Morning folks and welcome to Monday. I’ll be off to Sam Sebastian in Spain for a long weekend trip with friends, so my hopes by the time we get to this time next week are:

  1. Gabriel Jesus might actually have signed for The Arsenal
  2. We get a good showing in Germany as the lads travel out for the first of their pre season friendlies on Friday
  3. Some kind of left field transfer emerges that sees us linked with somebody we weren’t necessarily linked with as of today. Or at least one of the players we’re after moves closer to becoming an Arsenal player.

That feels like a very achievable ‘to do’ list that can be ticked off in a week I reckon. If I’m to guess on the chronology of those three things happening, it would probably be in the order that I’ve listed them. I suspect that Gabriel Jesus will happen at some point today or tomorrow and depending on who you read it is has been because of getting sign off on a visa for the player. Gabriel Jesus will have joined on the ‘skilled worker’ visa and the rules around that are that you need to earn more than £25k per annum, so I reckon he’s covered on that front! I suspect that the club are just making sure and they probably just haven’t had the confirmed paperwork over the weekend, hence why no announcement. I’ve seen some people talk about Richarlison being announced, but if you look at the statement made by The Scum, it says ‘subject to a work permit’. Perhaps the club are just waiting for that clearance before releasing. I also suspect that they’re happy to have some distance between that announcement and the one they want to make of our own newly signed Brazilian. But I’ve already speculated on that over the weekend so won’t go back over that thinking here.

It’ll happen, we just need to let it all play out, then we can all do the usual fanfare. I did kind of get how some fans are saying its killed the buzz a little bit. We’ve all known this for so long (that the transfer is happening) that when it does happen there will be a lot of ‘WE KNOW!’ that will go down amongst the fanbase. That would be a shame because it is a big signing and it is our marquee one of the summer, so to lose some of the good vibes because the transfer has been dragged out, is a little bit of a shame if you ask me.

On the second point, I think that happens before any left of field transfer talk because we know that it has a defined date. We are playing on Friday and after the game on Saturday against Ipswich, I suspect it’ll be most of the same faces that will play most of the minutes against Nurnberg on Friday. I think some of the international duty lads will be reporting in to start training and maybe that’ll see some of them travel, but I’m not sure whether they’ll be reporting towards the end of the week or today, so that will have an impact on who travels. If they all arrive from today then I think the halftime switch in players that will happen on Friday will be very different from the one against Ipswich. In that game at the weekend there were some very familiar faces for the first half, then it was a young and very unknown group of lads that finished off the match. If most of the first team squad travel out on what I’d presume would be Thursday, then I think it’ll be two halves of well known players getting minutes. So players like Gabriel, Xhaka, Saka, Odegaard, Smith Rowe, Martinelli, Fabio Vieira, Saliba, Tomiyasu…*whsipers*…Gabriel Jesus….could all be on show. But we’ll know soon based on who is in training this week.

So to my third and final point, which is on that random transfer to happen, or for us to get close to signing a player and like I said a couple of weeks back when I was in Portugal on holiday, these deals tend to seem to happen when I go on holiday. I’m only away for the weekend – his coming one – but my hope is that my holiday vibes can be channelled to the club and they go and make an announcement that somebody new has signed, or at least we can get an Ornstein bomb/Fabrizio Romano ‘here we go!’ over the weekend, which would be nice.

I personally would like that to be Tielemans. We have been after him for a while, the expectation was that we’d get him and get him for a decent fee, he appears to be quite hot on us if you read some of the journos out there with their fingers on the pulse, so this feels like the kind of deal we could chivvy along pretty easily. Perhaps that’s why they have focused their attentions on getting other deals done and certainly the noises this week are we’re going back to meet Ajax over the Lisandro Martinez situation. If the Tielemans deal is so easy to do I don’t know why we haven’t tried to get that done first, personally. Get the money over to Leicester, get it done, then go and have a look at those versatile players who could fit in a few different positions (which we already have players in and so therefore are not in as pressing need as we are for a midfielder). But I know naff all about the inner workings of elite sports teams and so I guess I should probably just leave it to those people whose job it is to worry about this stuff seven days a week.

Would be nice to have a shiny new Tielemans rocking up at London Colney this time next weekend though, I have to say.

And that’s probably it from me for today methinks. Hopefully catch you tomorrow with some thoughts on a certain shiny new Brazilian joining our ranks.