Gary Neville thinks Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice can win the crucial Premier League game against Manchester City for the Gunners on Sunday.
Arsenal are currently top of the Premier League after 32 matches as Mikel Arteta looks to guide them to their first title since 2003/04.
However, their chances have taken a bit of a knock in recent weeks with a 2-1 loss to Bournemouth last weekend allowing Manchester City back into the title race.
Man City have a game in hand on Arsenal, who are six points ahead, while they will also host the Gunners at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday.
Arsenal have won just one of their last five matches in all competitions, including a defeat to Man City in the Carabao Cup final, while they also exited the FA Cup to Southampton.
Rice has been in good form for most of the season for the Gunners and Neville has tipped the former West Ham star to step up on the big occasion at the weekend.
READ: Arsenal ’embarrassingly boring’ and Arteta destined for Rangers after sack as ‘brainless’ Rice slammed
Neville told The Overlap: “I do think Declan Rice is someone… When he went to Arsenal for £100 million, I was gutted. I think he’s a Manchester United player.
“He’s the player, Harry Kane, Declan Rice, that Manchester United would have always signed back in the day. You don’t let Declan Rice go to any other club.
“To me, on Sunday, he is the player I am looking at. This is not me putting pressure on him, by the way. This is me expecting that this is the Roy Keane moment, the Gerrard moment.”
Arsenal were held to a 0-0 draw against Sporting CP earlier this week as they scraped through to the Champions League semi-finals, thanks to a 1-0 first-leg win.
And now former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher has U-turned on a previous prediction by insisting that Arsenal don’t have the firepower to win the Champions League.
Carragher told CBS Sports: “I’m not sure they’ve got the quality in the attack.
“The game we just watched tonight, you think of the players on both teams, Arsenal don’t have that.
“It’s not a criticism, they just don’t have those players in attack, they haven’t.
“So, that’s why I think when you get to the business end of the season, certainly in the Champions League… even though I tipped Arsenal to win it, I just don’t believe it.
“I can’t see a team winning the Champions League who don’t have a star in the front four, and they haven’t got one.”
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Arsenal legend Thierry Henry wants to see “the fire” from the Gunners as they face Man City in their crucial clash against Pep Guardiola’s outfit on Sunday.
Henry told CBS Sports: “I want to see that fire at the Etihad.
“That’s what I want to see, it’s easy to talk, go there, at Man City, and deliver.
“I believe in what I see though, I believe in him Arteta, ‘the fire’, but when you talk like that you have to do it then. I didn’t see that tonight.
“We are through, so happy, semi-final, I never won it, but I won the league though, go and win at Man City, I want to see that fire there, I believe Mikel, yes, but show it.”
When asked how Arsenal should approach the match against City, Henry responded: “Not like tonight (Sporting), or against Bournemouth, or Brighton away, or Mansfield, or everything that I’ve seen this season.”
On whether the performance against Sporting would beat Man City, Henry replied: “The Man City I’ve seen recently? We’re talking about the team that won four in a row, Liverpool came in between that if not it would have been more.
“I do believe, I’ve been saying since the beginning of the season, this year I do believe we can win the league, this is the biggest chance in your life just to prove to yourself, as a team, that we can.
“And then people will not talk about the word they want to use that I do not want to use.
“I do believe personally but I am sitting in a chair for CBS, there’s nothing I can do. Now I heard ‘fire’, I want to see that fire at the Etihad.
“If you have the face of Declan Rice go back to that, at the end of the game I stayed with his face, you had a lot of guys smiling but his face… I don’t know, maybe I need to speak to him to know what he had in his head. This is a guy who just went through to the semi-final of the Champions League.
“There’s no positive or negative here. We are in a semi-final of a Champions League, well done, that didn’t happen a lot in history so obviously I’m over the moon. But City… I want the team to win there, not draw, statement.”
