Yo, how goes it, on this fine Monday? Well, it’s fine in England because we have a bank holiday and in my part of the world the sun is shining.

It’s also shining in the world of Arsenal. We’re still able to bask in the warming glow of three points and after the manager confirmed Mustafi and Perez, the German has spoken about how Mesut helped to convince him to join the club. it’s quite well known that Mustafi and Özil are really good mates, so the fact that Mes has another countryman with him is good. He may have lost himself a Flamini to play with, but Arsène has spent a lot of money on a new playmate, so that can only be a good thing for his happiness. A happy and in-form Özil is a thing of beauty to see on the football pitch.

Hopefully it can help to convince him to sign a new deal. That’s where our focus off the pitch now needs to turn to. We’ve augmented the team with enough bodies, some will need to go out of the club, but we need to get our two marquee signings from summers past to sign on the dotted line. Alexis and Özil Were so good at the weekend. Their movement, quick interchanges of possession and wavelength seemed to be spot on, and at halftime on Saturday I almost felt a little bit disappointed that we had only scored three goals. We need to get both of those players on new deals. Like, now.

I hope they do. Özil just lifts the entire team about 10% when he plays. At times he looks a class above anyone else on the pitch and from a personal point of view, I find him majestic to watch, as he glides over the pitch. On Saturday he got a good goal from running in to the box from deep, but his floating across the pitch enabled his teammates to get more space too. There’s never really enough made of that in post match analysis, I don’t think, because the emphasis is always on end product. But there should be. Drifting to a touch line and bringing two defensive midfielders for you, so Xhaka can just saunter forward, that’s clever. But it opens up space for someone like him to pick a pass for a forward player. Or for a player like Alexis to drop deeper to collect the ball, without having two or three players tracking him. I hope to see more of this pulling teams around structurally this season and I’m hoping what we saw on Saturday against Watford is merely the beginning of some great games to watch (and win) this season. 

So anyway, as I was saying, we’ve got the Mustafi and Perez formal announcements to be made and hopefully the club are just putting the finishing touches on the pictures and hashtags to announce the two deals. I’d expect we might get something this afternoon, but we might have to wait and see, because it’s a bank holiday and the staff at the club might all be taking a deserved day off. So no pictures, players-in-kit shots, or anything like that until Tuesday. I’m kind of ok with it though, to be fair, because we’re just about to plough head first in to another international break. Nobody wants to see that.

Well, almost nobody, because I’m sure Theo’s pretty chuffed that he’s back in to the squad. He’ll be disappointed from the summer but if he uses that as motivation, as well as retaining his place in the Arsenal team by scoring goals, making assists and generally playing well and not going missing in games, then we’ll all benefit by seeing somebody who can be very prolific, which is all anyone has ever wanted.

Right, that’s it from me today, I have to go and eat some pig.