Sideways Sammy

It all begins here! A 25 year wait to be back at the top table in English football is over and Coventry City are hoping it won’t be a brief stint back on the invite list.

The Sky Blues couldn’t have been handed a tougher test than an away trip to the defending champions, Arsenal. Any sense that The Gunners might be suffering a hangover from having put such a big effort into finally winning the Premier League last season were put to bed by a comprehensive win against Manchester City in the Community Shield last week. This could well be the highest-quality opposition Coventry have played for quarter of a century.

Maybe it will be a good thing to get the toughest game out of the way first.

Expected Line-Up

Having had 18 months to work on a style of play to win the Championship title, Frank Lampard is now going to have to find the balance between changing that up while ensuring that the positive aspects are retained. An away trip to one of the best teams in country is the toughest possible early test of that change in approach.

Last week’s friendly against Monaco felt as strong an indication as there currently is of what kind of team the manager has in mind for this game. Most notably, Matt Grimes is likely to be aided in midfield by the physicality and running of Frank Onyeka and Caleb Yirenkyi, hoping to limit the opportunities for the opposition to run directly at the midfielder and expose his lack of pace.

Elsewhere, it appears that Aurele Amenda will play at left centre-back, with Bobby Thomas on the right. It’s not ideal to play a right-footed defender on the left of the central defensive partnership but it feels like that will enable the team to have their most aggressive and physical pairing at the heart of the defence to help defend the crosses Arsenal will look to put in.

Whether either Taiwo Awoniyi or Sidiki Cherif start this game after signing this week remains to be seen. Awoniyi’s physicality and experience of this division could prove useful in helping the team get up the pitch with others getting used to Premier League football, but Ellis Simms may be preferred, simply because he’s been with the team over pre-season. Instead, one or both of the strikers could be useful as late subs to provide power against a tiring defence.

Additionally, Jack Rudoni and Ephron Mason-Clark look set to be fit enough to be involved in the match day squad. Of the two, Mason-Clark probably would be the most valuable as a potential starter due to the need for counter-attacking threat, but if he’s not fully-fit, Brandon Thomas-Asante and Loum Tchaouna will have to do the job out wide.

Last Time We Met

Steven Pressley’s Coventry City side travelled to the Emirates back in 2014, during the season in which the club had been exiled to Northampton, to take on a strong Arsenal side in the FA Cup. Any hope of an upset went up in flames in the first 30 minutes, with Lukasz Podolski grabbing a brace – the first from a Mesut Ozil pass, the second from a Per Mertesacker flick-on at a corner-kick.

Leon Clarke had a couple of chances in the second-half to make a game of it, but Arsenal eventually wrapped things up with goals from Olivier Giroud and Santi Cazorla to ensure that there would be no upset.

Key Questions

1 – Did Arsenal Make A Faustian Pact For The Premier League Title Last Year?

Arsenal had looked cursed never to win anything of significance for so many years, the club that could always be relied upon to go up in flames in the key moments to allow others to win, then that all ended last year with a first league title since 2004.

There has been an underlying sense that the victory has come at some cost. Mikel Arteta changed the team’s identity from playing free-flowing football towards prioritising clean sheets, physicality and set-pieces, making them a hard team to watch at their worst as they ground out results. On top of that, the manager’s reluctance to rotate his squad had some of his best players playing through the pain barrier, with William Saliba set for a lengthy absence, while both Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka hobbled through much of this summer’s World Cup.

Arsenal may have won something important again, but it took a lot of sacrifice to get there. The type of grind they put themselves through physically and mentally may well be the kind of sacrifice only someone with the hunger to summit a mountain puts through, rather than stay at the peak.

Last Sunday’s Community Shield performance suggested that there are enough fresh faces and, more importantly perhaps, new ideas to avoid that trap but the main challenge Arsenal face this coming season feels less to do with their opposition and more how they can keep themselves physically and psychologically in shape to stay at the top.

2 – Jay Dasilva’s Biggest Test?

One of the biggest talking points this summer at Coventry City has been the prospect of Jay Dasilva being first-choice left-back in the Premier League. To an extent, it is probably a remnant from Dasilva’s slow start to life at the club, which only kicked into gear following Frank Lampard’s appointment. If Dasilva had signed last summer, there probably would be fewer doubts about his status as first-choice in his position. If Dasilva could have picked an opponent for his top-flight debut, an away trip to Arsenal would have been at the bottom of his list.

The Gunners, specifically, seem like the worst kind of opposition for Jay Dasilva to face. A team that are set to dominate the ball, load the penalty area with giants and get in cross after cross, if Arsenal have done their homework on Coventry, they are surely going to load their crosses towards their right wing, right on Jay Dasilva’s head.

It’s less about the one-against-one situations that Dasilva will find himself against and more how vulnerable he may make the team to crossing that is the concern here. Equally, if the Wales international can come out of this game relatively unscathed then it really would send a message to his doubters that the Jay Dasilva they remember from his first two years at Coventry City is an entirely different player to who he is now.

3 – How To Crack Arsenal’s Dominance?

This is going to be the first big test of Coventry City’s ability to play away from home against the top teams this season. It’s not a situation this team has been in much over Frank Lampard’s reign and the concern is that the Sky Blues will find themselves under the cosh and put themselves under further pressure by trying to play out from the back in the manner they’ve become accustomed to.

Coventry are going to have less of the ball here and are going to have to be mightily switched on when it comes to defending crosses and set-pieces. The task here is not just to keep things tight at the back but pose enough of a threat on the counter that Arsenal can’t just flood forward completely.

Arsenal are very good at denying opportunities on the counter-attack via their pressing and their narrow defensive formation that makes it hard to play directly through their middle. They are likely to hound Matt Grimes on the ball, testing the skipper’s ability to keep play ticking over, forcing Coventry into playing directly into their forwards, hoping that will cede possession back to them.

The front three are going to have an important role to play here in acting as an outlet when the Sky Blues go longer – which seems to be the thinking behind adding in strikers like Taiwo Awoniyi and Sidiki Cherif, who are great at running the channels – while Brandon Thomas-Asante and Loum Tchaouna are going to have to be decisive in how they use the ball when they get the chance to run, in a way they’ve yet to show in pre-season.

The more time the ball spends in the Arsenal half, the better chance Coventry City have of claiming a result.