Happy Thursday y’all! It’s technically still summer in the UK but given the drizzle that has engulfed my particular corner of the world, you’d never have guessed it, because it’s looking pretty grim.

As grim as Carl Jenkinson’s hopes of getting out of Football limbo, where he currently resides, too expensive salary-wise to leave Arsenal and unfortunately not quite the requisite quality to fight his way back in to the Arsenal team. Poor ol’ Carl. A victim of the Wenger era and inflated salaries that now see us going through a second series of Deadwood. The first series was a flop so how on Earth Arsenal commissioned a second – Deadwood II: the re-deaddening is beyond most sane peoples comprehension.

In the current series we’ve got some players who are either gone or on their way though. Lucas Perez fell foul to a glut of West Ham, David Ospina has been Napolised, whilst Joel Campbell is about to be hit with a case of Frosinone. Apparently it’s incurable.

But I suppose these are players off the wage bill and if you imagine those three plus Jenkinson probably take the best part of £200k off the weekly wage, it feels like we have shifted some of the players that really needed to be shifted and hopefully that gives the club licence to put a few extra magic beans in Ramsey’s pocket.

That is of course if the Welshman is minded to sign a new deal. We’ve seen this movie before, remember, and we know how it plays out. Flamini, Nasri, van Persie, Alexis. The list is now so long that none of us would be surprised if Rambo was to just flatly remove and force the club’s hand come January. Personally I think it’s a little naivety on the club’s point not to put a hard deadline on the situation and just offload abroad to the highest bidder. I know football transfers are a complex thing but everyone else seems to manage it without having to drop a zero from the price tag, so I’m sure if Arsenal had been a little more decisive they could have found a buyer abroad for him.

Anyway, it’s all done now, we’re in the position we’re in and we have to just hope the club know what they’re doing. Like when Keano Reeves told Sandra Bullock to speed up on that bus that time.

The Ospina deal is odd though. I totally see why Napoli want a loan given that they’ve done a Burnley and already bought half a team of ‘keepers, but why would Arsenal sanction that unless they were desperate? Perhaps they are. Perhaps there are absolutely no takers for the Colombian national ‘keeper who’s just come off a World Cup and did pretty decent by my reckoning.

Or perhaps we’re just a bit pants in selling these days?

Thank goodness there’s some more football on the horizon to look forward to though. So thoughts are already turning to what happens with Emery’s selection decision and how he lines up his team. It was one of the discussion topics Giles and I talked about with Aaron from LoveSport last night and having seen the results of the poll we did in which 81% of people said he should change personnel for Saturday and not formation, I have to say I agree with the poll results. We are still trying to work out how Chelski are going to play in the same way we are going to play, but it looks like Sarri wants a high press and wants everything to flow through Jorginho.

So to me it feels obvious that we need a little more energy and that comes by taking Mkhi and Xhaka out of the team and playing Torreira and Lacazette. Chelski will be expecting to catch us cold and a little bit sorry for ourselves on Saturday, but if we can come out of the blocks and press them higher and win the ball back quicker, perhaps…maybe…we stand a chance of at least picking up a point.

We’ll know a little more about what Emery’s planning when he does his press conference at some stage over the next 36 hours. I hope we get an indication that there’ll be changes afoot because what I think we saw last Sunday was that Lacazette adds something slightly different to the team and certainly we looked more dangerous when he came on. I talked last night about wanting to see more of a meritocracy and I think we will, hopefully on Saturday with the Frenchman starting.

Not long now until we find out though.

Right, I’m done-diddly-un- for another one, so you make sure you all have peace and love man.

Catch you tomorrow.