Morning all,

Last night I was on LoveSport Radio talking about the World Cup and a bit of The Arsenal with Giles and Dave talking about the World Cup, country and western music and everything in between and as appears to be becoming a habit when we go on these shows, David Ornstein dropped another bomb on Arsenal fans by confirming that Torreira is very much in Arsenal’s plan and they are currently in stages of negotiating his transfer.

This works on many levels as I’ve already said: price, age profile, position of player, type of player and has already got many of us speculating on who our starting midfield might be next season.

Torreira even comes from the land of sh*thousery and we’ll see Uruguay up against Egypt on Friday lunchtime and if things move as we’d expect them to in the next couple of days, we could be looking at a game that suddenly takes more interest than whether Suarez will take a chunk out of anybody, or whether Mohammed Elneny looks any different for his national team other than a five yard passer of the ball.

Of course we can start talking like this because of the Ornacle, who’s words are usually followed by actions from the club and who doesn’t put messages out there unless he’s pretty much got it nailed on. His involvement is tantamount to taking it as ‘done’ and whilst we can never be 100% sure, I’m looking forward to see if Torreira takes up Coquelin’s number.

But as one of the Wayans brothers said on the first Scary Movie “But wait! There’s more! And this one’s gonna be a screamer!” And we were also treated to multiple sources claiming Leverkusen ‘keeper Bernd Leno to Arsenal. Ornstein has said Arsenal are working on a ‘keeper and it appears as though the German is our man.

I’m not 100% sure about this one though because there are many conflicting reports about him from plenty of people who watch more of the Bundesliga than I do. There seems to be just as many saying he’s a good signing as there are saying that in a league full of good ‘keepers, he’s one of the poorer ones, with a stat going around last night stating that only one other ‘keeper had made more mistakes last season (Oliver Baumann) than any other.

Given our history with ‘keepers and their ricks that hardly fills one with too much excitement. He’s 26 which is the right sort of age profile and apparently he’s good at saving penalties – which would be a nice change for us – but in a season where Cech’s decline has been very noticeable at times, you’ll forgive me for hoping that we’d be going a little more radical. If Leno was 21 then you’d say he has a nice big arc for improvement and at 26 it could be that he hits his prime if he signs with us, but our track record suggests it might not be the case.

The up side is that he won’t be ruined by the archaic “put the cones out and take shots at the ‘keeper” approach of the Arsenal goalkeeping coach team and hopefully the newly assembled backroom staff can contribute towards improvements rather than decline. We’ll see on that one.

I think it almost certainly means Ospina is gone and so what we all have to wish for is a good World Cup so we can add a few extra mil to his price tag.

The only other bit of news doing the rounds is Freddie coming back into the coaching staff. Good news. The guy is a legend at the club and will bring more of an Arsenal identity to the coaching staff at a time in which the broom appears to have been sweeping a lot of the old guard out.

That’s yer lot for today. Our show last night will be up as a podcast on the LoveSport website if you want to listen so head yourself over here to get your download.

Laters.