Luton preview: Rotation required, but how much, and who?

We’re in Premier League action tonight, taking on Luton at the Emirates.

With a trip to Brighton on Saturday and a Champions League game against Bayern on Tuesday – coming after that big effort against Man City on Sunday – there’s a good case for Mikel Arteta to rotate his side a bit this evening. With all due respect to tonight’s opposition,  a team who gave us a big scare earlier in the season and are no pushovers, you could see how it’s a chance to rest a few and get some competitive minutes into the legs of some others.

To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a fair few changes, but knowing the manager, it wouldn’t surprise me to see less rotation than some people might like. He was asked if too many alterations might be disruptive, and said:

That’s a good question. We are always wondering about that and it’s just changing certain personnel in certain moments and those relationships between the players. How long they have played together, how much time they have spent together, that can affect it as well – that’s related to what they do in training every single day. We’ll look at all these things and will try to find the right team to win.

Today, I could see something like this: Raya, Tomiyasu, Saliba, Gabriel, Zinchenko, Partey, Rice, Odegaard, Martinelli, Jesus, Trossard.

That’s five changes from the side that played on Sunday. You could also throw Fabio Vieira into the mix as an option for the right-hand side if he is minded to rest Bukayo Saka. To me that seems like an obvious thing to do (rest Saka), but his comments about how it was fatigue against Man City give me some pause for thought there. Still, he didn’t look 100% to me on Sunday, and I suspect the best thing this evening would be to give him the night off unless he’s absolutely needed. Get those batteries fully charged for the weekend, and basically every game between now and the end of the season because we’re going to need him for most of them.

Now,…

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Publish date : 2024-04-03 06:48:24

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