Yet again, on paper, Arsenal are far and away the hot favourites to beat a Sunderland team that have not won one single game all season so far, but, like Middlesbrough last week, that is the reason why Petr Cech thinks we should fear them!
“I think they should have more points than they have so far, because they had games where they lost in the last minute and dropped a lot of points in the last five minutes of games,” Cech said.
“But during those games they have been doing much better than it shows in the table. This season everything is really tight so the small details make a big difference and for them it has made a big difference in terms of their number of points.
“You have to be performing every single game and you have to be on top of the game if you want to win it, so we treat everybody with respect.
“It’s obviously to Sunderland’s advantage that they play a top team. They have nothing to lose, maybe everybody is saying they’re going to lose, but when you are in a position like this you just do your best.
“You don’t have much pressure, so obviously it will be very difficult against them.”
The new manager David Moyes hasn’t had much luck so far, but you can never discount a bit of improvement after a while, so I agree the Gunners need to always respect every opponent in the Premier League. Did we do that against Middlesbrough last week? Petr thinks he knows what the problem was….
“After the defeat in the first game against Liverpool, obviously we had to bounce back and I think we’ve done the right thing,” he said. “We’ve bounced back with good performances, we kept winning games and obviously we have had a long, very positive run in all competitions.
“We try to use that to our advantage and we want to prolong that but I thought on Saturday against Middlesbrough, they played really well. That was the first thing, and the second thing was that I thought we rushed a little bit in the final third.
“We put the final balls in too early and we could have kept our cool a little bit to find the right pass in the right time. But I think we have to give credit to our opponent as well because they were very well organised, very dangerous on the counter-attack and they made it difficult for us.”
We can be sure that Sunderland will also make it difficult tomorrow. There is no room for complacency in any game and our players need to remember that. Every point could be important at the end of the season….
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