Happy Saturday to you my friend. It’s an Arsenal free Saturday for us, which means you’re probably doing all manner of interesting things. Me? I’m cleaning my house, taking things to the dump and finally going to the next town over to work out why a Building Society i’ve never transacted with, keeps sending me letters about an account I don’t have. The Management is secretly hoping I have some kind of Monopoly-esque ‘bank error in your favour, collect £200 job, but I suspect that it’ll be a case of getting myself unsubscribed from a mailing list.

Yesterday the club announced it’s latest figures leading up to 31st May and as usual, the bit at the bottom registered a profit, albeit a little one of just under £3million. You know me, I just looooooooove the detail when it comes to this sort of thing, so I’ll just leave the link for you to have a look at and ponder over the many different numbers. It’s the sort of thing that account types better than me who are Arsenal fans will probably be able to digest and give you some better insight, but from my point of view it’s good to see that the club still has a nice bank balance and there’s still cash that can be spent. Well, it sort of has been spent already, I suppose, because these figures don’t take in to account the outlay on Xhaka, Mustafi, Perez, Holding and Asano, so I suspect the next set of recorded financial results will tell a slightly different story.

But hey, that’s all off the pitch, and we love what’s on the pitch, so how about a little chit-chat about that, eh?

Tomorrow it’ll be a 4.30pm kick off at Burnley and yesterday Arsene did his usual presser, but as expected he had to answer questions about England. I thought it was an interesting response that he gave actually. It was not really ruling it out, or giving it the old ‘come and get me’ eyes either. I think he’s playing a clever game actually, because he wants to be wanted at Arsenal and with the possibility of another high profile job very much on the horizon, he can certainly make some people fearful that he might go. I don’t think there’s any chance, personally, because I just don’t think it’s his scene. You can get decent odds on him becoming the next manager, but I think the favourite being Southgate on a permanent basis is probably more likely to happy.

He was also asked about Theo and the response he’s getting from the fans and naturally he was quite positive about the in form forward (it’s about five minutes in on the video). As Arsene said, he’s definitely ‘added something to his game’ and we’re profiting from his confidence, but the comment from the journo about the fans being patient did have me raising my eyes, I have to say. Theo is 27 years old, he’s been at the club longer than ten years and we’ve not nearly sen enough of the player we’re seeing at the moment – certainly in the last couple of seasons. He’s found a way of playing his game that emphasises his strengths and he’s added some grit to his performances and whilst I get where the journo might have been going with the question – i.e. that people need to not get too carried away – at the same time we have to recognise that Theo isn’t a new signing. Although he feels very LANS at the moment, and that’s a great thing.

So tomorrow it’s Burnley and we’re in form. I’ll do a proper match preview tomorrow with who I think will play, but Arsene was asked about how dangerous Burnley are and he identified Burnley as a decent defensive set up, with an emphasis on their set pieces. It’ll certainly be something we have to be aware of on Sunday. I watched the Watford game and Burnley were massively up for it. They’ll be more so against us because it’s a bigger club coming to town, but with the way we’re playing football at the moment, I fancy us because we’re playing good football and things are clicking. We could do with the league not stopping after this week, because it goes in to an international period, but such is the game at the moment. We just need to get the job done tomorrow and then hope the international break doesn’t disrupt our flow.

Right, that’s it from me. Time to get the joggers on and justify my trip up to Turf Moor with The Management by being an absolute hero and cleaning this house. Catch you in the morrow.