Manchester City will be big test of Arsenal's title credentials with another new midfield

When does Leicester City’s thrilling, unprecedented and completely counter-intuitive assault on the Premier League start to resemble a genuine title challenge? Not yet, according to the bookmakers, who still have the current table-toppers at 20/1 to pull off the most audacious trophy win in English football history.

They are right to do so. Leicester’s form is exceptional and is changing the dynamic of the Premier League in ways once thought impossible, but the table flatters the Foxes. A glance instead at the fixture list tellingly reveals Leicester still have to visit Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham and Everton.

Their favourable fixtures have been front-loaded this season, but by February 13, Leicester will have made all of those tricky away trips bar their visit to Stamford Bridge, which comes on the final day of the season, and Old Trafford. It is not unreasonable to assume that a hugely difficult winter will cause a fall in Leicester’s standing. In which case the question will be: which team are best placed to take advantage?

Arsenal, currently lurking two points behind Claudio Ranieri’s pole-sitters, are on the front row of the grid at present. If they can win at home to Manchester City on Monday night, it will only reinforce their status as the leading title contenders, if we remove the outliers of Leicester from the equation. Beat City, and they will have a four-point cushion over the current bookies’ favourites to lift the title.

It would also reinforce, and indeed secure for certain, their place at the top of another Premier League table – the form table for the calendar year of 2015. No prizes will be handed out, but 36 matches is a good sample size and even if it doesn’t have any real relevancy in a football calendar defined by seasons, not years, Arsenal’s presence at the top of the list (seen below) demonstrates they have been the most consistent team at the top of the division over the past 12 months.

That they attained this level of consistency is no small part thanks to a reconfiguration seen in a fixture against City last January. Arsenal’s 2-0 win at the Etihad Stadium on January 18 owed much to the deployment of Santi Cazorla alongside Francis Coquelin in midfield. Cazorla scored the opener from the penalty spot but more impressive was his effectiveness in winning the ball and launching intelligent counter-attacks for a team which had managed to lose that weapon from their arsenal.

Arsenal won 11 of their next 13 games and the Cazorla-Coquelin axis swept them into the Champions League and to FA Cup glory. Arsenal, rather more through luck than design given Coquelin had only been recalled from a loan at Charlton due to an injury crisis, stumbled across a balanced and effective midfield partnership. Wenger strangely broke it up on the opening day of this season as Aaron Ramsey pushed Cazorla to the wing, but the mistake was rectified at half-time of a 2-0 loss to West Ham and Wenger stopped meddling.

As Arsenal approach another showdown with City, however, they do so with neither part of the Cazorla-Coquelin partnership in place. The former has been lost to a knee injury for up to four months, the latter around three for the same reason. If Arsenal are to maintain their title challenge over the winter months, they will have to rely on a new midfield solution.

Ramsey has taken on the deep playmaking duties from Cazorla, moving in from the flank as the Spaniard did a year ago, while Coquelin’s more agricultural responsibilities have been handed over to Mathieu Flamini, who like his young compatriot could well have left the club prior to his unexpected first-team opening.

The early results have been encouraging: a 3-1 win over Sunderland, a 3-0 win at Olympiacos and a 2-0 win away at Aston Villa. But facing City will be another test entirely. Is Flamini mobile enough? Does Ramsey have the discipline to retain control against top-class opposition?

It is a question that no less an expert than Frank Lampard has been asking. "Ramsey has to change his game and think about the defensive side of his game," Lampard said on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football. "With Ozil playing so well he knows he's not going to get that No.10 role, so he'll have to drop deeper. At the moment he doesn’t yet have the ability to play in the midfield two.

"I love him as a player, very bright and very clever but you can see by the way he's running back he doesn’t really want to do it. Ramsey has to see that Ozil is the No.10 and drop back in. It's alright playing like he does when you're playing the lesser teams, but when you’re playing top teams you need to be more secure.”

Taking on their most immediate title rivals (sorry, Leicester) is the best environment to test such a hypothesis. Just as last January’s trip to the Etihad was the making of Cazorla and Coquelin, Monday’s home game against City should establish whether Arsenal’s latest makeshift midfield, thrown together due to circumstances beyond their control once again, is good enough to sustain their form of the past 12 months and support a title challenge into the winter and beyond.