Let’s start with the lovely ol’ news that Bukayo Saka has reportedly agreed a new deal worth around £350k-per-week, depending on who you believe.

What great news this is to finish a working week!

It was announced yesterday via David Ornstein and a few others that pen had been put to paper on a new deal and that means we’ll get our Staboy – on paper at least – until he is 29-years-old, which will mean he is committing the best part of his career – his peak years – to our club. We know he loves the club, supported the club as a kid, has given everything for the club and is our best player, but this commitment shows a few things which we can all be really pleased about:

  1. Saka feels like his ambitions can be met at The Arsenal
  2. Arsenal know they have a generational player and will not make the mistakes of the past (Cashley Cole, RVP, etc)

This Arsenal is very different from the one I grew up with. There is ambition, there has been clear evolution, there is a unity from top to bottom and an alignment in the fanbase (mostly – take what the online factions argue about with a pinch of salt, because when I go to games, I do not see the same discourse and vitriol that I do on social media). Arsenal has been a good environment to be in for some years now, and whilst Mikel Arteta is the driving force behind that, players like Bukayo Saka help him massively, because they set the ‘foggin estandards’.

And our standards and the desire this season is high. This team is in a ‘win now’ mode, and Saka knows this, senses this, which is probably why getting this deal done has felt a little easier than the previous one. He’s ready to be, as Sam Dean in the Telegraph says, the ‘franchise player‘ at The Arsenal. Sure, there are the trappings of being the best-paid player at the club, but he’s of an age where he also wants – and needs – to take some of the biggest burdens too. And I think we need him to for sure. Especially in the short term.

That means stepping up on the end-product, too. I spoke about this in the general context of the team a week or so ago, but the team spreading the goals has been great n’a ll, however, I think on an individual basis some players in there will expect more for their second half of the season, and I think Saka is defo one of them. He’s played 27 times in all competitions this season, 1,800+ minutes and has seven goals and six assists. I think somebody with the talent he has in his boots, with the ability we know he’s got for finishing and assisting, as well as his previous outputs in the last couple of seasons, would probably have set himself the target of 35+ goals and assists as a minimum. We’re over halfway, and he’s on seven goals and six assists. I think if we are going to win the league, his output needs to certainly be upped significantly in the second half of the season.

And I back him to do it, by the way, because he’s so supremely talented, as well as being a guy who has already proved it over several seasons previously. Heck, last season he spent a third of the season out injured and still got 12 goals and 14 assists, so him getting to…say…18 goals, plus 17 assists in circa 30 games (if he stays fit) feels like something that could certainly be achievable this season. He probably needs to get his shooting boots back on (has anybody else noticed that his radar has been a little off of late? He seems to have been ballooning a few of those trademark ‘cut inside and curl it’ finishes – or is that just me?), but if there’s one player in this Arsenal team you’d back to do that, it is Bukayo Saka.

As a quick aside, I do find it amusing that the club are always so late in announcing these things, in comparison to when the news breaks. I’m sure there’s not a lot they can do to control that. I’m sure what they wanted to do is do a nice video and announce it to make everyone feel warma nd fuzzy inside, but it always feels a little ‘after the Lord Mayor’s party’ vibe when they do these videos because a journo has leaked the announcement first. But there you go. That’s modern football, I guess.

Will Saka play tomorrow? I doubt it. I’d be really surprised if he starts, anyway. There might be a place for him on the bench if things start to go a little tit’s-up, but looking ahead to that Portsmouth game, it really feels like the manager needs to be flexing the squad muscles a little more. Portsmouth are currently in a relly scrap at the bottom of the Cham,pionship, lost their last game 5-0 away to Bristol City and whilst they have picked up a couple wins at home recently against Charlton and Blackburn and are unbeaten at home since a 1-0 defeat to Bristol City in November, you’d have to think that a rotated Arsenal team has enough to overcome them. I had a little look on Fbref to see what sort of side Portsmouth are and this is what the data told me:

  • Second-lowest xG in the Championship
  • Mid-table for xG allowed
  • Mid-table for shots against them and shots on target against them
  • Third-highest number of launched balls in the Championship from their keeper
  • Second-highest number of long passes over 40 yards in the league

So I look at those ‘top line’ metrics and think this is a team that will a) go long at every opportunity, b) let Arsenal have the ball, and c) try to maintain compact and defensive in their shape. But, interestingly, they are in the top five teams in the Championship who have won the most tackles in the attacking third. So clearly they adopt an aggressive ‘defend from the front’ approach, but that doesn’t strike me as a side that just sits in a low block. They also don’t have a high number of blocks either, which is what you tend to see from a team that sits in a low block with plenty of bodies in midfield. So I do think this will be an interesting encounter and certainly the home crowd will be up for it, but will we see Portsmouth forced into a low block by the sheer weight of possession and territory we are likely to try to command? We’ll have to wait and see.

I’ll leave it there for today ,I think. I’ve got a mountain of Saturday chores to do, so I should probably get out of me PJs and on with it.

Catch you all tomorrow for a match preview.