Another difficult draw early in the FA Cup

Morning.

As we prepare to face Man Utd in the Premier League tomorrow night, the FA Cup third round draw was made yesterday evening, and we’ll be playing holders Man Utd. It’s a home game, at least, but it’s obviously far from the easiest opposition we could have at this stage of the tournament.

It continues a run of difficult draws in the early stages of the cup. Last season we drew Liverpool at home, and the season before that our fourth round opposition were Man City after we’d beaten Oxford 3-0 away in the third round. It hasn’t been kind, and I do think it’s interesting that there’s a perception that Mikel Arteta doesn’t take this competition seriously when, for me at least, it’s far more about the opposition we’ve faced than just going through the motions or not caring.

Last season, the Liverpool game was the final one in that mini slump we had around new year. Having lost to West Ham after taking 30 shots in one game, and Fulham, we found ourselves unable to find the back of the net again against Liverpool at the Emirates. We had 18 shots that day, failed to take our chances, and got sucker-punched towards the end by a very good team. After that we went to Dubai, got hopped up Vitamin-D and found our form again.

The previous year, we came up against Man City away – a game that took place just a couple of weeks before our home game against the champions in the Premier League. It was a narrow defeat, a single goal from Nathan Ake was enough to inflict defeat on us, but although the manager did make changes, I don’t think you can say this was a game we didn’t take seriously. From the Arseblog report the next day:

Anyone can see the gap between the teams – which was so, so, so big not that long ago – has well and truly been closed. The next step is to do what’s long overdue, and show we can beat them.

A stronger starting XI got beaten 3-1 at home by City in the game a couple of weeks later, but it’s important to put the cup game in the context of our season. A surprise title challenge with a relatively small squad meant some changes were necessary, but obviously when that season fizzled out after William Saliba got injured, you could see how one absence had knock-on effects that the team couldn’t cope with.

And just for a bit more FA Cup pain, the year before was that infamous game against Nottingham Forest when the performance was abysmal, the squad stripped so bare that a then 18 year old Charlie Patino started his first game (he’s now barely featuring for Deportivo la Coruna in the Spanish second division); Nuno Tavares was hauled off after little over 30 minutes; and players like Cedric and Rob Holding were poor defensively, even by their standards. It resulted in Arteta’s post-game rant captured by the Amazon cameras, in which we learned how upset he gets when players don’t win duels.

All of which is to say that while our FA Cup performances under this manager haven’t been great in recent years, there is some context to our under-performance. I believe this is a competition he wants to win, and I’m sure he’s not blind to the fact that winning it in 2020 gave him a measure of goodwill when he went through some difficult periods in his fledgling managerial career. He will want to do better this year, and I think he needs to do better this year.

For some, the Premier League and the Champions League are the be-all and end-all. And look, I get that to an extent. We’ve waited too long for the former, and the latter remains a distant dream for a club whose European trophy record doesn’t come close to our stature down the years. But cups do matter, and it’s too easy to dismiss them as meaningless. Trophies matter, and as Man City and Liverpool have shown in recent years, title challenges and lengthy European campaigns are not incompatible with winning them. You can be quite sure our players would love a big day out at Wembley final, and I think it’s important that this group of players add silverware to the equation.

Let’s not ignore the fact we’ve got a Carabao Cup quarter-final in a couple of weeks against Crystal Palace. If we win that we’re into the semi-finals, and at that point you have to take the chance of winning a trophy seriously. It is absurd, by the way, that it’s still a two-legged semi-final in this day and age, but it is what it is, and that’s what we’ll have to deal with if we get through. It’s also funny to note that after that midweek League Cup game, we play Palace again three days later in the league, so our cup draws have been a bit unkind in that sense. It’s always weird to play the same side in such a short space of time, but with a different dynamic for each game.

Ok, that’s your lot for this morning. There’s a fun Arsecast Extra for you below if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, and we’ll be looking ahead to the Man Utd game in our Patreon preview podcast a bit later this afternoon. Bye for now.

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