Morning folks and a happy Monday to you and yours. Well…as happy as a Monday as you’re going to get when there’s been no Arsenal on and you’ve had to sit through a Man United versus Tottenham game in which both sides looked a little bit pants. The night before I’d watched a ding-dong of a game between Newcastle and Man City and there was crisp passing, good football, great goals and a fantastic advert for the Premier League. Yesterday evening I saw a United and Scum team trade possession lost, defensive mistakes and generally looked quite average indeed. It was hardly the advert for the ‘Barclays’ that should be talking up our league as the best in the world. Two horrible teams trying to out-stink each other and then some post match discussions in which the zenith of the debate was Jamie Redknapp solving it all by saying “just buy better players”. Flipping heck.

Still, we’re on count down to The Arsenal on Saturday and at least that’s something to look forward to. For those who couldn’t survive the weekend without The Arsenal there was of course the FA Cup victory over Watford for the Women, for which they progressed with ease it seems, so that might have helped. But the game against Palace looms in the distance and it is one in which I suspect all of our attentions will start to laser in on in the coming weeks.

We’ll have to though, because there’s not a lot else going on in the Arsenal world, unless you’re going to count the fact that Mikel Arteta visited that Sale Bae D*ckhead in Dubai. Honestly, I’m not that fussed about what he wants to do with his time and I won’t spend ages analysing it, but I just which people wouldn’t give him the level of exposure he gets. It’s kind of cringe.

At least the team come back to the world of normality this week and the next images we all want to see is some training pics with some players returning. The big one for me is Zinchenko. He missed out of the Fulham and Liverpool game, then he was absent in any of the Dubai training pics – unless I’ve missed something. But when Arteta was asked about him on 5th January he said that he was progressing well and they had one more training session before the game against Liverpool in which he’d be assessed. So there could only be one of two situations happening I think:

  1. He was a lot further off from playing than Arteta was letting on
  2. They are keeping Zinchenko out of the training pictures for some kind of marginal gains advantage.

I’m not sure it’s two to be honest with you. I don’t think it impacts preparation of a home game against Palace if Zinchenko is in the team or not. Perhaps Palace will be looking at it and wondering whether they put a different type of winger on their right hand side, but I’m not sure Roy Hodgson will go that deep in to the 3D chess mind games to completely change the way he is going to play dependent on whether Arsenal have the Ukrainian in the team or not.

Which means Arteta was probably not 100% straight in his press conference because we’re now 10 days later and if Zinchenko was on the verge of training (or at least sounded like it) then he would have been seen somewhere in Dubai methinks. So if he’s out for this weekend it essentially means he’s been out for more than three weeks (as he didn’t play against Fulham on New Year’s Eve) and he’s already missed the start of the season because he wasn’t quite fit. And as Arsenal fans if we’re questioning his long term fitness and availability – and we really should be – then you can imagine that the Arsenal medical team must be doing just the same as well.

It’s why the rumours of a new left back – despite the training pics of Timber being released – do make a little more sense. The best ‘ability’ is ‘availability’ as the saying goes and Zinchenko has missed patches of this season and last season with injuries that I’m sure Arteta will be saying to himself that we can’t really afford. I think that’s clearly also why he was trying Partey in as a right back and why he also wanted Timber too: Risk mitigation. If Zinchenko is going to miss up to a third of the season then we need alternate options that might not be the same, but might enable us to at least have a very similar style and approach to how we play with him in the team. Then to have Timber basically be out from the second half of the first game of the season was unlucky, but I’m sure Arteta thought that after we were able to get 33 games in the Premier League out of Partey last season, we might at least be able to manage another 25 – 30 matches from him. His injury which has limited him to four matches in the Premier League this season (three as the inverted right back) has meant that his plans have been scuppered and with Zinhenko being out too, that’s why the noises on a new left back have been the loudest of the possible arrivals in January.

Whether it actually happens remains to be seen. We all know the restrictions and even the financially doped clubs are making noises about how they have to operate within the confines of FFP (City’s historical charges still remain unanswered by the way…), so I still think that we’ll not see anything for another week or two and even then it might be nothing at all. So the hope then has to be that we get a few UK training pics with the Ukrainian back in training and that he can stay fit at least until Tomiyasu comes back in mid February. If we can get through the next few weeks and if Tomi doesn’t pick up a knock in the Asia Cup, hopefully we’ll be alright.

But we shall have to wait with baited breath and hopefully when the press conference rolls around on Thursday or Friday we can get some more good news on him being back in the squad and training.

Catch you all tomorrow.