We go to Brighton tonight having gone seven away league games without a defeat, sitting five points clear at the top of the table with nine games to play. Manchester City play their 29th league game tonight against Nottingham Forest and still have a game in hand against Crystal Palace without a confirmed date. If they win both, they close to within two points with the same number of games remaining. The arithmetic is manageable, but not comfortable enough to be treated casually. Pep Guardiola's side have been the benchmark for this league for the better part of a decade and they will not let this slip away quietly. We have navigated a Champions League group stage, two domestic cups, and an injury list that would have derailed most squads to get to this point. A five-point lead in March demands we go to the Amex and win tonight.

Arsenal have scored 22 of their 58 Premier League goals this season from dead-ball situations, three ahead of Newcastle United in second place. We have equalled the all-time Premier League record for goals scored from corners in a single season, with 16, and we still have eight league games to play after tonight. That record was built through Nicolas Jover's coaching, through Declan Rice's delivery, through movement patterns drilled until they are automatic under pressure.

Jover receives a performance bonus every time Arsenal score from a set piece, such is the emphasis Arteta places on dead-ball excellence as a deliberately coached weapon. Set pieces are the answer to a problem every top-flight manager in Europe is trying to solve: how do you score against a well-organised, deep-sitting defensive block that offers no space in behind and no gaps between the lines? You coach a corner routine until it becomes something the opposition cannot replicate or defend. Every manager in the country knows this, which is precisely why the complaints about it ring so hollow.

Arne Slot chose Monday as his moment to weigh in. Speaking ahead of Liverpool's game at Wolverhampton, he said: "Do I like it? My football heart doesn't like it. Now most of the games I see in the Premier League are not, for me, a joy to watch." He said this the day after Liverpool had scored three times from corners in a 5-2 win over West Ham United. Since the turn of the year, no Premier League team has scored more from set pieces than Liverpool. The audacity is genuinely impressive.

A manager whose side leads the league for set-piece goals since January, celebrating three corner goals in a single match on Saturday, then stepping in front of a microphone on Monday to lament what the game is becoming. Slot was not making a tactical observation. He was making a political one, and the target was obvious.

I have written about this pattern on this site at length. Arsenal score from corners and it is a symptom of a broken game. Liverpool score from corners and it is evidence of a team finding form. The coverage writes itself, every single time. Slot also pointed the finger at lenient English refereeing, arguing that physicality during corners goes unpunished in the Premier League compared to the Eredivisie, adding: "Here you can almost hit a goalkeeper in his face and it's play on." An interesting line from the manager of a side that has spent the season benefiting from exactly that.

Brighton's manager arrived at his pre-match press conference on Tuesday with the same script. Hurzeler called Arsenal "the best in the world at set-pieces" before arguing we take too long over corners when leading, saying: "Sometimes they spend one minute to take a corner if they are leading."

He called for clearer timekeeping rules and suggested the issue needed addressing at a structural level. According to Opta, Arsenal's average restart time from set pieces is 44.4 seconds, the longest in the division. Those 44 seconds are not cynical game management. They are the coordination time required to execute movement patterns and delivery precision that have produced 16 corner goals in a single season.

No team in world football runs a rehearsed set-piece routine in 20 seconds. The coaches calling for rule changes are not concerned with the aesthetics of the game. They are concerned with the scoreline. Hurzeler calling us the best in the world at something, the night before his team faces us at home, tells you everything about where his head is ahead of this match.

Brighton are 11th in the Premier League table and ended a five-game winless run with back-to-back victories over Brentford and Nottingham Forest. Hurzeler will present that as momentum building at exactly the right time. The Amex is a difficult ground, the crowd will be loud, and a home game against the league leaders is precisely the kind of occasion that can galvanise a mid-table side with European ambitions still flickering.

Welbeck, 35, has scored 10 goals this season and signed a new contract at the club last week. He will be highly motivated tonight, a former Arsenal player who knows this club intimately and understands exactly what scoring against us in front of his own supporters would mean. He is their most dangerous outlet from crosses into the box and our defensive shape needs to be alert to him from the opening minutes.

Hurzeler confirmed he expects to make changes to his starting eleven, with one or two players unlikely to have recovered sufficiently from the Forest game. Brighton have not beaten us at the Amex since Neal Maupay's 95th-minute winner during the pandemic restart in 2020, and the squad that inflicted that result bears almost no resemblance to the one that takes the field tonight.

Ben White has been ruled out and Merino remains unavailable after foot surgery, but the doubt that carries the most weight is Odegaard. Arteta said "we have to wait and see how comfortable he is to do certain actions," which suggests he is available but not fully trusted to go the full range of movements the role demands. Zubimendi has been excellent as the creative pivot in his absence, but Odegaard's ability to find pockets between the lines and combine in tight spaces is a different quality entirely, and on a night when we may need to unlock a deep Brighton block, that difference matters.

Arteta expressed real optimism about Rice ahead of the game: "I hope so. He was much better today. We haven't really trained because we have only two days to prepare the game." A fit Rice at the Amex means Rice standing over corners, deciding exactly how to hurt a Brighton side whose manager has spent two days telling the world how much those dead-ball situations concern him. On the partnership between Rice and Zubimendi, Arteta was unambiguous: "Yes. We always talk about these relationships and chemistry. There is one, and it's very strong off the field as well. That makes what happens on the field very, very special." A manager does not speak about a midfield pairing in those terms unless he has found something settled, reliable and worth protecting, and that partnership, fit and sharp, is one of our most important assets between now and May.

We have seen this squad's character all season — the team meeting after Wolves, the clinical response against Spurs, the grinding Chelsea win when we were far from our best and still found a way to three points — and what it consistently shows is a group that does not need perfect conditions to perform. Hurzeler has tried everything available to him to shift the psychological weight before kick-off, spending his press conference worrying about our corners rather than talking about his own team's strengths.

We go to the Amex tonight, seven away games unbeaten, with a five-point lead and the knowledge that winning here keeps this title race firmly in our hands. Hurzeler can keep talking about our corners. We will keep scoring from them.