FA Community Shield

How massive would three points be for them? Obviously, Liverpool are in very good form at the moment.

Arsenal have already beaten City in the Community Shield.

They've already beaten Chelsea.

Would this kind of rubber stamp them as, right, absolutely, we are the team to beat now?

Did you win trophies last season? We won three trophies, Kieran.

If you count the Community Shield as a trophy, which as it's bigger than the other two put together, I definitely do.

But it's strange that in modern football, you now have this new level of blame.

It's not the manager or the coach.

And the reason I'm not impressed is this.

They started the season in the Community Shield against, obviously, a great side, Arsenal, league champions, Champions League finalists, and lost 3-0.

They then went on a winning spree, 2-1 at home to Bournemouth, but they came from behind later on, 4-1 at Crystal Palace, 1-0 at home to Coventry, 2-0 at Porto, 1-0 at Manchester United, 5-0 at home to Norwich in the Carabao Cup.

5-3, conceding three at home to Sunderland in the league.

And apparently there was an assumption he would be coming with Brian Clough as well, which he didn't.

So the first game they had was the charity shield, but on his first day, and this has come up recently because of all of the Manchester city stuff, this has been memed hundreds of times.

So this is players that will come.

We'll have a bit more of a background of later on, but Billy Bremner, Johnny Giles, Norman Hunter, he said, they can all throw all the medals in the bin because they won them by cheating.

Oh, really? Again, he set himself an uphill battle, hasn't he? Let's put it that way.

Yeah, I think so.

And the first game was the 1974 Charity Shields.

Lee's lost on penalties, apparently.

look at some of those facts.

58% win rate, won three trophies, Europa League, League Cup and Community Shield trophies.

and came second in the league with United.

He said that was one of his best achievements.

On the corners and set pieces, have they been consciously trying to focus on other areas of the game? You talk about player movement.

We talked so much at the start of the season, we all watched that Charity Shield game and everyone was raving about this Arsenal 2.0. Gregor, last week you said after Forest, no, no, this is still going to be Mikel Arteta's...

He wanted

more midfield fluidity, which he's got, but they still struggle when teams sit back and say, try and break us down.

pounds or whatever it may be um but there have been a lot of games uh i mean they may deserve to win this game more than they deserve to win some of the games they have have won or drawn they've been a lot of basketball e5 three three two games i think i don't know if that's going to work out for them over the course of the season they're not going to um get a run of 38 straight wins and now that can't happen so that's good yeah i think a

lot i think a lot of um people me included were more surprised by the city thing off the basis of how incredibly easy and second gear it felt that arsenal were in when they smashed them in the community shield it felt like they would the the golf between the two teams was so big in that game that it just they didn't seem like realistic contenders but maybe me and others read a bit too much into that but i also do agree if anything i think they've been slightly worse than their points total up until this point and i'm not saying that this is now that leveling out because as you said i think they were better in this game than they were against bournemouth for example where i think they were very lucky to win um and maybe a couple of their other performances bsi what did you make of this one

Yeah, this Manchester City team are uninspiring.

The way they play is slightly predictable and boring.

I can see that.

I don't really get it.

I thought Trafford was excellent when we played them in the Community Shield, not Community Shield, the Carabao Cup final.

And he's made one mistake that I can think of so far this season.

Like...

Okay, yeah, he hasn't quite done it in a big game, but he's also scored in, was it the Community Shield, the Super Cup, and carried this team in relatively big games for a while.

Has he scored against Man City or Tottenham or whatever with regularity? No.

But I think that's a bit of a fake argument.