One man’s happiness is another man’s sadness. That is certainly the case for teammates Jurrien Timber and Christos Tzolis, after The Netherlands absolutely battered the Greeks last night.

Jurrien actually got two goals from left back, so he’ll be more than happy with his lot on the evening, but Tzolis will want to forget his night, with just one shot on target and one blocked shot. Still, at least he was at the other end of the pitch to where all the damage was done, because if you’re a Greek defender, you’re probably having a few nightmares last night. Jurrien’s goals were interesting. One was a proper poacher’s one, tapped in from the centre of the six-yard box. You know how last season we joked about him taking headers or chances off of Big Vik??! Yeah, that LOL. His second arriving at the back post was after nobody tracked him and nobody cut out a ball right across the six-yard box again, so like I say, there will be some Greek defenders who won’t want to do the post-match video analysis for that one…

But Max Dowman won’t have been. He made his debut for the under-21s last night alongside Ethan Nwaneri and looked every bit at home on the ball, put in one particularly good whipped cross from the left-hand side, and seemed to have a good game overall. Apparently, he’s now the youngest under-21 debutant since…Jude Bellingham. Impressive company to keep. And when you think that in this full men’s England team there are two ‘main men’ in Kane and Bellingham, it kind of gives you an idea of the potential trajectory of Max if he keeps improving as we’ve seen. It’s frustrating that we still won’t see him until the City game because of his ridiculous suspension, but I guess even that is a learning curve moment for the teenager.

Elsewhere, last night Kai Havertz got 73 minutes for Germany in their 3-1 win over Serbia, but it doesn’t look (on paper at least) as if he had the best of games. Germany won 3-1, but FOTBMOB has Kai at 6.9 out of 10 and, when you think about how Serbia were down to 10 men and nearly all of the German team played into the 7.7s or above, whilst some of his teammates made hay, our big German seemed to continue the awkward run of form he’s in at the moment.

It’s a funny one with Kai, and I certainly feel a bit torn, because I think all of us can agree he’s the technically better option for us up top compared to Big Vik. But his form has been patchy at best for some time now, and when you’re going for the top honours, you can’t really afford to be carrying players. But Kai feels like the type of guy who probably needs an arm around the shoulder. There are players who you kind of need to just keep playing back into form, and that’s the challenge Arteta has with Havertz. Remember when we signed him? One of the early games was that absolutely horror-show game against United, in which I vividly recall an absolutely shocking miss for an open-goal tap-in. That was his first season and it was also shortly followed by the penalty at Bournemouth; won by somebody else but given to Kai by his teammates to help build his confidence up. I think it did work, because by the end of the season we saw the guy that we’ve come to love. But where we’re at right now, I wonder if, given the competition for places, Big Vik is knocking on the door of a return to the starting XI?

We might get an idea of that tonight, because Gyokeres will no doubt start for Sweden against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Stockholm tonight. If he plays, plays well, and keeps his impressive international scoring form up, then I’m sure Arteta will have been watching and will be having some questions he’ll be asking himself about who lines up next weekend away at Newcastle. I think it’s a very close call at this stage.

To round up the other action from some of the international friendlies last night, Pierro Hincapie played the full 90 and got an assist for Ecuador against Costa Rica, which I think, given he’s only really now coming back from his recent injury, is probably good for Arsenal as it is for him. Brazil are over the other side of the world again in Japan, so that’s Bruno and Gabi who will be traipsing their arses over multiple time zones, and I have to ask: Why is it that every other continent seems to be doing friendlies, whilst we’re forcing players to play in these stupidly semi-competitive UEFA Nations League nonsense games? What is the point other than to just load players with even more minutes they could probably do without?

Anyway…Tonight there’s also Martin in action for Norway against the Welsh, so we have to just hope he comes through unscathed, before we rinse and repeat with Italy at Belgium, France at home to Turkey (although no Saliba, so we don’t have to worry about that, as well as England travelling to Spain, in which I hope every Arsenal player involved in that game is sat with their tracksuit and zip-up jackets on for the full 90. I won’t hold my breath, though.

Catch you all tomorrow as we work out who has had limbs severed off by some clobbermeister.

Laters kids.