Morning folks. You know how they say “slow news day?” When there’s the square root of b*gger all going on I. The Arsenal world?
Well, I think it’s safe to say that yesterday was not one of those days!
First we had the confirmation of Ceballos and Saliba from the club and with it cake videos, pictures and all of the associated PR. Call me a sucker but despite the fact we all knew it was happening it was still nice to see the players in an Arsenal shirt, giving their first interviews, even if one of them we’ll have to wait a season before we get to see him play for Arsenal proper.
Ceballos will join the team straight away and I suspect he’ll get a part of play in this weekend’s Emirates Cup. Everyone loves to see a new signing and this will be no different and I wonder if the club are crossing fingers that it accelerates ticket sales, which up until now, look to have been rather few and far between. Ceballos is an exciting prospect, we’ve probably all watched his videos by now and it’s no surprise or coincidence that he’s been given Ramsey’s old number. He is the exact type of signing we needed to fill one of the empty spaces.
The only challenge we have is that there are still a lot of other empty spaces that still remain and I am starting to think – despite the fact that some of the youth team players did so well out in the US – that replacing those players with some of these youngsters may not be the best idea. Augmenting the team with one or two additions is fine but at this stage if we’re talking about five, six or seven players all coming in, it’s going to be a tough ask I suspect.
It’s not that they’re not talented, but look at Lucas Torreira, for example. He has admitted that he played more games than he’d ever done before last season and we can all see how his form dipped slightly in the second half of the season. It’s all very well in August and September to see young players come in and light up the place, but when we get to February, the season is starting to take its toll, will those players have the same verve? That’s the question I have and so players like Ceballos who are already established – albeit quite young – will be useful to us in the coming season I think.
Saliba goes back to St Etienne which isn’t ideal, but we can watch from afar as to how he gets on and hopefully, fingers crossed, he has a good season and comes back an even better player.
So that’s two in the bag and as I said yesterday with a bit of cynicism, the timing will have been very obvious to the club with the Q&A on the horizon, because that also happened last night.
It seems like an interesting affair but from what I’ve read from Tim Stillman’s transcript it looks like there were some rather pointless questions asked by some sections of the crowd. This was an opportunity I thought and unfortunately I suspect that the club may have seen a few familiar faces and chosen to keep the microphone away from them.
There were some good ones asked about the safe standing, for example, but using this time to ask about whether we are signing a centre half or why we only have £40million to spend feels like a wasted opportunity to me. This was a chance to ask some questions and see if you could get those running the club to give us some real answers but instead people chose to ask questions about transfers which are never getting answered properly in a million years.
That’s a shame but it seems like a few people had a good evening anyway so hopefully it was a decent crack for many there.
What wasn’t a ‘decent crack’ however, was poor ol’ Sead and Mesut’s evening, which was complete with attempted car-jacking by a scooter gang. That type of crime will be all too familiar with other people who live and work in London but thankfully both players weren’t hurt and quite to the contrary, Sead Kolasinac seemed to be demonstrating his future career as a bouncer credentials, by chasing down some of the assailants.
Heck, I guess he isn’t called ‘the tank’ for nothing, but whilst I quip it’s just good to know they’re ok. These sorts of things happening in broad daylight are a travesty and sadly I watch too much of this type of stuff on the London news every few nights. Let’s hope they catch the little scroats who did this.
Anyway, that’s about that for today, with everyone still feeling a little warmer inside because of some deals in the bag. Now we all turn our attention to Tierney as the last saga!!
Catch you all tomorrow.
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