🕟 Kick Off: 19:45 GMT

📍 Location: Deepdale Stadium, Preston

📺 UK Broadcaster: Sky Sports

🙎🏻‍♂️ Referee: Peter Bankes

🔴 Arsenal Team News:

• Neto is cup tied for EFL Cup games.
• Gabriel was forced off with a knee injury against Liverpool and will miss this game.
• Calafiori will likely be unavailable after picking up a knee injury against Shakhtar Donetsk. His condition is unknown.
• Ødegaard (ankle), Tomiyasu (knee), and Tierney (thigh) remain absent with longer term injuries.

⚽ Arsenal Form: 🟧🟩🟥🟩🟩

🐑 Preston Team News:

• Evans, Bauer, Brady, and Keane will miss the game with various injuries.

⚽ Preston Form: 🟧🟧🟩🟧🟩

⚔️ Head-to-Head:

• Preston 1-2 Arsenal (7th Jan 2017, FA Cup)
• Preston 2-0 Arsenal (29th Aug 1960, First Division)
• Arsenal 1-0 Preston (22nd Aug, 1960, First Division)

📖 Match Facts:

• Deepdale Stadium is often regarded as the oldest continuously used football stadium in the world, opening its doors in 1875.
• Preston North End and Arsenal FC are the only two clubs in history to complete a season of top flight English football without losing a single league game, with Preston achieving the feat in the 1888/89 season; Arsenal slightly more recently in the 2003/04 Premier League season.

🎲 Odds (bet365):

• Preston – 9/1
• Draw – 11/2
• Arsenal – 1/4

✍🏼 Pre-Match Ramblings

Whilst researching for this game I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole of history. I won’t bore you with it, but an interesting point is that the year that PNE went unbeaten in the old (very old) Football League – it’s first ever year – was the same year that Jack the Ripper killed his five victims. There is obviously no correlation between the two events (unless?), but as a bit of an Ripperologist, the year stood out to me.

Anyway, you can expect a lot of rotation for this game from Arsenal. I expect Miles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri to start, with the former seemingly above Zinchenko in the left-back pecking order as of late, with the Ukrainian international being snubbed as a substitute against Liverpool in favour of the 18 year old Englishman. You can probably expect a start for Kiwior, Jesus, Sterling, and Jorginho as well.

It’s odd that Arsenal have only won the League Cup twice in their history, compared to 14 FA Cups. We’ve won so many FA Cups that sometimes one mistakes the competitions (if you think you saw this post before, no you didn’t). If a team like Manchester United can win the trophy in even their poorest of seasons, then we can certainly strive to win it in one of our strongest.