Only Ben White and Martin Odegaard retained their places in the starting lineup as Arteta took the opportunity to rotate his squad against League 1 Sunderland. The Black Cats are as of today 43 places back of the Gunners in the ladder of English football, and were massive underdogs. To their credit, they played an open game rather than bunkering in, and the match was a free flowing one with plenty of goals. Fortunately, most of those goals were Arsenal's. Eddie Nketieh took the opportunity to impress suitors (he's a free agent this summer) by scoring three times, all nice goals but two of them superb. We were just too much for our third division visitors, though the 5000 exuberant fans that traveled from the Northeast got some reward when Sunderland capped a lightning counter with an elegant finish to bring them within a goal just before the half. Sadly for the traveling supporters, it was all Arsenal in the second half. Our 18 year old debutant Charlie Patino got a goal in his 12 minutes as a late substitute. That was nice to see. One more starlet in the academy pipeline. Our semifinal opponent will emerge from tomorrow's fixtures:
There will be no more easy games in this competition. We've beaten three of those teams and lost to the other three in the league. I imagine the draw will take place Thursday. There's talk of making the semis a single game rather than the two-legged affair they've been doing recently, and that suits me fine.
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