Because of the way that he has begun his football career in the Premier League with a bang, Arsenal will certainly be looking at the Manchester United new boy Anthony Martial as one of the major dangers when Louis van Gaal and his players arrive at the Emirates stadium on Sunday.
And with Arsene Wenger having confirmed that our best defender Laurent Koscielny will miss the game with a hamstring injury, some Arsenal fans could be getting a bit worried. While I would love our French centre back to be available, there are reasons to believe that Gabriel and Per Mertesacker will be able to handle the young French forward.
A Sky Sports report explains how Martial´s success so far has come from his pace and dribbling skills, but in Gabriel we have the ideal player to counter this. Not only is the Brazilian being clocked as the fifth fastest centre back in the league, his speed is higher than Martial´s own.
Also, Gabriel is proving himself to be a great tackler and has yet to be dribbled past once this season. In fact, the Arsenal centre back has only been dribbled past once in his entire Premier League career so far, so the Man United youngster is likely to find his job a lot tougher on Sunday than it has been on previous games.
I know that you will be thinking here, what if he targets Mertesacker instead? Well pace is certainly an issue there, but when you look at the stats on Squawka.com between our three main centre backs, although Koscielny has the better total score and wins in many areas, the German has not lost a single tackle and wins more per game than Koscielny and almost as many as Gabriel. Our BFG has also won an amazing 90 percent of his EPL duels this season compared to around 60 percent for the other two.
So have Arsenal got the defence to cancel out the main attacking threat of Man United?