Pre-season friendly preview: Arsenal vs. Manchester City

Manchester City’s Manuel Pellegrini speaks during a press conference on August 9, 2013. City and Arsenal play their last pre-season match at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium on August 10. (Getty Images)

A quick tid-bit of distraction is on offer Saturday as we travel to Helsinki to face Manchester City in one final tune-up before the Premier League season begins in earnest on August 17 vs. Aston Villa. Ordinarily, I could care less about such a friendly, but it increasingly looks like we will go into the upcoming season under one of three approaches:

1. Sign Suarez and no one else of note.
2. Sign a few players of varying degrees of quality.
3. Sign no one.

Of the three, I’m not sure which one appeals to me the most. It’s more a question of which one disappoints me least. On that level, option #2 wins by a nose, if only because we have more than one area that needs strengthening.

However, given that the match with City is hours away, I daresay we’ll go into the match with a batch of very familiar names, minus one Ignasi Miquel, who for some reason has completed a season-long loan to Leicester. We apparently have a plethora of defenders, making Miquel entirely expendable.

In all seriousness, this is on one hand a preseason friendly that offers all of the intensity of chamomile tea served at room temperature; on the other, it’s one more chance for Arsene Wenger to suggest, if only to the Gooner faithful, that we are serious contenders for the title, if not a top-four finish.

There was, after all, a point during last season’s run-in when it looked like we might overtake City, but that hope faded. Instead, we have to look at the possibility that a revamped City squad under new management might be ripe for a drubbing.

After all, we’ve lost (or lost out on) a few players to them over the years, whether it’s Gael Clichy or Samir Nasri or Stevan Jovetic, and as such, part of what we’ll see on Saturday will feel a bit like looking in the mirror.

How much more confident might we feel if Clichy were available to play left-back? Would Jovetic have been a solution to our centre-forward dilemma? Manuel Pellegrini continues to size up his options, so we’ll probably see a fair number of unfamiliar faces as well, whether this is Jovetic or Fernandinho or Alvaro Negredo.

Put simply, the contrast between City and Arsenal has been stark, as they’ve managed a number of high-profile signings (Jovetic, Negredo, Fernandinho and Jesus Navas) against our one (Yaya Sanogo). They’ve also shed a few key players (Carlos Tevez, Kolo Toure, Maicon) to match our clear-out (Sebastien Squillaci, Andrei Arshavin, among a few others).

With these factors in mind, the outcome of the match itself matters a little less to this correspondent than does the difference in approaches.

While I’m not clamouring for a deep-pocketed sponsor to simply bankroll the club to glory, it is worth noting that City have shown ambition and acumen in the transfer-window, signing not one but two centre-forwards for somewhere in the realm of £45m, while we at Arsenal flounder on in hopes of signing one centre-forward at a price still to be determined (and at a value still in contention).

Therefore, without making too much of a mountain out of this molehill of a match, I do hope we see our first-team players run circles around theirs, if only to temporarily suggest if not prove that we can compete for a top-four finish. For City, this is one last tune-up to see how new players can coalesce with the old guard.

For Arsenal, this is more of a toss-up. Some have suggested that an embarrassing loss might shake Wenger and the board into some last-minute signings. Others have proposed that we have enough quality, don’t need to sign anyone, and just need a bit of seasoning to see the current squad realise its potential.

I tend to lean towards the latter camp, if only because I feel like I have to. We’ll see what happens while reminding ourselves that (should we fall behind) it’s just a friendly or that (should we stake an early lead) this is for all the marbles. It’s a win-win situation. Isn’t it?