Unai Emery accepts that Arsenal’s hopes of qualifying for the Champions League via Premier League position will be over if they lose to Chelsea at Emirates Stadium on Saturday.
The Arsenal manager continues to lament last Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at West Ham – his team’s third loss in six league games – and =it has set up what feels to him like a showdown. Another reverse could leave Arsenal nine points off the top four by the end of the weekend, with Tottenham playing at Fulham on Sunday.
Arsenal do remain alive in the Europa League, where they have been drawn to face Bate Borisov in the last 32 next month. The winners of the competition are rewarded with a place in next season’s Champions League.
Emery was asked whether nine points to the top four would be too much of a gap. “I think yes,” he replied. “After our loss to West Ham, it is a big difference to be six points behind Chelsea instead of three points. The opportunity we now have against Chelsea is not the same but, if we win, we have the opportunity to be closer to them.”
Emery knows where Chelsea’s principal threat will come from. When he was at Paris St-Germain, the French club were linked with a move for Eden Hazard and Emery puts the Chelsea winger among the very best in the game.
“With a player like Hazard, usually all of the big teams in the world will think about the possibility of trying to sign them,” Emery said. “He is in the top five players in the world. He has been the difference in a lot of matches.”
Emery has switched between back three and back four systems and he believes that it shows a richness to his options. “I think the best possibility for us when we can’t control the match like we want is to sometimes use three centre-backs,” he said. “But at other moments, we need to play with full-backs because we need to control a different situation, with more players in the midfield.”