Girona preview + Lewis-Skelly red card/ban overturned

Morning all.

We’re in Champions League action this evening, taking on Girona away in the final fixture of this new, elongated group campaign. Our qualification for the knock-out stages, without having to play another round, is more or less assured, so I half expect the manager to rotate his squad a bit for this one. Not wholesale changes, but with Man City on Sunday it’s a chance to take the pressure off some individuals.

Ultimately though, the scope for rotation is fairly limited, but perhaps we’ll see starts for Neto, Jakub Kiwior, Jorginho, Mikel Merino, Raheem Sterling and perhaps Kieran Tierney. Not necessarily ones which get the blood pumping, but which might just protect some legs which have given a lot during the month of January. This is our 9th game in 28 days, an absurd schedule really, so let’s see who he picks later on.

Still, if we saw a stronger side without some of those, I wouldn’t be that shocked, with the manager outlining his approach:

We’re here to win the game and in order to do that we’re going to have to be better than them. They’re a really good side, if you look at the games they’ve played in the Champions League against top opposition, they’ve made life very difficult for them. So tomorrow it will be a very strong team in order to achieve what we want to do because mathematically the qualifying at the moment is uncertain.

I know Arteta likes to give full respect to any opposition he faces, and I understand why, but Girona have won just one of their seven games so far, and lost six along the way. They’ll want to go out with a flourish, I’m sure, but little about their Champions League form so far this season suggests we have to go full strength. So, a mix and match approach to rotation later, and hopefully we can get the job done with no fuss, no drama, no more injuries, and then we can turn our attention to the weekend.

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Meanwhile, Arsenal yesterday appealed the red card issued to Myles Lewis-Skelly during the Wolves game on Saturday. News of that emerged just before lunchtime. Before 6pm, the FA’s independent panel returned with their verdict:

An independent Regulatory Commission has upheld a claim of wrongful dismissal in relation to Myles Lewis-Skelly and removed his three-match suspension.

The Arsenal player was sent off for serious foul play during their Premier League fixture against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday, January 25, 2025.

Common sense applied, thankfully, and the speed at which they came to their conclusion tells you plenty. As some journalists over the previous 48 hours bent over backwards to try and gaslight us into thinking the decision and the PGMOL backing of it was fully justified, the panel needed no time at all to make a mockery of those attempts – and the initial decision from the referee and also VAR.

As I said afterwards, everyone understands if a referee makes a mistake, but when VAR doesn’t do its job, and then PGMOL doubles-down on it very publicly and uses their friends in the media to muddy the waters, it just makes them all look very, very stupid. I’ve seen it argued that this demonstrates the processes in place work, and this is best practice, but to me it just further illustrates that the body that runs officiating for the Premier League and beyond is more interested in protecting itself and its referees than getting things right.

Thankfully this is a game that Arsenal won, so we don’t have the added frustration (as we did against Brighton, Man City and Bournemouth) of having a bad decision cost us points. It also means Lewis-Skelly doesn’t have to serve a thoroughly unjustified three match ban, and with loads of games coming up, that’s a good thing.

I’ll say this even though I don’t really believe it: but I hope this situation results in a little introspection from Howard Webb and PGMOL. They dealt with this in the worst way possible, rather than admitting a mistake and showing a capacity for learning from it, they made it a lot more contentious than it already was. They have to own that. And I think it justifies the unhappiness that Arsenal fans felt about it at the time and subsequently.

And by Arsenal fans I mean the majority who simply felt it unfair and unjust, not the tiny minority who went too far with abuse that is unacceptable and cannot be condoned. An extreme faction are not who you hold up to represent the majority. So, let’s hope that processes and standards improve for every team in the Premier League, and maybe this as a learning moment for PGMOL could turn out to be a positive. I don’t really have a lot of faith that that will be the case, but it would be good if it was.

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Right, that’s it for now. You can join us later for some Champions League live blog action, and we’ll have all the post-game stuff on Arseblog News.

Catch you later.

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