Arsenal take on French champions Montpellier at home as they look to bounce back from back to back matches against German club Schalke where they lost five points against them and move closer to securing their progression into the next round of the competition for the 16 th straight season. Arsenal have been going through an extremely bad patch of form over the last couple of months after starting the season in blistering fashion.
The match against Manchester United at Old Trafford a couple of weeks back demonstrated just how poor this Arsenal team is, without any cutting edge in attack, in spite of the summer signings of play
maker Santi Cazorla and strikers Olivier Giroud and Lukas Podolski. It seems that Arsenal have still not gotten over the loss of talismanic striker Robin van Persie during the close season to rivals Manchester United and the way the Dutchman has been firing on all cylinders for the Old Trafford side, manager Arsene Wenger must be scratching his head for not trying hard enough to keep the striker at the Emirates Stadium.
Moreover, as always, this season also showed how frail Arsenal is defensively and even the reliable Thomas Vermaelen has been prone to making mistakes, for example the one that allowed van Persie to score the opener in United’s 2-1 victory over The Gunners. But what stunned Arsenal fans the most is the way the team completely surrendered to a mediocre Schalke team at home, losing 2-0 on match day three and then going 2-0 up within the first 20 minutes of the game to draw against the same opponents just a couple of weeks later in Germany.
It has to be remembered that after reaching the semi finals of the UEFA Champions League in 2011, Schalke missed out on playing in the competition altogether last season and although they are playing this season, they had to come through qualifying and for such a team to lead Arsenal in the group standings is a massive surprise.
However, Arsenal fans can be hopeful that their opponents for Wednesday night, French champions Montpellier have just one point on board after four matches and are as good as out from the competition and the North London side should look to getting a result at home so that they can secure their passage to the next round of the competition and not wait for the final match day.