Morning campers, how we all doing?

The Premier League is now underway and last night we got ourselves our first glimpses of a Liverpool team that, as I put out on social media a week ago, I really hope defend like that all season. Sure, they still won and grabbed a last minute winner(s) which always feels good, but there are enough signs there for us to hang on to that they are not going to walk the league at a canter like they did last season. Which is all we could hope for really, because I didn’t really hold out much expectation for Bournemouth last night anyway.

As a quick aside too – remember when we were lambasted because we scored a last minute winner against Bournemouth? Remember that? We were told that we were ‘too emotional’ as a club to win the Premier League. Funny how that same narrative is nowhere to be seen this morning, eh?

In the Arsenal world, we had a couple of press conferences to have a look at ahead of tomorrow’s game against United, which included Arteta and Amorim separately previewing the game and the start to the season. He naturally didn’t give any fuel to the fire for United, saying they will be very different from last season and have strengthened, but he wasn’t really asked much else about United. Perhaps it is because it’s the start of the season and in a short space of time there are so many questions that the journo’s want to ask (fitness updates, signings, who will win the league, as well as the Tony Adams comments about leadership), but we didn’t really get much talk about the game itself. Unless it was for the embargoed section that I didn’t watch. But from what I did see there wasn’t too much on how he expects United to play or their approach, which I would have liked to have seen, if I’m honest. He gave nothing away about whether we need to sell to buy, he talked about how Big Vik was fit and available, but more importantly given there were a few rumours about Zubimendi circling during the week, he confirmed that the Spaniard is fit. I think that’s a big thing, because although we’ve only got a small sample size, I think Martin Zubimendi is going to be a vital cog in the way we play. His verticality of passing and ability to play those balls from deep will, I think, be important on Sunday, for sure. The way United might play, by sitting deep and looking to hit us in transition, might mean that when we do win the ball back, we have to go from front to back very quickly. His speed of distribution has been something a few Arsenal fans have picked up on and I think it’ll be a key facet of our play this season.

The Odegaard captaincy question was lingered on a little bit and I didn’t really touch on it much this week on here, because if I’m honest, I don’t see it as a big ‘thing’. I said this on the Same Old Arsenal podcast on Wednesday, but captaincy doesn’t really mean much other than a ceremonial position these days anyway. The captain does the coin toss, the referees sometimes call the captain over, but to me that’s about it. You need more leadership in the team than just one guy and Arteta’s comments about how he made the players vote is interesting. It must have been a secret vote, because imagine if everyone would have voted for Declan? How awkward would that be?

Of course Arteta says that the decision was unanimous and if that’s the case then it is good and speaks well about a harmonious dressing room. Which is all you can ask for as we enter this new season. Those players are about to go into battle together for nine months, so they need to be united on the field, which starts with decision making. But in terms of who is captaincy, as I mentioned, I just don’t really think it is that big a deal.

Up in Manchester, Ruben Amorim confirmed that the most tedious narrative of tomorrow will possibly go ahead with Benjamin Sesko fit and available to start. He also didn’t exactly sound unequivocal when talking about how much Man United will have changed. He cited the fact that it’s hard to really know in just four weeks how much the team has changed, so to me that sounded like a little bit of expectation management there, which I certainly hope is the case ahead of Sunday. And I hope if they are going to improve, they aren’t quite ‘set’ yet, which Amorim kind of hinted at. He talked about Bruno Feernandes, for example, saying that he’s operating more as a midfielder rather than an attacking player, so I wonder if we’ll see Fernandes as a deeper lying playmaker this season. Will he want that? Will he enjoy that? no idea. But it does feel to me that if they’re going to sit him deeper on Sunday, they’ll also do the same with Ugarte and we might be looking at another low-block United looking to spring traps. I wonder if Mikel will have watched that press conference for little signs of that and it’ll be interesting to see our approach if we get a United side looking to camp on the edge of their box and hit channel runners in Cunha, Sesko or Mbuemo.

There’s a bunch of football on today and of course the hope is that we see Palace, Burnley and Wolves pick up some points. Even if one of those sides can upset any of the supposed rivals for this season, that’d be grand. But let’s see what shakes out. I’ll be interested to see how the Villa v Newcastle game gets on. I think Villa might give Newcastle a bit of a going over today, what with all the furore over Isak, but let’s have a look at how they are looking, because we have them in a few weeks.

Catch you all tomorrow for a proper pre match preview.