What if we don't qualify?

As you'll all know by now, we've been handed a difficult tie to qualify for the Champions League this season, having been drawn against Udinese earlier today.

They finished 4th in Serie A last season, playing some good football, but recently sold their best player Alexis Sanchez to Barcelona. Sound almost like an Italian Arsenal, don't they?

As other blogs have pointed out, we stand to be without some key players for the first leg, as van Persie and Nasri will be suspended, Wilshere injured, and if Fabregas is still with us he might still be trying to engineer a move to Barca and will as such not want to be cup-tied in Europe.

For perhaps the first time in our bid to qualify for the Champions League, we face the very realistic possibility of crashing out before the proper thing even starts. It's almost impossible to imagine. Having messed up the top two finish that we should have achieved last season and crashing into 4th place, if Wenger fails from there to give us the Champions League football the club wants, will we see drama very early on this season?

We play the first leg at home on the 16th of August. This itself is a slight disadvantage in the tie. We could know by the end of this game if we're going to get knocked out. Would the board then force Wenger to spend big money before the dealine day of September the 1st? Or better yet, sack the manager and bring in one who can attract big names and make an ambitious squad?

OR...will Wenger move the goalposts AGAIN and say that the lack of extra fixtures in the Champions League will give us an opportunity to blood more youngsters in the Europa League, and focus more on domestic competitions? I wouldn't put it past him at all; last season, after bragging that we were the only club still in four competitions in February, he used our quickfire exit from three of those four to try and convince us that we would bring a stronger title challenge, with the league remaining our only focus. As we all know, things didn't quite work out that way.

Then again, maybe he'd be right. Maybe being knocked out early would make things easier on his squad, and not give them the false hope that they're actually good enough to win the competition.

I'm not hoping it happens, but it would certainly be different and interesting. There's always more to write about when things go wrong, isn't there?

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