Arsenal
AN UNCOMMON OPPONENT
Our summer season adversaries, to date, have all been acquainted and we’ll come up in opposition to every of Leeds United, West Ham United, Bournemouth and Everton on at the least one other two events between now and Might.
The identical can’t be stated for Fiorentina. 1 / 4 of a century has handed for the reason that Serie A outfit had been drawn in our UEFA Champions League group throughout the 1999/2000 season, and rather a lot has modified since then for each golf equipment.
United had been reigning European champions after we had been crushed 2-0 in Tuscany, a end result we avenged later within the marketing campaign with a 3-1 victory again at Outdated Trafford.
Fiorentina, in the meantime, truly ceased to exist inside a few years of these contests, being re-established within the fourth tier following monetary bother.
They made a swift return to Serie A in 2004 and have carried out solidly in most seasons since, with out ever fairly threatening to turn out to be the drive they had been within the late Nineteen Nineties, when the likes of Gabriel Batistuta and Manuel Rui Costa pulled on the enduring and crowd pleasing purple shirt.
