Happy Friday people. Hope it goes well for you and your kin.

Me, I’m toiling in the boredom levels of no Arsenal to think constantly about, but the fact I have my folks over for the weekend and the fact The Management and I are doing a bit of tourism in London tomorrow is keeping me happy. Sometimes I think it’s nice to be able to step away from The Arsenal. It reaffirms the love/obsession and when we get to about Wednesday next week I’ll probably just be desperate to see the lads on the field again.

Whether Aaron Ramsey is one of those lads still remains to be seen. Unai has – understandably in my opinion – limited his usage in what we’d probably call ‘first team’ games and I think that makes sense. My opinion ever since we learned of the contract withdrawal from the club has been that we need to gradually phase him out and our reliance needed to be on players we knew would be at the club this time next season.

I must admit I didn’t expect it to happy so quickly as Unai has, but given that he has no long term future at the club I kind of get it. I also certainly get it from January and if you believe some of the rumours coming out of the press yesterday, it appears Bayern have lined up the Welshman to be part of their squad for next season.

This could of course be simple journalistic mischief making, or even a bit of agent efforts to drum up some interest from somewhere to ignite other teams to bid for his signature, but to me the Bayern noises are about as positive as we’re going to get.

Look, we aren’t going to get any money for him in January. It doesn’t make sense for the player and it doesn’t make sense for a club that can get him on a free in the summer. This is also not the same as the Alexis situation. Alexis was on his way to Man City and was out the door until we pulled the plug. Everyone knew that. So when January came United knew that if it’s a straight footballing shoot out then Alexis would join City ahead of them because of Pep, ‘the project’, plus the chance to win more trophies. So United got in there quicker and the move was done with a bit of Mkhitaryan on the side.

That situation isn’t the same this January. So there won’t be any club – I don’t think although I readily admit I’m regularly wrong – looking to give cash for a player they can get for free in the summer.

So we will most certainly be losing him in June and therefore the most palatable outcome for us is that he moves abroad. It means we don’t strengthen a rival, we don’t have to watch him suddenly come of age (you blatantly know that would happen if he joined another English club) in our league, plus he can still have the adoration of Arsenal fans (well, some of them, anyway) after he’s gone.

Aaron Ramsey heading off to Bayern is probably the best situation we could hope for.

I just hope this is true and not just agent smokescreen and he ends up at Chelski or Liverpool. If that happened it would be quite painful indeed.

The only other stuff that has happened of late appears to be the systematic withdrawal of Arsenal players like Lacazette and Aubameyang. Both appear to have picked up knocks but what in I hope is a very Tottenhamesque situation, I hope that they are all fine actually and they’ve just been pulled out to give the players some rest. We have some pretty challenging fixtures coming up over the next month and we’re going to need our goal scoring big guns available for all of it.

Other than that we won’t really get any other news on our players until Tuesday at least I reckon so it’s ‘cross fingers’ time that they don’t get clobbered and lets have them back in one piece for Bournemouth away.

Catch you all tomorrow.