Here’s how things are looking at the One Call stadium. Kick-off is minutes away.
Arsenal: They’re the team people love to hate at the moment. The reliance on set pieces, the time-wasting, the foul-buying – things you’d associate more with Cup underdogs than the Premier League leaders. They certainly got under Fabian Hürzeler’s skin in midweek.
But Mikel Arteta knows what he’s doing and his approach has been hugely successful so far this season. But how will the Mansfield fans react to any dark arts today? David Hytner has been asking exactly that:
There is something else at play, a narrative that picked up further steam as Arsenal won at Brighton on Wednesday. The club have a target on their back, partly because of their dominance in every competition thus far, partly because of how they have achieved it. Everyone seems to be firing at it.
Mansfield have not been as far as the fifth round for 51 years, when they were beaten by Carlisle. Their record FA Cup run was in 1969 when they reached the quarter-finals, losing to Leicester. The 3-0 defeat of Bobby Moore’s West Ham in the fifth round that year is Mansfield’s proudest moment.
