In this fixture last season, played at the end of April, Arsenal all but secured their Champions League spot with a resounding 3-0 victory over a hapless Newcastle United side. A rare goal for Laurent Koscielny opened the scoring, prodding home Santi Cazorla’s free-kick, which was followed by a Mesut Özil tap-in just before half-time. Özil also crossed for a headed goal from Olivier Giroud sealing Newcastle’s doom in the 2nd half and condemning them to a sixth consecutive Premier League defeat.
To see how AFC fans may be thinking about this game, we looked at the Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football data from this fixture last season, to see what players were picked for the lineup last year.
Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football is a game similar to “Football Manager”, but applied to live football, where you manage your favourite Club and pick lineups, bench, formations and substitutions, all in real-time. When fans play the game, the Beat Your Manager team can measure the popularity of different players, by looking at how frequently they are selected for the starting lineup, substitutes bench or not selected at all.
The app ran for the 2013/4 EPL season and is currently inactive while the developers are creating the revised version – we’ll keep you posted on when it’s going to re-launch and in the meantime you can check out their Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/beatyourmanager and follow them on Twitter – https://twitter.com/beatyourmanager
A big surprise for this game was that the fans’ most popular lineup and the one chosen by Manager Arsène Wenger were identical; a first for last season!
Formation: A solid 4-4-2 the choice for Arsenal fans
An overwhelming 40 per cent of Arsenal fans opted for a solid 4-4-2 formation for this game, with the next-most popular formation a flexible double-pivot 4-2-3-1, selected by half that amount of Gunners.
Goalkeeper: Szczęsny again makes the cut
Wojciech Szczęsny was the fans’ obvious choice in goal; his 98 per cent popularity rating making him Arsenal’s 2nd most popular player for this game. This year could be different but with the Pole apparently back to full fitness he should get the nod ahead of Damián Martinez who has acquitted himself well with the injuries to the other two keepers.
Defence: Three obvious choices in defence with fans
Per Mertesacker and Bacary Sagna were jointly Arsenal’s most popular defenders, their 100 per cent ratings listing them jointly the club’s most popular players for this match.
Sagna was closely followed by Koscielny (96 per cent), who rewarded both fans and Manager with the opening goal.
Nacho Monreal (58 per cent) took up the fourth spot in defence much further behind with fans, but still substantially ahead of the next-most popular defender, Thomas Vermaelen, rated by 31per cent of fans. Koscielny is not ready to come back in the centre of defence so the boss will stick with Mertesacker but Chambers is suspended and Monreal is injuried but now that Debuchy is back to play on the right, he has options on the left with Gibbs and the impressive young Bellerin who shook off his dodgy early start vs Stoke to play well vs Galatasaray but the other centre back is the spot he needs to fill – interesting to see how he addresses it.
Midfield: With a long injury list, four obvious choices also in midfield for fans
Midfield injuries again hit the club hard for this fixture last season, with Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshere both out as they are this year.
However, this had the effect of making the four midfield choices pretty obvious for Gunners fans; Cazorla taking the top spot as Arsenal’s most popular midfielder, his 93 per cent fan rating making him the Club’s 6th-most popular player.
Özil was close behind on 89 per cent, with Mikel Arteta (84 per cent) and Aaron Ramsey (73 per cent) taking up the remaining spots.
After Ramsey, ratings for AFC’s midfielders plummeted; Tomáš Rosický (31 per cent fan rating) the next-most popular midfielder.
This season as mentioned Wilshere is out as is Ozil and Arteta but Ramsey is on a hot-streak and will surely get the call if he can shake off a knock along likely with the Ox, Cazorla and Flamini.
Forwards: Two obvious choices upfront for fans
Lukas Podolski was the striker of choice for Arsenal fans for this match, getting a 96 per cent approval for the lineup from Gunners fans and after his sweet strike in midweek he deserves another game but is unlikely to get it based on recent Wenger selections.
Podolski’s AFC colleague Olivier Giroud was usually the most popular forward, but not for this game, the Frenchman getting a still-respectable 80 per cent rating for the lineup. Welbeck is likely to figure and who knows maybe Sanogo will get a chance to double his Arsenal goal tally.
We expect a tight game with end-to-end action vs the in form Newcastle United side who are on quite a run. We are going for a confidence building 3-2 victory for the Gunners but with plenty of drama along the way.
Thanks as always for the insights and data from BeatYourManager.com