Happy Monday folks. Well, as happy as it can be after you’ve just had a wonderful week off in the sun boozing, eating nice food and generally sleeping in late. This ‘returning back to work and having to get up early to tap at your computer’ thing is, ideally, not something I’d like to do. But I guess you can’t always have fun all of the time – not least my waistline and liver couldn’t anyway.

And so back I am tapping away and starting the day with the usual bloggy goodness, except it is a little quieter right now than last week. Last week we had the back and forward on what was happening for the Rice deal, which was a rollercoaster in itself. Then we had the Kai Havertz signing confirmed as our first ‘big one’ of the summer, before the end of the week brought new noises about Jurrien Timber and the fact that we’re pretty close to a deal being done.

Oh, and Elon Musk ruined Twitter for us all. So a pretty interesting few days whilst I was sunning myself in the Algarve!

I know Cesc Fabregas retired and so there was a lot of chatter about that over the weekend, but I’ve never really been that fussed about talking about retirement of players. They played for us, some did better than others, but ultimately he went on and did other things; it is not as if he stuck with us his entire career and did a Tony Adams, is it? Then the whole discussions about whether a player was a ‘legend’ or not. Meh. Who cares? It’s just a word, and a subjective one at that, so what does it really matter if one person says they are and another doesn’t think so? Everyone has the right to feel how they feel about a player. Then we move on with our life. The only consistent is The Arsenal and the Arsenal of ‘now’ is the most relevant.

I suspect the week ahead will be the culmination of some of the discussions that have happened in the last week. The latest titbit of information was that the Rice ‘video’ of his arrival was done yesterday, which suggests that he’ll be announced either today or tomorrow I suspect, once the editing has been finished and all of the finalised bits of info confirmed. Arsenal always like to get their ducks lined up on the transfer announcement stuff and so often it can feel like it has been put on a bit of a delay. But the reality is that this deal looks to have been all done and so now we just play the waiting game when the official announcement is made. I tweeted last night that when even the details on when the announcement video get leaked, we’re now at the point in which there really is no more mystique in football transfers, aren’t we? We know so much about every deal that by the time it happens we are already the salivating monsters ready to devour the next transfer gossip morsel. And as a result it doesn’t matter how significant the player, so many people are just never satisfied enough. Bit sad really.

But that is the world we now live in. Access to information is so readily available (unless you’ve ‘exceeded your rate limit’ of course) that we get data and intel so quickly and drip-fed that it doesn’t ‘bang’ like it used to. We have to accept that the world has changed and you adapt or die, as they say.

But what I think will happen, when all of this transfer dust has settled over the next week, is that we will hopefully have our business done early and therefore have our new players well embedded by the time the season kicks off in….amazingly…about a month’s time. That was one of the cornerstones of last seasons success i.e. getting business done so the players could start working on tactical set up and approach as a team and if we head to Germany on 13th July with our new players all arriving to meet their new teammates, that is going to be massive in terms of an acclimatisation process. Fingers crossed.

Other than that there isn’t really a lot going on as we all wait patiently for the club to make some big announcements. Hopefully sooner rather than later!

Back tomorrow with some more ramblings. Have a good one guys.