Arsenal: Early Europa League exit makes top four easier

Getting bounced from the Europa League certainly isn’t ideal, but the after-effects may be much more in Arsenal’s favor that it initially seemed.

No matter how “inevitable” the result against Olympiakos might have felt for some people, seeing Arsenal bounced in the first knockout stages of the Europa League stung. It stung worse because of the sad fact that the Gunners are mired in the middle of the Premier League table.

But one of the biggest causes of the Gunner’s inability to maintain consistency in the two competitions was tired legs. Mikel Arteta clearly didn’t trust his rotational options enough to let them hold down the Europa League. As such, our regulars were stretched too thin and the club felt the negative implications of that.

Still, many saw the Europa League as our best chance to get back into the Champions League. I’d bg to differ, however.

Especially now. Let’s assume that Arsenal can take care of business against West Ham in the weekend return to Premier League action.

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That puts us at 40 points, with a game in hand. I don’t want to assume any results alongside that fixture, but United currently sits at 42, Tottenham at 40 and Chelsea at just 45. That means that with that game in hand, we can sit just five points outside of the top four. But with only fifth place potentially needed, we are just two points outside of the zone.

Now, that doesn’t account for Sheffield, Burnely, and Wolverhampton, but they’re all in the same zone. We are well and truly primed to strike in the Premier League table, to crawl our way up to fifth place and solidify a position in the Champions League spots.

It might even make us better off to be focused on one competition every single week rather than having to leave our main guys struggling to accommodate two matches per week when they clearly aren’t cut out for it.

Call it finding the silver lining if you want, but I’m much more optimistic about getting into fifth or even fourth place now that we don’t have the Europa League to take away our focus and our fitness. After all, this top-four race has been wide open all year. Hell, not even Leicester are untouchable with all the struggles they’ve had this year.

So full speed ahead! Let’s surprise the hell out of all the haters and land ourselves in a Champions League place.