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Have we accidentally stumbled upon a new tactic? Are Myles Lewis Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri already first team regulars? Neither are necessarily playing in their best positions and I am not sure what their best positions are. Seemingly Lewis Skelly is a midfielder and Nwaneri a 10 but is that the reality? Is Saka a full back? That’s where he broke through into the first team. I feel that the Merino situation has transfixed the fans. People are arguing that Calafiori should be our striker. Everything is in flux regarding positions but our team are near the top and a strong run now could even get us the title, but only with a Liverpool collapse that is unlikely to happen. Myles Lewis-Skelly. But where should he play? Two areas that we are happy with though are Myles and Ethan. They look superb. They could get fast tracked into the England side. They look certain to make a major contribution there. And yet in what position? And is it really necessary to have a fixed position? Supposing we had five six players that could play many positions, is that not a great asset? How could opposing managers figure out their tactics if they don’t know where our players are playing? Maybe that is the next tactical switch to come? We no longer use fixed positions but change them up several times during a match? A bit like Tyson Fury switching from southpaw to orthodox and back again during his fights. We switch and we win At the moment I feel that along with Mikel Merino, Lewis Skelly, Ethan Nwaneri, Jurrien Timber, Ricardo Calafiori, Kai Havertz and Declan Rice could play several positions from attack to defence. Could you imagine the chaos caused by four, five or six players switching during a game and switching back again repeatedly? The opposition would be mesmerized. Ethan Nwaneri - could he be the new Ian Wright? Can you imagine the commentators the first time this was tried? They would say what’s going on here, lots of players are out of position? Have Arsenal lost their minds and players are running wherever they want to. Arteta will have a heart attack. But it would be actually Arteta’s plan. One player being in an strange position happens all the time in football and normally someone tries to cover but what about as a deliberate policy? You would need players capable of playing several positions at a top level but I feel that is possible for certain players. Heart attacks for defenders Maybe tiki taka and the high press has had their day and something new needs to be tried? A truer version of total football that is dynamic, and capable of instant change. Havertz goes into the centre strikers position, then Merino, then Nwaneri, etc. Defenders would be wondering what to do, and who best to take what player. Kai Havertz - nobody knows what his best position is. What do you think? Could it work? I don’t see why not. It could give us access to that most crucial of margins, goals in our favour. Maybe this striker injury deficit has thrown up a new way of thinking about the game. We are looking at all our players in the strikers role, it seems but what about the rest? The only changes we sometimes see at the moment in football is sometimes teams switch wingers when they feel a fullback is giving a winger a hard time. But can you imagine many switches regularly throughout a game? Goalkeepers and defenders having heart attacks would become the norm. They might even get frustrated and lash out at our players and get sent off.. That would be a nice change with other teams getting the red cards. Same old Arsenal? Never Of course Arteta would be accused of cheating again as he is with the set pieces. Pundits-and I am looking at you two Carragher and Neville, would be saying this is not fair, we don’t know what positions Arsenal’s players are playing in, they keep changing them, it’s not fair. Mikel Merino - will he stay in the middle? But would us fans care if we kept winning? Of course not. I even have a name for this new tactic and it is the Switcheroo. The moans from all the non Arsenal fans would be deafening, same old Arsenal, always cheating. Ricardo Calafiori - the new Roberto Baggio? C’mon Mikel Arteta, listen to this Irishman, bring on the Switcheroo and let’s win all our games until the other teams catch up and start copying you. We might get a few years particularly if Per Mertesacker starts training all the Academy players in the Switcheroo. And hey, I don’t want any money for this but a nice club level season ticket for free would be nice.

Red cards – no, a red and white team David Seaman Lee Dixon Sol Campbell Tony Adams Ashley Cole Santi Cazorla Patrick Vieira Gilberto Silva Declan Rice Ian Wright Dennis Bertgkamp What’s unique about the players above? They have all been red-carded for the Arsenal since the Premier League began. I have tried to pick the best team from the list but it was hard. All our top defenders have been no strangers to red cards and it’s the same with our midfielders. I ended up with a 4 4 2 but I figured that Gilberto and Vieira would stay back and Rice and Cazorla further forward so more like a 4 2 2 2. Bergkamp and Wright up front. Forwards don’t get red-carded so much so I hadn't got a lot to choose from. Still, that is a top side. Leandro didn't make my great red-card team Trossard was a candidate as our latest but I couldn’t pick him above those two. In the Wenger era we picked up many red cards with our man Patrick being our king—eight red cards which is almost an average of one per season. Red cards were very common in the Wenger era and it probably cost us some trophies. They were big feisty players a bit like now. Let’s hope it doesn’t cost us many trophies this time. Arteta will stop the flow of red cards We have had 51 players red-carded since Sky invented football. And while Patrick Vieira had eight, Granit Xhaka had four in a slightly less timeframe, although one of his sendings off is probably the most famous of ours. Everyone remembers that one. And you can fuck off if you don’t. Good kick, Pep, you haven't lost it The way it is looking, we could have a bad year for sendings off. Arteta needs to move quickly to stem this flow. I believe he will, it is where he excels, looking at our flaws and correcting them. I am pretty certain that the second half of our season will be better in this regard. Rice, who picked up his first red, will discipline himself against further lapses. Partey and Gabriel still have reds in them, I feel, and Timber may join that bunch as he seems feisty. Pep Cantona gets no discipline Mr Pep surely could have been disciplined for an Eric Cantona attack on his car seat, and he probably imagined a ref sitting there as he let fly. That ref would not have got up. In fairness to Guardiola, he did not finger the ref for the Calafiori goal but his team for not having cover for Walker as he remonstrated with Mr Oliver. That is correct, you cannot expect a ref to wait as a player jogs back to his right position. Play had to restart, and in this case Oliver did nothing wrong. You can't give a red-card to a blue guy However, there was one incident at the end which the BBC panel of Alan Shearer and Shay Given thought was a big joke and that was Erling Haaland throwing the ball at Gabriel’s head as he rushed back to take the restart. I am sorry but deliberately throwing the ball at someone’s head is against the rules and a red card should have been the option. I am certain an Arsenal player would not have got away with that. It would have been letter of the law time again. A record year for red cards? We seem to have got an enormous amount of ambiguity this season in refereeing decisions and bookings and cards are on the increase. Seven yellows in Sunday’s match and one red in what was, despite its intensity, a fairly law abiding match, indicates that this could be a record year for cards. It is hard to see to what good effect. Arteta does need to ensure that we don’t get any more unnecessary ones. Ricardo Calafiori scored a simple tap-in... from 25 metres The match showed that we can win the league this year. City needed luck to scramble that late goal which didn’t seem likely given the amount of defenders lashing the ball over the net or wide for far out. Defenders can’t score from outside the box, Calafiori will confirm that for you. He knows it's impossible. Oh! Are we now better than City? We can only be happy though. We all feel that without Trossard’s indiscipline we would have won at the Etihad, something no team seems able to do. We have improved year on year. Martin and Merino are still to come and we might just get a target in January. Raya has proven me wrong The other area I feel I need to address is David Raya. I am a big fan of Ramsdale and still believe that he will get to the top. I had a similar belief in Martinez and he has proven himself. Arteta, Emery and Wenger were wrong and I was right. And I think Ramsdale will also prove to be truly top class. But David Raya surely must be in the reckoning for the top spot in Spain. Unai Simón is in his sights and Raya’s ability to calm down his defence, make multiple stops, lead the attacks and pluck crosses out of the air, definitely makes him a candidate for the best goalkeeper in the world. The Arsenal are back I also want to address playing Calafiori in Timber’s slot and Timber in Ben White’s position. I suspect it had to do with Savinho and the belief that Calafiori would be best to deal with him. He did that well but for the goal he was out of position as he was a few other times. Maybe that was Savinho’s doing but White is our best defensive full back in my opinion and the other area he excels in is linking with Saka. Saka had a quiet game and was taken off for White to bolster the defence. A good move, I feel as Saka needs to be protected. He will need that boy for many matches ahead and any time he can be rested is good. No,you fuck off, ref The team are good, this game proved that. We are still unbeaten. We got 7 points away from City, Villa and the Spuds, a run that we feared could be much worse. We do need to sort out the discipline, accept that certain referees are biased against us but not give any of them an excuse. We don’t want red-cards to spoil what could well be a great season. Mikel, do what is necessary, and bring a level of discipline unseen in football similar to the level of discipline in our playing ability. We know what we have to do and we do it. We support each other and we have made City need a red card to draw with us and even then, their fans went crazy that that was all they could achieve. I think we are Arsenal again. Time to send all the rest home crying. We are back. Let’s start with Bolton.