Hello and welcome to Telegraph Sport’s live, minute-by-minute coverage of Arsenal v Newcastle at the Emirates. Let’s start with a moment of sympathy for Peter Bankes and Lee Betts, who are on VAR duty tonight. Given what happened in the return fixture – “it’s embarrassing, it’s a disgrace” – they’ll do well not to quintuple-guess every single decision they make.
Although Mikel Arteta’s fury was with the people of Stockley Park rather than St James’, the match was ill-tempered even before Newcastle’s controversial winning goal. There is a burgeoning feud between these two teams, who both fancy clambering atop Manchester City’s perch. With this also being a night game, there should be a cracking atmosphere.
Arteta said yesterday that refereeing standards have improved since his rant, though he was too modest to highlight the correlation. “Well that is what we all wanted – for decisions to be better,” he said. “The last stats that came across show that there was a significant improvement and they were getting a lot of the decisions right. Hopefully that continues.
“I talked the way I felt. I was very straight and I did it in a way that was pretty strong but within the law. I didn’t get charged for it and I think that tells the story.”
Arsenal have had a few news cycles since St James’ Park. They won the next six games, then lost at Villa Park to start an increasingly miserable run of one win in seven. At the turn of the year, Arsenal held the Premier League Crisis Baton, which is passed each week to the team that a hysterical media deems to be in crisis.
If Arsenal didn’t sign a striker, we were told, they were done for in the title race. Since then, without signing anybody, they’ve won all five Premier League games and scored 21 goals. What does it all mean?
Arsenal remain third, but they have some very winnable fixtures ahead of the huge one at the Etihad on 31 March: Newcastle (H), Sheff Utd (A), Brentford (H), Chelsea (H). They’ll quietly fancy taking all 12 points, which means only one result will do tonight.
Kick off is at 8pm, and we’ll have team news shortly.