The EFL Cup tropy. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve only been to Bolton once and it wasn’t for a football match. In 2016 I was involved in a charity project and one of the people we helped was Paul. Paul was 39, a lively, successful manager of a big car dealership in Bolton and a fanatical Bolton supporter. He went to work one morning with a headache, subsequently had a brain stem stroke when he arrived at the office and was paralysed from the waist down and unable to speak normally.

By the time I met him he had made real progress .He had a hi- tech wheelchair with a voice synthesiser and his first Hawking-like words to me were “I hate the Arsenal. Southern softie fancy-dans . Bolton are going to crush you when we play you again”.

All delivered with an impish smile and a tap on my knee to suggest he was … probably … joking! We conversed as best we could about the recent history of Bolton/ Arsenal clashes which usually involved Sam Allardyce getting his team to rough up Arsene Wenger’s “fancy-dans”. I told him about watching Nat Lofthouse score two goals in the 1958 Cup Final, just post-Munich against Manchester United, the first game I ever watched and a 1963 game I described on here a few years ago when Arsenal came back from 3-1 down to beat Bolton 4-3. He mentioned all the tough games they gave us under Allardyce and I winced! But we did virtually clinch a title there in 2002 and sadly by the time I met Paul Bolton had plunged into economic disaster and playing ignominy.

Bolton were relegated to Division One in 2015 having survived a winding-up petition earlier that year and ultimately ended in Division Two. Under Ian Evatt, the former Barrow manager, they have climbed back up to Division One where they are currently 18th after a 5-2 win over Reading at the weekend. They play Crawley early on Saturday and the local press has them prioritising that game over the trip to Arsenal. We are very much a free hit for them.

Bolton are one of the founder members of the Football League and a famous old club with a history of FA Cup glory and top international players. However, they travel to Arsenal on Wednesday as massive underdogs but at the same time with nothing to lose. That can be a dangerous combination and much will depend on how seriously Mikel Arteta views the competition. On one hand it is a Cup competition with a relatively quick route to Wembley (although why have two semi-finals?). Oh I forgot … money! It offers the best opportunity for a club in
Arsenal’s position to blood young players in the first-team and it can throw up exciting Cup football. But for Arsenal , in our current position, it may be a Cup too far. Having lost Odegaard, Merino, Zinchenko and Tomayisu and with Ben White partially crocked apparently, and after a fearsome run of away fixtures it is a distraction we could well do without. But I will still be urging on the team on Wednesday night, albeit it from my sofa. Since my illness last year I’m trying to conserve energy, the game is on TV (I will be reporting on it from there) and at the last Carabao Cup ties I attended I was surrounded by strangers whose level of interest in the game was highly dubious and I found it hard to concentrate on the action. And we lost!

The titanic effort at the Emptihad on Sunday after such an exhausting recent programme will have undoubtedly drained the players and I think we should rest as many of our first team players as we can. We also have a number of talented players who will want to press their suit for inclusion in first team affairs and some young tyros who merit a chance to shine on a bigger stage.
I put this team into the blog the other day:

Setford[*]
Timber Kiwior Calafiori Lewis-Skelly
Jorginho Oulad M’Hand
Nwaneri
Martinelli Jesus Sterling

[*] Seaford may be short after illness so Porter may play – he’s 16!

There is some method in my madness . Timber is building back after last year’s injury and this should be less demanding than a league match. Kiwior hasn’t started at all and Calafiori has a chance to build on Sunday’s sensational performance. MLS and Nwaneri look likely to start and Oulad M’Hand has impressed many observers and if I recall, impressed CER at Orient recently.

Martinelli needs goals and Jesus and Sterling need games. Exciting young talents like Kabia , Gower and Kacurri can join from the bench if the match situation allows. I would be very careful with our subs. Raya is slightly crocked, Saka, Rice, Saliba and Gabriel are too important to risk in a game like this and while I expect Havertz to be on the bench I hope we don’t need to play him.

I think we will prevail but after a tough game possibly 2-0 and I hope Paul up in Bolton gets a chance to watch his team and they make him proud. After we met we contacted Bolton and they made him guest of honour at their next home game. It was, he said, the “proudest moment of my life”.

I used to dislike Bolton intensely during the Allardyce era but they are a club that has battled to survive and after meeting Paul I have a very soft spot for them in my heart. I fervently hope we beat them nevertheless and show the quality that Southern softie fancy dans inherently possess.

It’s been a very good week for the Arsenal. A win at Tottenham and a draw at Europa League winners, Atalanta, in the Champions League, both achieved in the face of an injury and suspension crisis with two brilliant defensive displays. What a shame that with one of the biggest games of the season around 24 hours away, the focus of most Arsenal fans will now be split between football and legal matters. Sadly, that is the inevitable consequence of a game against Manchester City.

If the loss of a couple of players against Tottenham last week provoked an extra desire to beat the neighbours, it’s to be hoped that the light on the current hearing into Manchester City’s various misdeeds will do the same on Sunday against Abu Dhabi. It should do as our whole club is still smarting from the failure to lift the Premier League trophy four months ago. Arsenal, under the transformative guidance of Mikel Arteta, have done enough to be deserved champions against all other opposition for the last two seasons. All other opposition, that is, except the erstwhile also rans from Maine Road, Manchester.

Old Manchester City
Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, City were a proper club with players like Colin Bell, Francis Lee and Mike Summerbee. They enjoyed success in the old First Division and both domestic cup competitions. It didn’t last, however, and their prolonged slide down the English football pyramid finally ended in 1998-99 when they won promotion from Division 2 (the third tier) back up to Division 1. Despite their decline their supporters in those days stayed loyal, and even in the third tier of English football they enjoyed gates of 20,000 – 30,000.

Modern Manchester City
The current incarnation is a confected club constructed with the proceeds of Abu Dhabi oil, and was acquired in September 2008 by the Abu Dhabi United Group, an investment company for the Abu Dhabi royal family, which is owned by Sheikh Mansour, who is also chairman of the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

Somewhat similarly to the Spurs fans that GSD described last week, the City fans have nicked a goal celebration from Poland, been given a stadium by Manchester council to help them on their way, and found their club the recipients of untold wealth from the Sheikhs of Abbly Dabbly (thanks, as ever, BtM). Not content with their ability to outspend all who stood in their way, the Sheikhs allegedly (take note, lawyers) felt it necessary to clandestinely enhance their contributions to the club by sneaking a few extra quid under the counters of FFP and PSR to ensure that they won so much in the next dozen or so years that many of their supporters are now too bored to turn up and witness the next victory. That loss of interest might well eventually apply to the demoralised supporters of many other clubs if City’s behaviour is allowed to continue unpunished – and that could have fatal implications for the Premier League.

The Court Hearing
And so, from last Monday 16th September, we have finally come to the hearing of City’s many and varied charges of Premier League rule contraventions which is expected to take something like ten weeks. It transpires that due to ‘reporting errors’, City are actually facing not the widely reported 115 charges but, in fact, 130 charges. You can add to that 22 counts of late kick offs in both first and second halves of league matches over the last two seasons, for which they have already been fined £2 million. You can come to your own conclusions as to why they would want to repeatedly kick off late. My own, purely personal opinion, of course, is that it cannot have been anything at all to do with foreign betting markets. Of course it can’t!

Once the initial verdict of the current hearing is announced, C130y are bound to mount all kinds of appeals and try to drag the process on as long as they possibly can, but you cannot allow 130 charges of offences ranging from non-cooperation to fraud, to simply be swept under the carpet and ignored. The league would lose all credibility and with it a significant number of its supporters – that’s to say it’s paying customers around the globe.

Don’t believe it? Well I’m hearing on radio that Premier League clubs are looking at ticket price increases of up to 20%. How many fans, who are struggling to keep up with mortgage increases and cost of living inflation already, are going to cough up even more cash to take part in a competition that is going to continue to be won by a team that everyone knows has cheated their way to six of the last seven titles? And how many paying TV customers around the world will continue to pay to watch games in emptying stadia, increasingly devoid of atmosphere, abandoned by fans who can’t be bothered with a corrupt competition.

So Man C130y are lawyered up to the teeth, with a team led by legal eagle and life peer, Lord David Pannick, and there are those who believe they will weedle their way out of this crisis by courtesy of their huge wealth and their army of legal advisers. Well, there are a lot of very rich, smart operators who own Premier League clubs too, who will also be lawyered up to the teeth – angry at the losses they have suffered over many seasons and seeking appropriate retribution and compensation. The Premier League would surely not have gone public with the news of these charges if they were not very confident of making them stick. Their mistake was probably in bringing all 130 charges at once, allowing C130y’s lawyers to take an absolute age in preparing their defences.

My own feeling is that it may be possible to quibble over specific, individual amounts of money in various holes and hiding places in the accounts, but surely you can’t argue with the basic principle of “failing to co-operate with an investigation”, or “failing to provide the information” requested.

We will all now have to wait another age to learn anything about the hearing as in the interests of clarity and transparency – cough – it is being held in a secret location and will be closed to the public. All we will get is the eventual verdict which, considering the points deductions handed out last season to Everton and Nottingham Forest for their relatively minor offences, should see Manchester City relegated to the National League North. One good thing about this hearing compared with the UEFA investigation into their FFP contraventions, is that City will not have the option to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

This all reminds me of what happened to a friend of mine when he had to take recourse to the law. He initially asked his solicitor: “If I give you £400, will you answer two questions for me?” His solicitor replied, “Absolutely ! What’s the second question?” At the end of the hearing and with a guilty verdict, the solicitor said, “Judge, I wish to appeal my client’s case on the basis of newly discovered evidence.” Judge: “And what is the nature of the new evidence?” Solicitor: “I have discovered that my client still has £500 left.”

Manchester City Team News
Honestly, who cares? There are rumours that de Bruyne could miss the game with an injury sustained in midweek, but I’ll believe it when I see it. If any of their squad are unavailable, they will bring in £50m – £60m replacements and it will make no difference to them – or they will play a thug like Kovacic to maim a few more of our players with continuing impunity as their pet referee Michael Oliver will be in charge.

That’s the very same Michael Oliver who –
i) was paid £20,000 in 2023 to referee a game in UAE, funded by Man City’s owner Sheikh Mansour
ii) allowed Kovacic to escape a red card for two horrible challenges on Rice and Ødegaard when the teams met at the Emirates last season
iii) has awarded fewer yellow cards to Man City than any of the other top 8 clubs
iv) has awarded Man City 11 penalties in games he has refereed and
v) has never issued a red card against a Man City player.

Remember the scandal in Spain when Barcelona were found guilty of paying referees to fix marches? The Director of Football at Barcelona at the time was Txiki Begiristain who just happens to have been Director of Football at Manchester City since 2012. How is it possible for a referee to be on the payroll of the owner of one of the clubs in the league in which he officiates?

Arsenal team news
Martin Ødegaard remains sidelined. I don’t know where the rumours are coming from but the end of November is being suggested as his possible/likely return date, which would suggest a serious grade 2 tear to his affected ankle ligament(s). The club has quite rightly issued no detail on the injury so this has to be all conjecture at this stage. There don’t appear to be any new problems after the game against Atalanta, so Calafiori, Timber, Jesus, Sterling and Jorginho should all be available. Extra baggy shorts have been ordered for William Saliba as he will again be expecting to keep Erling Haaland in his back pocket.

There has been a lot of nonsense talked in the various media this week about how Arsenal lacked ambition and parked the bus at the Emptihad last season. It seems we didn’t make the game exciting enough for the poor loves because we shut City down. Well you bet we did – and I’ll be delighted if we manage to do exactly the same on Sunday. Mikel Arteta’s job is to win games for the Arsenal, not to entertain the press – and especially when he is having to do it with a makeshift midfield that is also impacting the attack.

He told the press yesterday that the club has been preparing for this exceptional week of away games since pre-season. His original plans were then shot to bits by the clutch of injuries and suspension we suffered to all our new players, holding midfielder and captain. So he has had to try to adapt again, one week before that horror week began. Whatever he comes up with on Sunday will be the very best the club can do, for all the reasons we know nothing about. That will do me just fine. I’m actually finding it fun, while the present circumstances persist, to watch teams banging their heads against our impenetrable defensive wall. One-Nil to the Arsenal would be absolutely fantastic. Nil-Nil would also be a job extremely well done.

“You’ll fall in love, I know you will …. Our No.6 is the king of Brazil”

The Holic Pound
I decided that betting on this game, given some of the information above, really would be a mug’s game. Instead I’ll leave you with a topical tale that occurred in the Holics’ pub of choice –
A man walked into the pub and shouted for all to hear, “Lawyers are all ASSHOLES!” A man at the back of the bar stood up and shouted back at him “I take exception to that statement and I resent it greatly!” The first guy asked, “Are you a Lawyer?” The man at the back responded “No, I’m an asshole!”

Match time
Kick off is on Sunday 22nd September at 16.30 UK time. TV coverage on Sky Sports. Try to enjoy the game. Safe journey if you’re going.

And finally, words of wisdom from Winston Churchill – “Lawyers occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

Cheers !

And so to Alpine Lombardy, where a new opponent and a new Champions League format await.

One of the rewards of CL qualification is meant to be not having to play Thursday night football. However, we shall be playing football on Thursday night in hilly and historic Bergamo where Atalanta hosts us in its newly refurbished Gewiss Stadium for the first of our eight CL league phase games.

It does not look like it from the glitzy new wraparounds at either end, but the stadium dates to 1928. Then known as the Brumana, it was tiny, holding just 12,000 spectators. Today, following a three-phase expansion started just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it holds shy of 25,000. However, the pitch has remained 110m x 70m — barely larger than the 105m x 68m minimum specified by CL rules. Last weekend’s Serie A game against Fiorentina was Atalanta’s first home game with the renovation complete.

The club dates to 1907. It was founded by pupils of the city’s Liceo Classico Paolo Sarpi, an elite and demanding high school famed for grooming the future ruling class through a classical education. The scholars named their football team for the mythical Greek heroine, Atalanta, ‘whom no man could outrun except by cheating’. Always good to see a classical education not going to waste. The club’s crest depicts Atalanta’s profile to this day. It bears a striking resemblance to the logo of the German hair products company Wella. But I digress…

After merging with Bergamo’s other football club in 1920 and adopting its blue and back colours, the Nerazzuri were admitted to the predecessor of Serie B. They have yo-yoed between the top two tiers of Italian football, earning the unusual distinction of holding the record for promotions to Serie A. They are now in their 14th consecutive season in the top flight, their longest continuous stay.

Atalanta qualified for this season’s CL by finishing fourth in Serie A, with the backup of winning last season’s Europa League, beating the otherwise invincible Bayer Leverkusen in the final and the Scousers along the way. They are no mugs.

Gasperini

That was the club’s first European trophy and 66-year-old manager Gian Piero Gasperini’s first of any kind in a career dating back to 1994. Atalanta is his seventh club, but he has bloomed there into the most underrated coach in Europe. Since taking over in 2016, he has transformed Atalanta from regular relegation candidates into a club consistently challenging for Serie A’s European places.

Gasperini plays highly-fluid and high-risk football. He once said, ‘If you don’t win without danger, there’s no glory to your triumph’. Drawing his inspiration from the Dutch sides of his youth rather than the defensive-minded Italian ones, he favours setting up in a 3-4-2-1. Yet that is a mere starting point. Jose Mourinho once moaned that Gasperini was the most difficult coach he faced because Atalanta changed its formation so often in a game. 

The uniqueness of Gasperini’s philosophy is his mix of high-intensity offensive and defensive pressing, relentless, persistent one-to-one marking and lots of quick, short passes and overloads to progress down both wings. Atalanta largely abandons the middle of the pitch. Both wing-backs play high and wide, as do two midfielders and the defensive line, with the centre-backs also ready to carry the ball into the half-spaces. 

This fluidity lets Atalanta flood the box with players who get off lots of shots. They averaged 14 a game last season, the fourth highest in Serie A with more than five on target, second best in the league. Atalanta scores a lot — 72 goals last season, bettered only by champions Inter and runners-up Milan — but it also means they are vulnerable to opponents making hay in the space behind. Inter ripped them to shreds in a 4-0 pasting before the interlull. 

Without the ball, Atalanta falls back into a compact 5-4-1, marks man-to-man and squeezes the already small pitch. Gasperini employs an unusual counter-pressing system that pushes attackers further and further away from the Atalanta goal one by one. If it holds (if a defensive system that essentially has no structure can be said to hold), it is highly effective; if the opposition breaks it, there is space aplenty to counter-attack.

Stuttering start

This season has seen a stuttering start to Atalanta’s league campaign, with two wins and two losses in the first four games. At the weekend, it twice came from behind to beat Fiorentina 3-2, not a good omen as home wins over the Tuscan side have a habit of triggering unbeaten streaks for Atalanta.

Against us, Marco Carnesecchi will likely be between the sticks. He played up through Italy’s national youth teams, but he is now 24 and has yet to get a senior cap. He replaced last season’s No. 1, Juan Musso, who was sold to Atletico Madrid.

Ahead of him, the back three will likely comprise the lanky Swedish international centre-back Isak Hien, Swiss-born Albanian international Berat Djimsiti and in the absence of injured skipper Rafael Toloi, Sead Kolasinac, formerly of this parish. However, the veteran DM, Marten de Roon, who has been pressed into emergency service in the back three of late to cover a raft of injuries to the club’s centre-backs, may stay there if Gasperini doesn’t relish the prospect of his mane of white hair being turned a further whiter shade of pale by the prospect of footraces between Kolasinac and the likes of Saka, Martinelli and Sterling.

If de Roon does not move back to his more accustomed midfield role, Mario Pasalic, the ex-Chelsea man who had more loans (six) than games for Chelsea (none), and Éderson, who is on the fringes of the Brazil squad, will provide the hustle and bustle needed by Gasperini’s midfield.

The Dutch international Teun Koopmeiners delivered that last season when he was also Atalanta’s joint-top scorer in Serie A. However, he was sold to Juventus for €54.7 million in the summer. Like Brighton, Atalanta tends to buy young and well and has a noted Academy but regularly loses its stars to the big-spending clubs. Rasmus Højlund was the money-spinning sale of the previous season.

Matteo Ruggeri, the tall Italy Under-21 left-back bought from Torino in the summer, and Raoul Bellanova, who won his first Italy cap earlier this year, will provide the width, progression and energy Gasperini demands from his wing-backs. Ruggeri is equally capable of playing in the back three, in which case the veteran former Italian international Davide Zappacosta would come in.

Gasperini’s preferred attacking midfield starters are the 23-year-old Belgian international Charles De Ketelaere, who turned last season’s loan from AC Milan into a permanent €22 million move in the summer, and Ademola Lookman, the London-born Nigerian international who will be familiar from his days with Charlton, Everton, Fulham and Leicester City. Gasperini has revitalised two men whose careers were going sideways before arriving at Atalanta.

Marco Brescianini, the Argentine-born centre forward picked up from Serie B’s Frosinone and who won his first Italy caps in the interlull, Lazar Samardžić, a German-born Serbian international and Nicolò Zaniolo, who is on loan from Galatasaray, which lent him to Aston Villa last season, are options from the bench.

In-form Mateo Retegui will be up top. The Argentina-born Italy international, who joined from Genoa in the summer, has four goals in four games, three with his head. He is filling in for last season’s top-scorer, Gianluca Scamacca, a prospect with whom we were once linked but who ended up at Moyes’s West Ham, where he didn’t take. He was rebuilding not only his club but also his international career before doing his ACL. 

Former Everton centre-back Ben Godfrey will also be absent due to injury. Other superannuated Premier League players in Atalanta’s squad include former Wolves keeper Rui Patricio, who arrived in the summer from Roma, and Juan Cuadrado, once of Chelsea.

The Arsenal

Arteta will want a winning start to the CL league phase. He rarely makes wholesale changes in team selection and I suspect he will only tweak in order to execute a specific game plan for this opponent. I write before knowing the latest injury news, but the word is that Saka is available but Big Gabi is not. Thus: 

Raya

White — Saliba — Calafiori —Timber

Partey — Rice — Havertz

Saka — Jesus — Sterling

If Sterling gets on, it would make him the first player to feature in the Champions League with four different English sides.

This will be a challenging and unusual game, turning on who wins the tactical battle between our young master and their old apprentice, so to speak. A 2-0 win would be a good evening’s sorcery for Artera, especially if he can rest legs early ahead of Sunday’s trip to Manchester.

Enjoy the game ‘holics, near and far.