Arsene Wenger had said earlier in the week that we was planning to use his Arsenal squad to rotate one again during this busy festive run of fixtures, but as many people expected the boss has mainly just brought back the plkayers that he rested for the win over Bournemouth.
The only player that keeps his place in the first team after coming in for the Cherries is our England international Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, so the Costa Rican forward Joel Campbell will start from the bench and will probably feature at some point.
So Nacho Monreal and Laurent Koscielny come back in to the side and our Brazilian centre back can consider himself unlucky to be back on the bench after his brilliant game against Bournemouth, with Mertesacker being preferred by Wenger. The same can be said of Calum Chambers who makes way for Mathieu Flamini although the Frenchman has been playing well himself.
Cech
Bellerin, Mertesacker, Koscielny, Monreal
Ramsey, Flamini,
Oxlade-Chamberlain, Ozil, Walcott
Giroud
Subs: Ospina, Gabriel, Gibbs, Chambers, Campbell, Iwobi, Reine-Adelaide.
The visitors today have plenty of injury problems of their own to deal with but they have been coping fairly well of late and Steve McLaren has got them playing a lot better and being much harder to beat than they were at the start of the season.
They have beaten both Liverpool and the spuds in the last month but as long as we do not see the Arsenal that turned up in Southampton, will the Gunners be staying on top of the league this weekend?