Suburban Gooners – Arsenal Blog
Eze could become the ‘sour taste in the mouth’
Let's do some 'real talk' here, shall we? Because it looks like - if Fabrizio Romano is to be believed - that the Scum are advancing talks ahead of us to get Eze out of Palace. The 'real talk' bit is that as much as many of us would like to, there'll be no rowing [...]
The dominoes need to fall for Arsenal if Eze is to become a ‘thing’
The sheer volume of cash that floats around the Premier League is mental, isn't it? I mean, when you get newly promoted Sunderland about to drop £51million plus add-ons (because you have to always talk about the add-ons these days, it seems) for Lois Openda from RB Leipzig, it really hits home. This is a [...]
VAR, PGMOL and a sense of familiarity brewing ahead of the new season
How does the old saying go? Nothing is certain but death and taxes...and Liverpool getting a VAR decision in their favour I watched the second half of the Community Shield game in my garden as I was prepping some food for the grill and I don't know what Arne Slot was seeing, but when he [...]
All the boxes ticked in Arsenal’s Bilbao victory
Well now, that was more like it, eh? Arsenal’s final pre season friendly of this summer ended with a pretty emphatic 3-0 win against a Champions League Athletic Bilbao, with boxes ticked all over the shop, including: Big Gabby returning to start Calafiori on the pitch for valuable minutes Timber shaking off his knock and [...]
Full strength big guns for Bilbao
It’s the final friendly of the 2025 pre season today and it’s The Emirates Cup for Arteta and his lads. I have to say I preferred the old Emirates Cup format of two matches per day and played over the Saturday and Sunday, but they keep it to one these days and there’s probably a [...]
Weighing up “it’s a friendly” against some concerns Arsenal fans have
It’s a curious thing, is pre season, because you can have your concerns about performances, but not about results. It’s a real juxtaposition to the real thing, in which ultimately the opposite is true. Due to work commitments I managed to catch from minute 28 of the game against Villareal last night and found myself [...]
Villareal part of Arteta’s careful friendly selection process
It's another friendly match day today for The Arsenal and I'm intrigued to see how we line up tonight against Villareal. Will we see a pretty much first team rock up against the Spanish side? Or will it be a blended side from the start like in the Asian tour? equally, will we have a [...]
Sell…Sell!…Sell?
Morning folks and let me bestow unto thee a most happy of Tuesday's. The sun is out in London, The Arsenal are back in the country and a new kit dropped to keep those merch-starved fans sated for at least another week until the next training kit is launched at some stage in August no [...]
How much stock to take in other teams’ friendlies?
Morning folks and welcome to Monday. I had family over and coupled that with a bit of a two-day hangover, so didn't blog this weekend, but thankfully not a lot really happened in the Arsenal world, as the players headed back to the UK and today they kick off the proper pre season prep ahead [...]
The ‘Meh’ NLD hasn’t really taught us anything we didn’t already know
Having not watched any of our pre season friendlies - and I think I should probably underline the word friendly for today's blog of context - I wasn't going to start yesterday lunchtime by watching us play The Scum. But I followed what was going on and have also read a few match reports and seen [...]