The key Arsenal players for me could be the two who clashed in the draw with Tottenham on Saturday. We missed Emmanuel Eboue badly till he came on for Senderos. While Johan Djourou looks good defensively at right back, he doesn't yet carry the attacking threat that Eboue does, especially when combining with Alexander Hleb on the right wing. If Eboue is fit after that errr debilitating injury picked up off of Gilberto, then his ability to get forward as well as defend will make a big difference. We want to be pinned back defending for as little of the game as possible (for the sake of our hearts as well as the result).

Gilberto is the other key man. If he can keep Riquelme as quiet as he did in the first leg, then we should be halfway there.

Hleb will surely return on the right of midfield, and it'd be very surprising if Jose Antonio Reyes didn't start on the left. That'd leave one place for either Robert Pires or Freddie Ljungberg, playing a roaming attacking midfield role in support of Thierry Henry For me it's a toss-up, but I imagine that Arsene Wenger's thoughts will veer towards Bobby. While Freddie's more than happy in the role (which he's played for Sweden so many times, as well as for us), Wenger's used Bobby there more often this year. And Freddie's been carrying an injury this season, needing his foot to be drained after it swells up at the end of every game. "I play with a lot of pain, but sometimes as a footballer you have to do that. It's a lot of pain in the foot when I twist or turn. The foot swells and fills up with blood and we have to 'tap out' after every match. It's painful but the pain is not so bad that I cannot play, but of course it's not good. I feel pain maybe 10 times during a match but that's pain I am willing to take."

Of course, if Freddie starts instead of Bobby, tongues will inevitably wag about the latter's job offer from our opponents. Ignore it, they'll be wagging anyway. The same goes for the Gael Clichy and Ashley Cole. Clichy is in the squad but Cole isn't. Oooooh, what could this mean?, I hear people asking. It means that Wenger knows he doesn't need them both on the bench (Mathieu Flamini starts at left-back, and we have other options for the left wing) and he's more confident about Clichy's fitness than he is about Cole's. End of.

Villarreal will be without their experienced Italian defender Tacchinardi, because of the booking he picked up in the first leg. They rested 10 players in the league match at the weekend (but unlike Arsenal, they had nothing to play for). That includes striker Jose Mari who had a minor injury from the Arsenal game, but who's thought to be fit for tonight.

They're also still without central defensive duo Gonzalez and Pena, but it has to be said that their replacements at Highbury (skipper Quique Alvarez and defensive midfielder Cesar Arzo) did pretty well. I think their first choice keeper and former Arsenal target Sebastien Viera returns from a ban.

Many pundits are saying that the home side will need to attack tonight, and that this will gift Arsenal the space they need for the away goal which would count for so much. This includes Thierry Henry who's said "What I think might suit us is that they will have to come out and attack more than they did at Highbury". But Villarreal will know that this would suit us and anyway it doesn't seem to be their way. They've scraped through to this stage with strong defensive performances, and have only won 3 of their 11 Champs League games (compared to Arsenal's 8). Often they've only scraped through towards the end of the tie. So I can see them sitting back a bit, at least to start with, flooding the midfield to try to stifle Arsenal and hit us on the break through their pacy strikers and Riquelme's "quarterbacking". They know as well as we do that the first goal tonight is everything. We get it, and they've got one hell of a mountain to climb. They get it, and Arsenal could start to feel the pressure. But it won't matter to them when they get it. It's going to be like 90 minutes of "Golden Goal" play, and coule hardly be more nerve-wracking.