THE EASY SELL for Arsenal against Manchester City this afternoon is the performance of Declan Rice.
That is where the spotlight will be shining and, most likely, the focus of Sky Sports’ pre-game montages.
No surprise, really, considering last season’s top two went head-to-head for his signature over the summer.
But it was a transfer tug-of-war that always felt as though Arsenal had a far tighter grip, yet City still seemed in control.
Former England women’s international Eni Aluko, who later became sporting director at Aston Villa in the Women’s Super League before heading to Angel City FC in Los Angeles, suggested there was something bigger at play with the manner of the protracted negotiations.
“I think there’s a lot of cat and mouse going on here,” she said on UK radio station TalkSport. “As a sporting director I used to do this a lot. I used to call up a club, a big club, and say, ‘right can you put a bid in’ and that would basically force my owner to put a higher bid in.
“I don’t think Manchester City actually want to sign Declan Rice, I think what’s going on is [Mikel] Arteta has picked up the phone to Pep [Guardiola] and said ‘listen, Arsenal are going to do the incremental bid approach, if you put a higher bid in, that will push my owner’.”
Aluko was derided by some for putting her head above the parapet and providing insight from her own experiences of what can be bubbling beneath the surface.
City came to the table late, pushing as far as £90 million for Rice before Arsenal eventually broke the £100m barrier. The Premier League champions swiftly announced they were dropping out of the running and all of a sudden Aluko’s reasoning didn’t seem so outlandish.
Rice’s arrival at Arsenal was viewed, from the outside at least, as one that could be transformative for ambitions that were so nearly realised during the title race the season before.
For City it would have been simply another transaction to maintain their dominance, and Guardiola confirmed with subtle brutality earlier this week his own thought process regarding a player he had earmarked as merely an understudy.
“Everyone knows we wanted him (Rice), we could play him when Rodri could not play,” the Catalan said, which meant he would have started for City this afternoon given the Champions League final goal scorer has one game remaining on a three-match ban.
“But in the end Arsenal pushed more,” Guardiola continued.
“Maybe Mikel [Arteta] was more convincing than me, or the club itself. The offer they got we could not reach it because we thought about Josko Gvardiol in that position and we could not afford to pay that much. That is why.
“Normally when City spend this amount of money it is crazy. When others spend it, then it is how smart they are. That happens. But I am not denying anyone can do whatever they want. I never judge what the others do.”
Rice, and how far he can help take Arsenal in the title race this season, will be judged after 90 minutes at the Emirates Stadium this afternoon.
Rodri is out, Kevin De Bruyne is still injured and John Stones remains sidelined.
Vulnerability must be seized upon, especially as it will be Arsenal who stand to benefit most in the long run.
This is not just set up for Rice to show he is capable of dominating a game of such significance, but their midfield as a whole must function in a way that delivers the control necessary to win and end one of the remaining mental blocks of the Arteta era.
He hasn’t beaten his mentor in the Premier League – losing 12 on the bounce – and the Gunners haven’t earned a draw against City since 2015 when Arsene Wenger was in charge.
Ending that sequence by any means necessary seems of far greater significance than the performance of one player.
