Howdy howdy fellow Gooners, hopefully you’re enjoying what has been of your Saturday so far. Can I make a bit of a confession? I seem to be one of the few people on the planet who finds the whole Iceland hand slapping chant a little bit awkward and uncomfortable, when done by anyone else other than the Icelandic’s? It just seems a little bit staged and I get that it’s supposed to be complimentary towards the chant, the in vogue thing for the Euro’s and lord knows, it’s better than those awful vuvuzelas that we had to put up with in South Africa in 2010, but come on guys, get your own chant.
I’m talking, of course, about the slightly cringe Welsh efforts to replicate what Iceland did in the Euro’s, although I do find it amusing that everybody seems to think this is where it originated. I’m pretty sure I saw one of the German sides come to the Emirates a few seasons back and replicate the same chant – I think it was Dortmund – so it’s not originated in Iceland. But for this Euro’s, to me it just feels like “their thing” and other countries replicating it should probably, y’know, just not.All of this preamble is of course because there’s still bugger all going on in the Arsenal world. Some people on Twitter were getting a bit worked up because an up-and-coming left back called Sidibe appears to be joining another club this summer, but I can’t personally get too worked up about that. Until somebody leaves, there’s really no point in getting angry at another player in a position for which we have cover, choosing to join somewhere else. The fact of the matter is that Arsenal shouldn’t, and I don’t think they will to be fair, offload a player like Gibbs if there isn’t another player already in at the club. So that effectively means that regardless of whether Gibbs wants to leave or not, we should hold all the cards. If we’re after a left back and we don’t get one, do you know what? I will be quite happy to keep Gibbs. He’s a good player who has only found himself down the pecking order because of injury, then the amazing form of Nacho. ~It’s not an area of the pitch we should be concerned with one way or another.

Up front, well, that’s another matter entirely, because I think we do need another player and even Arsene has admitted that. I’ve been talking about it for weeks now so I won’t go over old ground, or re-hash some thoughts i’ve already given, but with the Euro’s drawing to a close Arsene needs to find a player who is of sufficient quality to improve our attacking threat. Be that up top or out wide.

What he also has to do, is to convince Alexis that he wants to stay at the club for another few seasons. The guy is a marquee Arsenal player, was part of the ‘new world’ we all thought we were now in as Arsenal fans, and we need him. Talk of Draxler coming in and Alexis leaving just keeps us in the same position as we were at the end of the season, or worse, because the German has no Premier League experience. So We need to talk to Alexis, get him committed, do the same for Ozil, then go out and get a wide-right forward like Draxler that can provide more goals (although I know Draxler’s goalscoring last season was hardly amazing, but he’s still young and I suspect in a better team he’d get more goals).

It’s time we started to make a move peeps. The Premier League money-machine will soon be in full flow and if Pogba signs for United we can expect Juve to react quickly. We need to ‘head them off at the pass’ by getting Alexis tied down and then show that they’ll have to look elsewhere to keep their fans happy.

Ooh, one bit of lovely news, which is that Petr Cech will retire from the Czech national team. From an Arsenal perspective that’s great news. It means he’ll get rest time in between the international breaks, he’ll be less susceptible to injury and he’ll be hopefully in better form for us than he would having had to travel all over the world to play for the Czech Republic. Gooners everywhere can rejoice at that news.

And that’s pretty much it from me today. I’ve got some chores to do before my little bro comes over later this evening with his family, and we shut ourselves away in the spare room to play FIFA all night, like when we were 15 and 11 respectively. Good times.

Laters peeps.