On Saturday I said that Riccardo should be on the first flight back to London after the knock he sustained on Friday night playing for Italy. That wish has been granted, with Fabrizio Romano confirming that they didn’t want to take any risks with him and that’s why he won’t be playing in their game against Israel this evening. Good. I’m pleased, but at the same time we all need to probably be a little worried about his inclusion in the squad for this coming weekend against The Scum. He has six days from now to get over the knock and even then, would Arteta risk him in a game like the NLD? I’m not so sure.

So it could be another player out injured or suspended for Sunday and if any more players come back broken it’s going to feel like an even bigger task than it already is. So all eyes tonight and tomorrow will be on:

  • Saliba against Belgium (Trossard wasn’t selected so we know he won’t play)
  • Odegaard against Austria
  • Saka and Rice against Finland
  • Partey against Niger
  • Timber and Havertz for The Netherlands against Germany
  • Zinchenko against Czech Republic

We know Raya played last night so thankfully he’ll be heading home today but there are still a fair few players from the first team who we have to sweat over, with Big Gabby also playing the furthest away on Wednesday in the early hours of the morning, which means he probably won’t get back until Thursday during the day some time, so he’ll have Friday in training and Saturday before the North London Derby. So Arteta will honestly be in a position where he’ll do his Friday press conference before one of the biggest games of the season and he won’t really know the availability of his whole team until Friday afternoon. Which is absolutely crazy.

He will have had most of them back for a day or two, thankfully, but the fact he can’t really do full planning for such a game until around 48 hours before it starts is completely bonkers to me.

Anyway, focus for us Arsenal fans will already be turning towards the big showdown on Sunday and I started my preparations already by starting to go in to enemy territory and find out what some of their lot are saying and in the most part they’re quite bullish about the game. I guess it’s early in the season, they’re seeing that we have one or two players out, plus they’re at home, so I can understand their optimism. We haven’t clicked fully yet either and whilst you look at their results from a zoomed out perspective it looks lovely, they have apparently been playing well – they just haven’t taken their chances. I’m up in Northumberland at the moment and the Management’s uncle and I (Newcastle fan) were talking about the win they got against that ‘orrible lot along the Seven Sisters Road and he basically said Newcastle scored with just a couple of chances against the run of play. The Scum left themselves open, but they created a lot of chances. They had no Richarlison or Solanke either and I think Solanke will be back by then at least, so they’ll have more presence in attack than they did against the Geordies, which is something Arteta will have to prep for. As the week unfolds we can start to look at how the game might go, but yesterday and this morning I wanted to check out the ‘vibes’ and as expected it’s tense on their side as much as it is on ours. Let’s see how everyone is feeling on Friday, Saturday and then Sunday morning though, eh?

A final side note for today, which is that Rob Holding is now training away from the Palace team and looks like his football career is on the brink of collapse. He left us for £1million just over a year ago and at the time I thought it was a bit low. He was a model pro, he’d played a ton of games for The Arsenal and I thought he’d get plenty of game time at Palace, but injuries and not getting on with the current boss appears to have scuppered any hopes of forging a career with the Eagles and he’s now training alone, as confirmed by the Palace boss Glasner recently. He’s also apparently deleted all record of Palace from his social media profiles and so I guess that’s another sign of a complete breakdown between manager and player. It will be a sad and acrimonious end for a player who has never struck me as a trouble maker. He was nowhere near good enough for us towards the end of his time at the club, but he still feels like a lower-end Premier League defender and at 28 years old he should still have a career ahead of him. Hopefully he gets that stuff sorted and he can find a club in January but it looks like he’s going to have a tough few months just watching on and waiting for his career to get jump started again somewhere else. Shame.

A final final shout out to the lasies, who also beat Rosenberg to progress to the next round of Champions League qualifying. Big up to them.

Right, that’ll do me for the day methinks. Back tomorrow with hopes of clean bills of health from our players who are playing in these pointless international games this evening. Catch you then.