Thomas Frank adopted a light-hearted tone when asked to preview one of the Premier League’s most heated fixtures. He made clear he had no intention of inflaming the rivalry ahead of the clash at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday afternoon and admitted he does not relish the chaos these matches can produce.<\/p>\n
“The interesting thing is that probably both Mikel [Arteta, Arsenal manager] and I would like a little bit more control, but it will probably be a madhouse and very, very enjoyable to watch for the outside people or fans,” Frank said, before adding a warning about the unpredictability of the fixture: “I expect a difficult game of course, but a game that can go anywhere and anything can happen in games like that. Everything also evens out a little bit more because it\u2019s so competitive and the atmosphere in the stadium.”<\/p>\n
Frank used humour to defuse emotion in the room. He was reminded that his first Premier League match as a manager was a 2\u20130 victory over Arsenal four years ago, and that only four players from that game will be involved against Spurs this weekend. With a grin he interrupted to say: “And two of them are now traitors and moved to the wrong club,” a reference to Raya and N\u00f8rgaard.<\/p>\n
When the subject turned to Eze and the late transfer developments, Frank kept his tone playful. Asked about the player, he replied: “Who\u2019s Eze?” before conceding, “Very good player,” and adding, “He plays for Arsenal. A team we want to beat on Sunday.”<\/p>\n
On speaking of opponents, Frank was clear about his focus. “I really like to speak about players who are here,” he said. “The only other two I will speak about are [Lionel] Messi and [Cristiano] Ronaldo.”<\/p>\n
The background to the Eze move featured in the briefing: after terms with Tottenham had been agreed this summer, it was a last-ditch phone call from Eze to Arteta which helped force through a move to his boyhood club. Eze said he was “prepared to go to Tottenham” only to make a late switch, and Arteta added, “My feeling when I spoke to him was that he wanted to join.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thomas Frank kept things light ahead of the North London derby, mixing humour with measured caution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4645,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,187],"tags":[606,1215],"class_list":["post-4646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-tottenham-hotspur","tag-christian-norgaard","tag-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}