Morning folks and welcome to the middle of the week. I like to call it…..

Wednesday.

In two weeks time we’ll be staring down the barrel of another “match day” and I’m sure you can’t contain your excitement, especially with the way we’re bound to have Sky and the other channels absolutely hammer the sh*t out of ‘Project Restart’ as they try to clack back some of their flagging sales. I’m bracing myself for advert after advert of the return of the Premier League ‘product’ but just hope that some of the noises about the weather being crap aren’t true, because what with all the glorious sunshine that’s been out there over the last couple of weeks, I’ve thankfully barely even been in my lounge to watch TV.

Take that Rupert Murdoch, you won’t get me that easily and I will not come quietly.

The Arsenal news is still think on the ground, with only the Benfica chairman saying that David Luiz is going to sign his contract extension, which is nice of him. Does he have a twitter account with a cartoon agent on it? Will we be seeing him drop Yann M’Villa hints to us in the coming days? Who knows, but I for one cannot wait to hear that Luis Filipe Vieira has dropped another transfer story bomb on us when the silly season of rumours come off.

He claims that he has a ‘father-son’ relationship with David Luiz, but that Benfica can’t afford Luiz and his wages. I call bullsh*t on this, because I just googled David Luiz and this is what I got:

Now you can’t tell me that you have a father-son relationship with somebody who is currently 70% off. It’s practically giving him away. Maybe Vieira just hasn’t bothered to reach out to the good folks at Stuccu to get the deal down to a more manageable figure? Come on Luis, do your desk research man.

So what else is new in the Arsenal world? Well not a lot and a quick scan of NewsNow this morning gives me transfer nonsense after transfer nonsense. Call me an ever-ageing cynic, but I don’t believe we’ll be dropping big cash to get Partey, nor will we be parting with Hector Bellerin this summer I don’t think. I mean we only have him and a Cedric Soares yet to even start in an Arsenal shirt and with Arteta clearly not too hot on Maitland-Niles, I’m struggling to see why we would let the Spaniard leave.

If PSG drop big money on Bellerin then maybe Arsenal could be persuaded, but surely we have to be talking closer to the €50million for us to even have a sniff at it.

There’s been some talk that he’s going to wait and see what happens with the rest of this season and perhaps he is feeling like Sagna did, or the Ox, and that his Arsenal career had hit a point where it has plateaued. But with so few options for us this summer in that position, it feels like we’d be making a bit of a headache for ourselves that we don’t really need to make. Again though, as with all things, player power can have an impact and if Hector agitates for a move then Arteta might let him go. The boss has already made it very clear he wants players who are committed to the cause and if they don’t show that then they can be on their merry way. Unlike Emery who didn’t seem to show too much backbone when it comes to his decisions – Ozil aside – I think Arteta will have seen what happened with the squad when Emery’s decision making started to flip flop and I reckon Arteta is a character that just won’t let happen.

And that’s what we want as fans. Remember when Robin van Persie decided to be an utter w*nker and post that message to us “guys”, the fans, because we “had a right to know”? Well the second that message was out there were so many of the fanbase that rightly turned on him. We all took the view that if you don’t want to play for the club then we don’t want you near the club. Get ’em out, get ’em sold, move on and try to improve the club. That’s our mentality and if Arteta is taking that with him too, that’s another plus point for me. Every single player you and I have loved have had to eventually be moved on or retire. In football things are rarely permanent and whereas we worship Aubameyang today, for example, in four or five years time he will be merely a footnote in a very long and illustrious history that is Arsenal Football Club.

So let’s just see what happens over these next few months, because whilst we might see a few changes, I don’t think we’ll see as much root and branch change as a lot of people think.

Right, that’s me for another one, so I’ll bid thee farewell for now and ta-ta until tomorrow.

Laters potatoes.