League leaders Arsenal will try to continue their recent North London Derby dominance on Sunday at home against fifth-place Tottenham Hotspur, who enter the fixture for the first time with manager Thomas Frank in charge.
Arsenal (8-1-2, 26 points) are unbeaten with five victories in their last six in the fixture, all played in Premier League competition. The last three matches finished as one-goal wins against previous Spurs manager Ange Postecoglou’s squads.
Gunners boss Mikel Arteta believes his team has gotten the emotional approach right in those encounters, no easy feat in a fixture that can include overwhelming intensity.
“Yes, that emotion requires something else, and you cannot be too high, but, at the same time, that game demands that in every ball and every action, you have to be at it a bit more than in any other game,” Arteta said. “We have found a really good balance, we played well, some days we have won, some days we’ve been a bit lucky as well to win, that’s fair as well to say. So on Sunday we need a really, really good performance to beat them.”
But one of the leaders of that effort, Brazilian center back Gabriel, will be out for weeks, Arteta said, after picking up a knee injury on international duty. Several other recent injury absentees, including team scoring leader Viktor Gyorkes, will be late decisions.
Meanwhile, Tottenham (5-3-3, 18 points) could see attack-minded players Papa Matar Sarr, Lucas Bergvall and Randal Kolo Muani return after they sat out international action to recover from their respective ailments.
And Frank’s squad also brings something into the fixture that Postecoglou’s Spurs sides never possessed: the Premier League’s best away record, with only two points dropped from five fixtures.
That said, with Dominic Solanke still out, Spurs remain light on goals — Richarlison leads the team with four — and haven’t previously fared well with the unruliness the North London Derby often brings.
Frank says his side must learn to adapt to that latter aspect, particularly as a decided underdog that thrives on the counter.
“I’ll definitely embrace controlled chaos or chaos we like to create, if that makes sense, because I think chaos is also good,” Frank said. “You can also be too disruptive, too fixed, stop-start. So, we need a bit of chaos. I think we all need that. Chaos is transitions. Chaos is high pressure, you win it. Chaos is set pieces, second phase. And all those elements are areas we would, of course, like to exploit if we can in that situation.”
–Field Level Media
