It’s Champions League night baby, and we have absolutely nothing to worry about. We’re top of the group, sitting pretty like Christmas kings, so you’d think we’d, you know, just leave all our best players at home this evening.
Well, not quite.
Arteta is actually taking them to Holland. Saka, Kai, Jesus, Odegaard, Ben White… they’re all on the plane.  I honestly don’t get it. You could say, ‘well, you’re not a professional coach’ and that’d be true. But I also don’t have a record of exhausting players and breaking them during crunch-time moments.
This was his explainer:

?I don?t know in another context what I would have done, but I also want everyone together with the mentality to win. I want to see that in their tummies tomorrow.
?The job technically is done, but the job is not completely done. It is our duty as representatives of Arsenal to win every game and to give a big performance against a team that is going to make things very difficult, as they have shown the past two years.?

This type of rah, rah commentary feels very dated in a sporting world dominated by data. I understand that a lot of management is about feel and emotion. But this is PSV in a dead game in a moment when we’ve struggled for bodies. The squad doesn’t need more unity, it needs less minutes on the pitch to heal and recover. Fatigue is cumulative, so the more miles we put in the engine now, the more pai...