Arsenal Predicted Starting Squad Against Monaco in the Champions League

Ronnie Macdonald – Flickr Creative Commons

It doesn’t need to be stated how big this game against Monaco is, but we’ll go ahead and state it again – it’s humongous. Arsenal need to overturn a 3-1 deficit, so their best hope is obviously to win by a comfortable 3-0 margin like we did against West Ham. But a 3-1 score would take us into extra time and a 4-2 score would see us through.

So basically, the first objective is to score three goals. Something we’ve only done once since February 1st – on Saturday.

Given the undoubtedly defensive-oriented tactics that Monaco are going to engage in, the key to the game is to score quickly, to get that first goal early. The West Ham victory gave renewed confidence to all the Arsenal players, and they’ve all been speaking out about how the Gunners aren’t done. It was Mesut Ozil who spoke out saying that the key was that first goal.

“It’s very important to score early” he told the Arsenal website.

Therefore attack is going to be the name of the game and Arsenal’s starting squad should reflect a team that wants to score, and isn’t afraid to sacrifice a little bit of defense to get it done. Here is the starting XI that I would put forth with a three goal margin in mind.

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