Arsenal vs. Sutton United – FA Cup Fifth Round — David vs Goliath?

Arsenal will be travelling to Borough Sports Ground, in order to play against fifth league side, Sutton United.

There isn’t much to say about this fixture, to be completely honest. Sutton United come off a huge upset against Leeds United, a game in which Sutton beat the former English champions 1-0. The man question here is this — can the hosts recreate magic? The normal spectator will immediately disagree to any who say that yes, Sutton are capable of upsetting against one of the biggest clubs in English football. And that said spectator is right, it is very unlikely that Sutton will make any sort of upset against the London giants.

For Sutton, this game will either go down or history, or will be another expected result. The hosts will either have a match that will forever be enshrined in the club’s history, or they will exit the FA Cup after a match against a 3-time Premier League champion. For Arsenal, this game is an opportunity for fans and club alike to field out younger players, who don’t get as many minutes as they usually do. Rob Holding is one of those names (despite having some Premier League minutes under his belt), as well as some of the younger players in the squad — Jeff Reine-Adelaide, Ainsley Maitland-Niles and perhaps even Christopher Willock. Emiliano Martinez is also set to start in goal for the Gunners, seeing that the likes of Petr Cech or even David Ospina will probably have little to no action in goal. Wenger will still probably field some first team players — Kieran Gibbs can get a start, Carl Jenkinson can be deployed at the right-back role and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain can start again as a central midfielder – a position which he’s been able to fill superbly over his past few starts.

All-in-all, the odds for an upset here are very unlikely. But then again, the Arsenal squad can look very different to what it looks like on a weekly basis in the highest tier of English football. Nonetheless, Sutton fans can look forward to a (hopefully) entertaining 90 minutes of FA Cup action.