I don’t think it will be easy as nothing is really easy for us, I’m just saying we should be expected to come through over 2 legs and it’s failure if we don’t.
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But why should it be expected? The way you’re talking it’s as if we’re way better than these teams, looking down on them like they are peasants. The gulf between us and some of these teams isn’t that big – especially this season. We’ll have no Auba in this competition either.
Hopefully we’ll get the luck of the draw.
It should be expected because we have a wage bill that is probably double these clubs, hence we should progress.
Yeah no Aubameyang is a body blow and we are now relying on Lacazette, though he’s had a good record for Lyon in the Europa League.
I’m not dismissing any teams to be honest, I’m just not throwing us under the bus quite yet.
Anything is possible in knockout competition and I’m not going to immediately write us off even though I recognise and respect our competitors that’s all.
I’m not saying we’re going to be bulldozing anyone, but I don’t think for a second we’ll rollover for the likes of Lazio, Milan, Atletico or Marseille like we have done to Bayern in the past.
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Napoli are not gonna care about the cup. They desperately want to the title in Italy.
I feel like you are overstating the case here. People are reasonably saying that we should be able to beat sides like Lazio, Marseille and Milan. We have aspirations of being in the CL, we’re a very wealthy club with some very expensive players, theres nothing unreasonable about thinking we should be beating clubs of that calibre (note: Milan are obviously a massive club but in their current guise…)
Nobody is saying it’s a foregone conclusion, we are all aware that we could run into serious difficulty, people are just saying that we should be competent enough to prevail.
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I’m not writing us off. I said I think we’ll be favourites against most opposition. I don’t mean you here but things like this have been said in this thread, “if we can’t even beat them we don’t deserve CL football…” as if the teams are in the third division or something. These are teams who will have Champions League football next season.
You just said it yourself, anything is possible – including us getting beat by a team considered worse than us.
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No, it’s as if those teams are in a second tier European competition.
There’s validity to that sentence you have quoted. If we can’t progress against a Marseille or Lazio then who would hold out hope for us against what is generally a better standard of team in the CL?
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My point is these are Champions League level teams. They will more than likely be in the CL next season. Marseille yeah, we should be beating them. But Lazio - nah, with their attack and our defence I wouldn’t fancy our chances. Basically, all i’m saying is it’s not just Atletico we should be worried about getting drawn against.
Except they’re all in the Europa League this season because they were too inconsistent/not good enough to be in the Champions League…
I totally see what you’re getting at, I’m just not scared of any of these teams. I respect them and I won’t underestimate them, but I’m scored of them.
Agree mostly with @Phoebica line of thinking but having the two legs should allow the likes of Özil enough time to demonstrate our favourites tag. I think we’ll demolish Ostersund at home but after that I expect close ties
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Arsenal
Atletico
Lazio
Lyon
Zenit
For me.
That’s 5 clubs in alphabetical order. What is it you’re trying to tell us?
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I’d put Atletico ahead of us purely because of their recent European success. They’ve also improved a bit in the second part of the season so I’m expecting them to make a strong run in the Europa.
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Zenit Atletico and Lazio are the danger ties.
I hope Atletico focus on getting 2nd in the league and go out of the EL early.
The funny thing is costa actually destroyed Holding that game and it’s only the head pointing which completely rewrote what happened.
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Completely destroyed seems particularly hyperbolic to me, as I remember it we were pretty good defensively despite Costa scoring, especially considering how makeshift that defence was.
But I was in the ground for that one so I do find that that can distort my memory/reading of a game sometimes, particularly after a few pints.
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The favourites. It’s easy to understand 
It depends. If they beat Barca away next month they would be in the title race again so they could decide to focus on it.
In a game in which we dominated Chelsea for the most part Holding directly lost Costa on two occasions (that stick out in my memory) for the goal and again in the first half. The team played well but costa could of got something from that game of the back of Holding mistakes.
It’s just a small grieve of my mine that people used to big up holdings performances the back end of last season imo solely due to the fact we were picking up points and he was young. When in my opinion he was shaky af. Arnautovic had him on toast I remember as well.
So now every time someone brings up a past Holding performance I like to chime up like a miserable cunt.
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