chelsea, perhaps Arsene Wenger has set about fixing our ‘big six’ problem?
Being one of the best teams in the league, and even in Europe on our day, we won’t give up and with the probably comeback of Alexis and Ozil in our upcoming games, don’t write us off just yet.