How mental is that?

I am a season ticket holder. I have been going for decades and have been a season ticket holder for nearly two decades. I have achieved the requirement for home ticket allocation this season. I have always promised myself that, come hell or high water, if Arsenal ever get to a European Cup final of any level, I will be there. It is a real ‘bucket list’ thing. It’s something I’ve dreamed of. In 2006 is was 23-years-old, in my first job, I hadn’t got my season ticket yet, and I couldn’t have afforded the trip either, given that I was only just a year into my first job. I was gutted I couldn’t experience it, but at that age, and with our recent history of winning trophies, I always thought “there will be another opportunity”.

When we reached the Europa League Final in 2019, I said: “I’m going”. I was convinced that, despite some of the murmurings about how difficult it is to travel to Baku, I would find a way. Well, we all know what a farce that was, with tickets being given out to the locals because of the sheer lack of available travel plans for normal fans.

Yet here we are, 20 years after that 2006 Paris final. Seven years after Baku, and normal match-going fans are once again being shafted. If I put myself in the ballot, the chances are that even if I am fortunate enough to be one of the circa 25% of fans that might get my ticket, I’m going to be asked to pay £821 for my ticket. £821. For a football match.

It is a disgrace. UEFA are a disgrace.

I was asked on BBC London yesterday evening to talk about it – I dumbed down how I was feeling for obvious reasons. But I am furious.

By the way, I know this is an ‘us’ problem now, but it has been a problem for all fans for several years. I had a quick check at the price of tickets for fans in Munich last season. The same. The top category was the same price. The second was €650. The third was €180. Yet you can bet your bottom dollar there will be plenty of neutral ‘influencers’ who make their way to that final at the end of May.

F*ck UEFA. They have priced fans out of football yet again. And have been doing it for years.

This should still be one or two more days of basking in the glow of a Champions League Final. Yet I am having sleepless nights on whether or not I have to essentially spend a big chunk of my monthly wage packet, for a 24-hour trip to Budapest. And I find myself having to seriously consider whether I can afford it. I am literally being priced out of watching my team play in a game they haven’t played in 20 years.

There will be people who read this and think “Boo-f*cking-hoo. You get to go to games, you can clearly afford the season ticket, and there are those in the world who can’t even dream of even watching one game in their life in the Premier League, let alone a Champions League final,” and I get it. I appreciate that I am lucky. But just because of that, it shouldn’t make me feel any less outraged at the prohibitive nature of what many consider a working person’s sport. It isn’t. It is for the ultra-rich. It is for the one-percenters. Probably the 0.1%-ers, actually, and that stinks. Football should not be marginalised. It should be something that everyone has the opportunity to be part of as a fan. It stinks.

And it’s worse for the World Cup. I’m not going to go to America, I have no interest in watching that live, but I saw something on Sky Sports yesterday, in which there was a ticket on sale for $11million. Yep – you did not read that wrong. One ticket to the World Cup Final for that money. That is the worst football-related ticketing thing I have ever seen in my life. Land of the free and home of the broke if you want to be a football fan in the States. Oh, unless you’re a billionaire, or some kind of Instagram influencer like that Speed twat. I bet he’ll be on the pitch in Budapest at some stage, doing the stupid noises that he does.

Sorry, a bit ranty this morning, but it’s hard, you know? This was meant to be a joyous occasion. But I just feel frustrated at the ticketing news. And some go home and away. These people deserve priority, of course they do, but you can’t tell me that 16,824 tickets for Arsenal fans is acceptable in a 67,000-seater stadium. That’s not right. That’s a farce.

But as the ‘ordinary folk’, there’s nothing we can do. We are just the riff raff. We don’t count in football. And every fan from every team that has played in the competition for years has complained about pricing. But it has got worse last season and this season. Do you want to know how much the most expensive price was in 2024 at Wembley?

£610. Here is the official UEFA website to show that price.

In euro’s that is €705. This season it is €950. That is a 35% price increase in two years for the most expensive ticket. During that time in the change in inflation value (which you can calculate on the Bank of England website here) has gone up by 5.2. So £610 in 2024 is the equivalent cost (as of March 2026) of £641.45. So even if you take inflation into account, UEFA has jacked the prices up last year and this year by 28%. They are passing on an additional third of the price of the ticket to the fans. An utter joke.

Right, I’ll leave it there for now. On the upside, if you want some more content to feast on from the actual football side, Amanda and James did a post-Atleti pod last night which you can watch here if you like. Other than that, I’ll be back tomorrow as we look ahead to that massive game against West Ham. See you then.

I am convinced of it.

Diego Simeone was waving his arms around like a lunatic. He was encroaching on the referee. He was barking and hollering, and so was the crowd. And last night’s referee just played to that gallery.

Let’s look at the facts here, boys and girls:

1. Eze gets to the ball first
2. There is contact by the Atletico Madrid defender
3. It is inside the box

It. Is. A. Penalty. Now, what you could argue is that the contact was, indeed, minimal. And because of that, if the referee doesn’t give it, you’d have me saying things like “tight call, but it’s not a stonewaller of a penalty”. And then you go with the on-field decision. But when the referee gives the penalty, there is ZERO chance that it shouldn’t be given. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. No way should that have been re-refereed in the way it was.

And yet here we are. Simeone is a prick. Afterwards, he supposedly (can’t find the exact quote but some journalists mention it on social media) laughably tried to claim Gyokeres’ penalty shouldn’t have stood because he backed into the Atletico player. Utter deflection, because his side had been edged out in the second half, and I thought we’d played really well to go one-up in the break. Their home fans were loud and raucous for the opening exchanges. Atleti started well and fed off that, but once we rallied and started getting on the ball, I thought we looked composed and in control. You could tell that Atletico Madrid were going to show us respect; this is a swashbuckling Spanish side who bag a lot of goals, but they were remaining tight and compact in their shape, and at times I was watching this game seeing a back five from the home side. That is a compliment to what we were doing in possession, and I thought the back four, particularly, were good.

Arteta changed it a bit, and I think it is a blueprint we need to think about moving forward, because Rice was playing the deeper of the two midfielders, with Zubi just in front of him, and that also enabled us to move to a back three at times and give us more passing lanes. It was good from the manager, and even though we still had that dreaded front three, we had a few chances. I still think between them, Martinelli and Trossard, when he came on, didn’t offer enough on that left-hand side, but Madueke was better.

And so too was Gyokeres, who notched his 19th of the season, and never in my life have I been more convinced that a player would score penalties than the big Swede. We all have our issues with Gyokeres; he’s been frustrating at times this season, but when it comes to finishing and penalties, the ball stays hit, and you know we are going to score.

That’s why the Eze penalty is also such a disgrace, because Gyokeres absolutely would have tucked it away to win us the game, and then you’re talking about bringing a one-goal lead back to your own turf. We’ve been robbed of that, and it’s a real shame because although Atletico were better in the second half, there was still so much positive to take from the way Arsenal handled the game overall.

On the Ben White penalty, I think Arteta handled that perfectly too, afterwards, admitting that it isn’t given in the Premier League, but it is in Europe, so we have to stomach it. Atletico had other chances too. Raya made a couple of good saves, Griezmann hit the bar, plus big Gabi made a tremendous block to deny the Frenchman. We rode our luck at points, but there’s no doubt in my mind, the luck was more with the home side than ours by the time the final whistle came along.

So where do we find ourselves now? How am I feeling this morning?

Actually, pretty good, if truth be told. We went to a tough ground, with a partisan home crowd and a barking manager, we came away with a draw. We can all be annoyed by the end, but before a ball would have kicked, I’d have taken an away draw to turn our home game into a knockout. Away goals mean nothing anymore, so this match next week is effectively one in which all is decided on the night. And having home advantage has to make you feel more confident.

I also think Arteta has some ammo now. We got minutes into Saka’s legs, Calafiori is available, Eze also got on the pitch so he should be fine for Saturday, Rice and Zubi had great games. The only question is with Odegaard, who came off and I read that he was getting some treatment on the sideline. We have to just hope that it’s nothing massive and he can have a day or two off and be ready for the game against the Cottagers on Saturday evening, because we need everyone now.

Arteta can use this injustice on the Atletico game, but he can also use the performance for Saturdaay too. The team can take confidence from the game and given that Saturday’s game is an evening kick off and hopefully the weather is good like last weekend, the home fans might just be feeling a little more boistrous than we would have done if we’d have lost last night.

We didn’t lose. we played pretty good. There is some confidence that can get built back up now. And so on to Saturday, in which another big match looms and Arsenal simple MUST win.

Back tomorrow as we start to prep for that one. See you then.

1. I predicted the line-up spot on
2. Max Dowman

Perhaps you could also point to the impact Viktor Gyokeres made from the bench, following up his goals for Sweden with a smartly taken finish to draw us level in that second half at St Mary’s Stadium, but the rest of the evening was pretty disastrous, if we’re all honest with ourselves.

There were some proper stinkers of performances. I mean, some really bad ones, that could effectively crystallise in Arteta’s mind who he will rely more and more on for the remainder of this season. For example, Gabriel Jesus, who was utterly anonymous on a day in which I had held some faint hope that he would seize this moment to have his manager ask questions. But the only questions anyone should be asking of Jesus right now are:

How on earth are you STILL earning that much money?

He and Martinelli stunk the place out from an attacking point of view. It was one of those Martinelli performances for which those who advocate that he’s a super sub and that’s about it, are people you can hardly argue with, because he made it quite obvious that he doesn’t deserve a start against Sporting on Tuesday.

But weirdly, unacceptably, whilst the misfiring attack (Dowman aside) is something we have seen a fair bit of, of late, what we haven’t seen is a shaky defence. Mistimed passes (Mosquera’s horizontal one in the second half that led to a chance springs to mind), unforced errors (Myles Lewis-Skelly massively overhitting another horizontal pass to the full back on the other side), and mistimed headers (Gabriel, then Ben White for their first goal) were rife in yesterday’s performance. That is very out of character.

I’ve taken a few pelters for a message I put on social media at the time of their first goal, but I will stick by it again this morning, because Alan Shearer had said Southampton deserved to be ahead. The numbers told a different story. It was their second shot, and first on target, when they scored. We’d had 11 shots and their keeper had made good saves. We were the better team up until that point. The only difference was that they took their opportunity, and you have to say that’s what it is all about, so fair play to them.

Arsenal’s response was not what we had wanted, and Southampton troubled us with long balls that we didn’t deal with. I thought that we were sloppy, half-hearted in the duels, and that is something that Arteta will be infuriated with this morning. You have to give Southampton credit, because their game plan was pretty spot on; get ahead, then tuck in and see if we could break them down. Even after we equalised, they were content to play on the break and that worked for them. They deserve to go to Wembley. We do not.

And we are left to lick our wounds again. For the second match in a row. I’m torn between being really worried about this performance, coupled with the one against City, and recognising the specifics behind it. No doubt we were poor against City in the League Cup, but some of our absences forced us to do something that City were able to counter. Last night, because of some of the absences, we were again forced to do something different, because I don’t think Arteta wanted to risk this competition, as he had his eyes on Sporting Lisbon on Tuesday.

One thing for certain, there are a few players out there who will only be used if there is injury or extreme fatigue now, I think. Kepa, White, MLS, Norgaard, Martinelli, Jesus – all of those players will, I think, be spending a fair bit of time on the bench now. We have two games left to play this season, and I think Arteta will obviously ring the changes for Tuesday and Bournemouth at home in the Premier League.

And that needs to bring about a change in performance, too. We can’t have that many errors from an Arsenal team going for big trophies. Yesterday showed us that when you do make that volume of mistakes, you get punished. It is even more acute in the Champions League and Premier League. Arsenal need to change a few things.

The Gabriel injury is a worry, too. I am crossing everything this morning that it is a “if you feel anything, just come off” situation, and he was rubbing that knee that has caused him some problems. Arteta invariably said afterwards, “I don’t know” when asked about the severity of it. If Gabriel is out for the season now, all our faith goes into Mosquera. He wasn’t amazing yesterday, but he’s shown how good he can be. The only worry is that with Hincapie also potentially injured for a while, we’re getting to a point where we’re going to have to rely on those understudies. Yesterday, they showed plenty of flaws for players who hadn’t played much.

Either side of the international break I had thoughts about how these few weeks could define our season. We’re 0/2 on season-defining results now. That has to change.

I feel sad that we are out of this competition. But I am going to feel a lot sadder if we put in another performance like that against Sporting, then follow that up again against Bournemouth next weekend. If I heard that some of the absent players yesterday were rested and will be back to 100% by Tuesday I’d probably start to feel a little easier about this result, because the Premier League is everything and the Champions League is the second jewel that we want to try to snaffle. But at this stage, there are still a lot of question marks over who will be available. Let’s hope that tomorrow, when Arteta talks to the press, he can provide some crumbs of comfort.

I’m going to try to end on a more positive note. Max Dowman. Wowsers. I know we need to temper our superlatives and let the boy grow in to this team, but he once again showed he’s ready to make an impact. He can play in that wide right position. He is ready. Southampton look like a Premier League team in waiting and he was great against them. Like he’s been great in all of the performances he’s had this season. He showed somebody like Martinelli what you should be doing as a wide forward. I think he needs to be considered as a ‘next one up’ if Arteta wants to change things in attack now. What a talent we have. Let’s hope we use him to more effect for the remainder of the season – it could be our ‘ace in the hole’, as they say in cards.

Catch you all tomorrow as we try to forget yesterday’s mess, and look towards Sporting Lisbon.

At this point, you just have to laugh. Because the latest guy to return to London Colney is Pierro Hincapie, who limped off against Morocco on 72 minutes, and I have to wonder what the actual eff he was still doing on the pitch at that moment. If he’s playing 45 to 60 minutes, I guess you have to say ‘fine’, but he’s on the pitch until the 72nd minute, and given he’s one of the best players for Ecuador, one has to wonder what the point of this was. Does the coach need to get an extra look at him? Of course not. This was pointless and now we have ourselves another player who could be crocked.

Honestly, at this point, it is just farcical. And then I check the sports websites and newspapers to read that Martin Zubimendi has also now been withdrawn with a knee injury.

What the frigg is going on?

These players should never have been called up to these pointless international friendlies. They should have been told that their place is secure and they should be resting up.

Of course, you now have a raft of opposition fans who are bleating about Arsenal withdrawing their players, but as a team, we are still fighting in three competitions, and these players are clearly knackered, so this should have been a decision taken out of their hands. All of them should have been told that they were fine to stay at home and not report for training. The only players who should have been called up are those who need the minutes. The White’s, the Norgaard’s, the Havertz’s – all fine. But Zubimendi? No way he should have been told to report.

And for those idiots who are now blasting out YouTube and TikTok videos calling this a disgrace – you’re a new level of moron. The players, and the clubs themselves, have to provide medical information for those players who are called up by their international sides. They have to show where knocks exist. The Spanish FA has even mentioned discomfort in the knee for Zubimendi; he’s teetering on the edge, and they’ve sent him back to Arsenal.

People are citing Ferguson, but we live in a different age now, because there has to be medical evidence for withdrawing from international duty. There is an obligation by the clubs, probably because of managers like Fergie, who have gamed the system for years and now we find a situation where players are reporting for duty when it is clearly in their interest to be resting up.

So now we have an ‘official’ injury list (in brackets because I think some players are due to come back, but that just hasn’t been confirmed yet) that includes:

• Timber
• Saliba
• Gabriel
• Hincapie
• Zubimendi
• Rice
• Eze
• Odegaard
• Saka
• Madueke
• Trossard

Just 11 players, at the most critical point in the season, who could be out. And the problem we all have as worried Arsenal fans, is that when Arteta does his pre-Southampton press conference, we’re either getting no information from him, or confirmation that a ton of players are out.

This game next weekend feels like it might now be one that Arteta basically throws by rotating out a lot of the above. And do you know what will happen if he does that? He’ll get accused of disrespecting the FA Cup.

Ludicrous.

Away from that though, because I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, I find it interesting that the discussions over Man City and the 115 charges have resurfaced over the last few days. And I thought the discussion that Tom Canton popped up on the Football London website was interesting yesterday. And I agree with Tom about his assertion on a possible points deduction happening towards the end of the season. Because if we do what we all hope we will do and win the league (fingers crossed, touch wood, etc, etc), that last thing you want is the 115 Charges being used against us to asterisk any kind of title.

Ultimately, none of us will care if we win the league, but it would be annoying to see this all unfold just at the point at which we want to be celebrating. Utopia for me would be for us to win the league, then the 60-point deduction to be applied for next season. Let’s have City start off at the bottom of the table and go from there in 2026/27, because I want a purity about the Premier League win, however, come back to me after the Bournemouth and City games, because if we lose both of those I think I’ll be taking that deduction buffer!

There’s not a lot else going on right now, so I think I’ll park any further thoughts for today. I’ll be back on the Same Old Arsenal pod tonight, as Amanda and I are doing a bit of an international break check-in, so if you fancy joining us at 5.45 pm UK time, you can do so here. Otherwise, I’ll leave you all be for today and catch you again tomorrow, when we learn that Raya has broken his fingers whilst in training for Spain.

But Saka? And Rice?

Apparently, according to the official England Football website, it is for ‘medical assessment.’ Now, there are two ways in which this has gotten to this point:

1. The players picked up knocks in England training and therefore the club and Thomas Tuchel have to send them back
2. Mikel Arteta and Arsenal have sh*t a brick at the news of Noni and has told Tommy T to pull them from the game.

I pray, for the love of all that is good and holy in the world, that we are talking about scenario 2 here. Because if it is one, then the list I spelled out in yesterday’s blog, just got really scary indeed. In fact, if those two are added to those who have knocks right now, we’re almost at the point of being able to field a full XI of injured players, such are the question marks that will now surround the Arsenal squad going into that game at Southampton on Saturday night.

I really hope to god that Arteta was like “nope, not happening, get your arses to Colney, NOW”

I’m also now playing a bit of a game in my head, which includes trying to imagine what the starting XI would be at Southampton at this moment in time, if none of the current players who are fit could play. The back line is pretty do-able, but it’s when we get to the front line that I have to really think about how we plug the gaps:

Kepa

White   –   Mosquera   –   Hincapie   –   Lewis-Skelly

Norgaard

Dowman   –   Havertz

Harriman-Annous   –   Jesus   –   Martinelli

That’s not even an ideal team, to be honest with you, because we ideally want to be easing White, Hincapie, Havertz, and Martinelli back, given they have all been away with their respective international teams. White broke down the last time we overplayed him, but I think you’d have to earmark the Southampton game as one in which he should play, because surely Arteta will have Timber earmarked for Sporting away and Bournemouth at home. Those are the two bigger games out of the next three, with all due respect to Southampton and the FA Cup. You could argue that we have a second bite of the cherry in Sporting Lisbon, given it is a two-legged affair, but I think Arteta is going to want all players fit and available for that and Bournemouth. So I think this news about Saka and Rice is one that will mean we probably won’t see them on Saturday. I think I’m fine with that. It will have meant that by the time the Sporting game comes along, Rice and Saka will have had 16 days off from playing football. Hopefully that is enough time for them to have rested an recouperated, because as much as Saka has been in and out of form this season, he is still one of our best players. With Noni no doubt out for a while now (let’s be honest, we’re all waiting for the Athletic scoop telling us his season is over), keeping him fit is even more important.

When I look at the others in that team that I’ve picked as a possible lineup for Saturday:

• Mosquera hasn’t played a ton of football (he’s got 1,400+ minutes this season so far in all comps), so he’s fine to come in, and he’ll be buoyed by his international debut
• Hincapie too, was injured at the start of the season – he’s just over 2,000+ minutes this season
• Lewis-Skelly and Norgaard will be fine
• Dowman will be looking to impress
• Jesus has been a bit-part player for some time
• Harriman-Annous has just 86 minutes all season
• Martinelli has been second to Trossard of late, so he might be alright

So it really is just Havertz, Hincapie, and White that I’d be keeping an eye on, fitness-wise, and all three have games still to play. Let’s just cross everything that nothing happens to any of them.

Anyway, let’s not end on a negative, let’s end on a positive note today. And that positive was an Arsenal heritage scoreline, as the ladies beat The Scum ladies 5-2, with an Alessia Russo hat-trick to down the tiny Tottenham. This wasn’t the hairy-scary performance that the men delivered two years on the trot back in the day, though. The ladies were two goals up within 10 minutes, then given an absolute gift by the Spurs keeper to make it 3-1. It was the very definition of a ‘Spursy’ bit of goalkeeping, that. It’s good to see that the ladies know how to conduct themselves against the old enemy – that’s by battering them wherever they go. Good work ladies. That’s 13 goals scored in the men’s and women’s leagues this season. Love it.

Right, I’m going to leave it there, I think. Have yourselves a wonderful Sunday, and I’ll be back tomorrow with some more thoughts.

I didn’t watch the game (because why would I bother?), but having listened to Tuchel on Thursday, I think most of us knew the sort of treatment he’d get. The media have played their part in this, too, big time, I’m afraid. It’s people like Henry Winter who have felt compelled to make comments like this, or Martin Samuel of The Times, quoting:

England fans like winning, but they still don’t like players who walk out on the team at a World Cup.

Well, Martin, you of all people know the story behind the reasons for Ben’s exodus, and you know very well that Ben White just didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide he didn’t like England anymore. The good folks over at The Daily Cannon have reposted this yesterday, which I think is worth a link to. Steve Holland is clearly an idiotic, archaic, “Proper Football Man” the likes Yer Da would love. Go back to the late 80s, mate, football ain’t for you anymore.

That Telegraph article from the time leaves a few bits out, but there are also rumours that White didn’t want to discuss tactics of Arsenal whilst in an England camp, whilst the City players didn’t mind, which also sounds very plausible. But the very fact that Ben has come back into this England team and scored that goal, you’d hope that everyone will just drop it. But let’s just see, shall we?

AS for our other involvement on the night, of course we have another injury as a result of f*cking international football, as Madueke was seen after the game in a knee brace, having gone off on 39 minutes. Honestly, these f*cking internationals during the season can just f*ck the f*ck off. I’m sick of them. Players get chewed up and spat back to their clubs to deal with the fallout. With Eze likely to be out for at least another three weeks according to reports, it means that once again we’ll have to become over-reliant on players. And that has been happening all season. Odegaard is out, so Eze comes in. Eze gets injured just as Odegaard goes down. Timber plays all the time and gets injured, then White comes in and gets overplayed. It’s a never-ending cycle when you have players who keep going down. I was wondering about whether this is now worse than last season or not, so I took a little look at the ‘absences’ chart on TransferMarkt for last season and this season. I’m not counting what I would call ‘youth’ players, but perhaps any player who has played more than three times in a season. Last season we had a total squad absence of 196 match-day absences across the squad in the Premier League alone. This season so far we have lost 144 absences. From last year 37 of those 196 were because of Tomiyasu who was basically in the squad on registration only. So if you take him out, last season we had 159 by the end of the season. Depending on how long some of the current injured players are out for, we could eclipse last season, which I dubbed “The Cursed Season,” when we were in it by the end. It’s so frustrating. We just can’t catch a break and, from a position about a week ago where we had an almost fit squad bar Odegaard and Merino, the current list of players absent who have an injury is:

1. Saliba
2. Gabriel
3. Merino
4. Odegaard
5. Eze
6. Trossard

Hopefully, some of those are just knocks, and we see players returning next week, and the noises are that Odegaard will be back, but still, this is silly now.

Elsewhere, Havertz got 63 minutes and came off along with Leroy Sane on 63 minutes, as Germany beat Switzerland 4-3, so that says to me, I think he’s fine. Hopefully, Nagelsmann is sensible and keeps him on the bench for their next game. Rodri played 77 minutes in their 3-0 win over Serbia, and Zubimendi came on for the Man City knobhead, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see that switch around for their game against Egypt on Tuesday. Ideally, you want him to play no part, but clearly, he’s getting on the pitch. Kudos, though, for Cristhian Mosquera, who made his international debut last night as an 83-minute sub. 100% deserved for a player who has stunned us all with just how good he is this season, and I don’t think many Arsenal fans aren’t delighted for him this morning.

There was no place for Raya, though, which I have to say, is a bit bloody weird if you ask me. I know I don’t watch enough football, but the little I have seen of Unai Simon kind of baffles me, that our chap isn’t the main man between the sticks. I know Simon is good with the ball, but better than Raya? And in terms of shot-stopping? Is he really as elite as Raya has shown himself to be? A quick search online tells me his weaknesses are that he has lapses of concentration, technical errors in ball control and his handling is at times questioned. There’s also this article here that suggests that many believe Raya or Garcia should be the number one.

Still, at least it reduces the chances of injury to David, which is important given how much of a delta we’ve seen between him and Kepa very recently, of course.

The other guy that got minutes from our squad yesterday was Pierro Hincapie, who came off on 72 minutes, in clearly an effort from the Ecuadorian boss to appease Arteta. Good man management because the way things are going right now with injuries, I fully expect to hear that Calafiori didn’t last the first 45 in Italy’s play-off game on Tuesday night.

Look at that – I’ve managed to write 1,000 words about Arsenal players, and now I’m grumpy. I should probably leave it there. Hopefully, some kind of good news story can come out from the Athletic or somewhere, because it feels like we need it.

Catch you all tomorrow kids.

So I want to take this moment to offer a public apology to all of you guys who read my ramblings regularly: I have let you all down.

I went Uber-positive on Sunday’s blog. It was a break from the norm. I am an apprehensive Arsenal fan. I always have been since the 2006 Champions League final. I went into that so convinced we would win it. Then it broke me when we didn’t. So I turned to pessimism to protect myself and my emotions from that level of heartbreak. I figured if I think about the worst-case scenario in my head, then if/when it happens, I will be prepared for it anyway. If the best thing happens and Arsenal win, I am doubly happy about it because I didn’t expect it.

For the second time that happened to me, which is in my head, you have to fast-forward 13 years to the 2019 Europa League final. I was convinced that we were beating Chelsea. They had already qualified for the Champions League, they had that ridiculous EFL Cup final in which Kepa (I know, I know) had refused to come off, and then they lost on penalties. They, of course, wanted to win something, but our need was greater, so I was convinced our design would get us over the line. Oh, and we had MR Europa League in Unai Emery too.

We all know how that went.

On Sunday, I had that same conviction, but we all know how that went. And I don’t want to labour the point here too much, but as the dust was settling and we were starting to all think yesterday “it’s fine, we have three more competitions to go for”, the Football Gods decided to clearly read my blog and go “ooh man, we’re are screwing you royally for this”. By ‘the’, I of course mean my proclamation on yesterday’s blog:

My hope is that we don’t get any wind of news that any of the injuries that are sustained are long-term. If we’re talking players needing a solid 10 – 14 days rest to recover, then happy days – for once, an international break has come at the right time.

Famous last words, eh? Because yesterday Sami Mokbel dropped on us this afternoon, and I found myself thinking “for f*cks sake, why does this sort of sh*t always happen to us?”

I do feel like ever since we had the 2023/24 season of various media pundits saying things like “yeah, well, they haven’t had any injuries” in reference to our good form that season, we’ve had one after the other. It’s certainly coming on 18 months of injury after injury. And this one is a particularly bitter pill to swallow because:

1. Eze was starting to find some form
2. Odegaard was able to recover from injury without being rushed back
3. We have been told – and are seeing that with our own eyes – that Spring is when he comes alive.

If the timeframes are right, then we are looking at him being out until probably the Newcastle game at the earliest, and with two months of the season left, he’s missing half of it. It’s a massive blow for a player who has been so clutch for us in recent weeks and I feel has started to see his place in the team, delivering end-product with it as well.

The positive, as Sami says in the article, is that Odegaard appears to be back in training, and the club now has at least another 10 days with which to get minutes in his legs at London Colney. Whether or not he goes straight into the team for Southampton needs to be carefully looked at, though, because he’s hardly built up a cadence of games to suggest he’ll be fine to play on Saturday night and then Tuesday night against Sporting Lisbon. This season alone, according to TransferMarkt, he has missed:

• 37 days and seven matches due to a knee problem
• Eight days and two matches due to a knee problem
• 10 days and two matches due to a muscle injury
• 53 days and eight games due to a knee injury
• 13 days and six games due to a shoulder injury

Our captain has missed a total of 121 days, with five injuries and 22 games this season. Arsenal have played 50 matches so far. So Odegaard has missed 44% of ALL matches we’ve played this season. The worry now, with Eze’s injury, is that we are going to be reliant on a guy who has shown that he’s susceptible to injury all season for basically two seasons now. Last season, he missed 15 games in total. So whilst I love him, I think an Odegaard in top form is integral to the way we play, it does feel like we haven’t seen that very much at all this season and I also think it is going to take him time to get back any kind of form and rhythm.

If I’m trying to look at the positives here, I could say that we have other options. But they aren’t fully tested and, frankly, they haven’t exactly delivered amazing results. At the weekend, we had Kai in that midfield role, but after he signed and then switched to playing up front, we all spent the time saying that he wasn’t a midfielder and didn’t do that job as well. He wasn’t great on Sunday, although he’s still coming back from injury, so he’s building his fitness up after a year out. Saka centrally has the possibility of being exciting on paper, but his form is such that we haven’t seen too much of what his potential is for that role and on the weekend, he wasn’t great in it before Noni came on either. That could be the circumstance of that situation; we were just abject on Sunday in that second half anyway, so perhaps we just have to accept that and move on. Perhaps Saka could be something that works there, but with the season reaching a crescendo, it’s hardly optimal that we’re discussing untested options at such a crucial time.

As I said yesterday, and I’ve quoted above, perhaps the other good news is that Arteta and his coaching staff have the next 10 days to think of how they react to this Eze injury, and how they plan an approach that will get Martin Odegaard’s engine up and running again. We are going to need him, plus some of the other options I’ve mentioned, between now and the end of the season for sure.

Catch you all tomorrow.

I am starting this blog the night of the game. I never do that.

This was an unprofessional Arsenal performance.

This was a disgraceful performance.

I am embarrassed.

This is falling apart.

Two wins in nine.

This is a football side who have spent two-thirds of the season being a dominant side, the best side in the league, the ‘Champions-Elect’.

Nope.

This team is crumbling and they are – collectively – falling apart.

That second half is one for the ages. In a bad way. Players lumping the ball. Players hiding in plain sight. A manager who – in his instence to keep Martinelli on the pitch – showed that maybe he is also feeling the pinch and not recognising when difficult decisions need to be made.

I don’t even want to go into details on this game. It was shit. Arsenal were shit. They played a Wolves side who spent most of the game passing the ball to us.

And yet they have found two goals to draw level with us.

Who cares about analysis at this stage? Arsenal just fell apart and our form is a real problem right now.

I don’t want to hear about the others. I don’t want to hear about the fact we are five points clear. City win their game in hand and beat us – which feels certainly feasible, nay – realistic given our record up there – and they are in the driving seat.

This Arsenal team could have turned this Premier League season into a procession. Instead they are delivering unto us torture.

Name me one player who has stepped up in that Wolves game. I can’t. I see scared little boys who played what might end up being the worst team in Premier League in history.

Shame on so many of you Arsenal players.

What’s the point in analysing it? Arsenal were awful. Wolves were awful. Two awful teams played out what felt like a relegation scrap.

Normally, I write 1,000 words for this blog. But what’s the point at this stage?

The North London Derby – against a terrible Tottenham team – could bring more misery. Because if Wolves can do that to us on their own patch, why can’t a Tottenham team with plenty of rest, as well as the incentive of seeing an Arsenal team falling apart.

It feels like a horror show waiting to happen. And right now – I feel like I don’t even want to watch it.

Sorry – you’ll get no positivity from me today.

I’m going to stop now. I’m going to save this as a draft. Then I’m going to wake up tomorrow and look at this again. I don’t think I’ll feel much different. But at least before I post I’ll have a night’s sleep. How much sleep I’ll get I don’t know.

Shambles.

************************************************

The dividing line is the difference a sleep makes. I didn’t get too much sleep. I am still utterly apoplectic with rage. I have re-read my semi-drunken ramblings from last night and I still feel the same. This Premier League season is imploding in front of our very eyes. It is pathetic.

It’s a football media and social media lock down for me now for at least 24 hours I think. SO it’s also debatable whether I’ll blog tomorrow morning too. I probably will, but right now, I just don’t feel like it. And the North London Derby on Sunday is the absolute WORST game to be playing right now.

Laters people.

I watched the United/City game, and I just assumed United would be pants and City cut our lead, not the other way around, so by the time kick off came for our game, I was buzzing.

There’s nothing like a Sean Dyche mid-block slog-fest to quell any excitement, though, eh?

Let’s do some real talk here, though, because I don’t blame or accuse Forest of anything in terms of the game. They are sitting in 17th, they need to pick up points, so having the visitorsto their gaff who are currently top of the league right now was always going to mean they would have to grind something out. So in no way do I mean my Sean Dyche comments as a slight on them. But we’ve seen him do this to us before, and we really should be able to have an answer for it.

When I say “do this before,” I mean Everton at home last season, in which Everton kept their shape, kept their discipline, said to Arsenal, “go on then, see if you can break us down,” and we had no answer that day.

And it appears we had no answer yesterday, although I think that is more on us, than it is on Forest. Because you look at all the data points, you look at the eye test on some of the chances we missed, and this was a 1-0 / 2-0 game in which we were once again profligate on goal.

• Martinelli missed an open goal
• Zubimendi puts wide with a half-cross, half-shot
• Gyokeres put in behind, and Murillo blocks
• Rice hits a shot into the tur,f and Sels palms it wide
• Sels makes a wonder save from a Saka looping header
• Merino heads a Rice ball into the box just wide

By the end of the game, depending on which statistical model you use, we’d created enough xG to bury two chances. But we come away with a big, fat, zero, and I have to look at our attacking display and say it feels like it was just all wrong yesterday. I said pre-game on social media that I didn’t think that Martinelli is quite the right choice for what I suspected Forest under Sean Dyche would do. Here are my words in the morning on the blog:

Martinelli is fresh off a hat-trick last weekend, so he might be a good option, but if Forest sit in a compact shape when we have the ball, Martinelli might be reduced to that kind of game we all dread for him: hugging the touchline, no space to run in behind, touch-touch-touch-byline-cross to nowhere.

As it was, he wasn’t reduced to hugging the touchline, but he didn’t have a great game, wasn’t involved much at all, and when his big moment came to make himself a match-winner, he fluffed his lines at the back post. It was really poor from a guy who is our top scorer this season. But herein lies the problem; Martinelli, as our top scorer, shows that sometimes, we just lack that clinical finish in front of goal. Games like yesterday showed this. We score goals, we all know we do, and we’re one of the top scorers in the Premier League, but games like yesterday are where you go from being in a title race to shutting down a title race. Last season, Liverpool had the likes of Salah, who would just bag in a game like this. Haaland tends to do that too, and that’s also why City won the league two seasons ago. We’re in great shape, we’re seven points clear (although that will be reduced to four today with Villa sure to beat a pretty average Everton side on their own turf), but if we had a monster in front of goal, I think that lead would be so unassailable, that we’d all be wondering what we were going to be wearing to the victory parade in May – even by now.

As it is, because of games like this, as well as the failure to capitalise and frankly, just be better in that second half against Liverpool, we find ourselves seven points clear and not able to really pull away from the chasing pack.

There is, of course, some introspection needed. We ARE seven points clear. But it just doesn’t ‘feel’ to me like we’re acting like champions-elect. Yesterday, we had so many players who were off the pace. We slowed everything down (and not for the first time this season). We allowed Forest to keep in their shape because of the way we slowed everything down. Odegaard dropped an absolute stinker, and, as somebody who is supposed to be our cornerstone in this team, we can’t be having that. I thought the balance of the attack was wrong, and having Gyokeres playing with Martinelli and Madueke on either side just feels pointless. Gabriel Jesus offered nothing when coming on either, so he’s hardly the answer, so perhaps having Merino in there would have been a better call. Certainly, at halftime, you can make those changes. Odegaard dropped a stinker, was hooked before the hour was off, but I think the move was to swap him for Eze and then Gyokeres for Merino. Merino played well when he was on. He offered more threat than Viktor, but giving a player like Eze 11 minutes plus stoppage time to do something isn’t enough. He’s the kind of guy who needs to ‘feel’ his way into the game.

Arteta got his approach all wrong. His assertion that Saka was carrying something doesn’t wash for me. If that’s the case, don’t play Saka in midweek; the Premier League is more important than the League Cup, and Arteta played his strong hand then when he should have been playing it today. I’ll tell you one thing right now, I REALLY hope he doesn’t go strong again for Inter. We have daylight in the Champions League, we have another home game against a Kairat team at the bottom of the whole league, and we can rotate heavily and still should be beating. And if we do that, then that’s 21 points confirmed, even if we lose to Inter and it confirms a top-two spot. There should be no reason for playing a strong team in midweek. Manchester United is priority number one, and seeing them with their new manager bounceback yesterday, we need to make sure we are ready, because they will have a whole week to prepare for us.

I’ll say a final word on the penalty incident. Firstly, you can’t be relying on the referee to get you out of games like this. We needed to have taken our other chances, and then this would have become an incidental situation. But that’s a penalty. I’m not sure how you can cup the ball with your hand to try to keep it in play inside the box and it not be a penalty. When VAR looks at that and says, “It came off his shoulder first,” I have to just laugh. He LITERALLY tried to keep the ball in play with his arm. You can’t say that hitting the shoulder should have any distance. No doubt we’ll have some Dermot Gallagher gaslighting on Ref Watch tomorrow, but it’s a penalty; we’ve been shafted a bit there. But we shafted ourselves by not taking our chances.

Unfortunately, I’ve said I’d do a post-game show with Amanda and James in which we talk about this game, which was hardly a classic. But if you want to join us, you can do so – click here at 1 pm, where we’ll be going live.

*A few moments later…*

Yeah, that was basically me last night as, post making and eating dinner, I had a little scroll on my timeline to see:

Arsenal continuing to assess Gabriel amid concerns 27yo could miss 1-2 months through injury sustained on international duty. Initial indications suggest #AFC centre-back set for spell out but tests ongoing
W/ @gunnerblog.bsky.social for @theathleticfc.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/athletic/681…

[image or embed]

— David Ornstein (@david-ornstein.bsky.social) 18 November 2025 at 17:18

“Great” I thought. And just bloody predictable. But the night wasn’t done there, with Fabrizio then appearing on my timeline with:

Nagelsmann: “Kai Havertz had minor relapse on his injury, but overall he’s doing well”. “He is expected to return towards the end of the year”.

[image or embed]

— Fabrizio Romano (MIRROR) (@fabrizioromano.yopro20.com) 18 November 2025 at 17:29

Super stuff, if true and to be fair, he’s just repeating the words of the German national team coach. But honestly, this news bloody sucks. I think a lot of us were hoping to have some exciting news regarding a number of players, but this Havertz stuff is a massive blow and as my mate Cookie pointed out on his social media last night  the amount of time Havertz has missed in 2025 is mental. Given that about a week before he picked up his first big injury at the beginning of the year we had Arteta talking about how Havertz is a ‘genetic powerhouse‘ it makes me feel like sometimes we are bloody cursed. It’s like we’re not allowed to say anything, or think anything, because it could literally manifest itself into existence. The injuries we’ve had in the last year and a bit have been crazy and by the sounds of this – as yet to be confirmed by the club – series of setbacks, it shows no sign of abating just yet.

Just let us play football with our players. Please. It’s getting mental now.

Let’s not sugar goat this either; Big Gabi out for one, or two months, is huge. We’re on 19th November now, if it is worse-case scenario, he misses out until mid-bloody-January. There’s so many games during that time, it’s crazy to think that he’ll probably have missed the equivalent of a third of a season’s games if it’s the worst-case scenario.

It means that we need to find a solution and that solution, thankfully, comes in different guises. Piero Hincapie – who I’ll admit I wondered where and when he’s get game time – is suddenly a guy we’re all looking at and by the sounds of it he had a bit of a blinder for Ecuador last night. He played the full 90 so hopefully he’s back and ready to go for the North London Derby and given he comes across as a guy all built up as a warrior centre half, there can probably be no better option than having him in our defence on Sunday. I wonder if that’ll be as a left centre-half, or as a left back?

I seem to recall Arteta saying that he prefers not to disturb too many positions and shuffle people around (back when he said that I think it was related to Ben White playing centre half instead of right back) and given the positive news about Calafiori, perhaps the Italian will stick in at left back and we’ll have either Hincapie or Mosquera in to replace Gabi?

The good news is that I don’t think any of us could remotely predict who, but equally that either would be a very able deputy for the Brazilian. Mosquera has come in on a number of occasions, filled in on the left and the right of the centre half pairings. He’s proved good on the ball, with good distribution, an ability to ride tackles and a strong presence about him. Hincapie looks every bit the ‘warrior’ I already mentioned and whilst Mosquera might get the nod, I do have a sneaky suspicion that Hincapie will be the one. It kind of sets the right message too; he’s the left centre half understudy and Mosquera is nominally the right. He’s the guy who ‘feels’ like the better option to me, although I wouldn’t be unhappy with either. And that’s the good thing, right? Big Gabi is out, yet we have two defenders who look ace and who will see this as an opportunity to step up and prove their credentials. I don’t think we’ll be as solid as we are with Big Gabi, we’ll certainly not have the same goal threat in the opposition penalty box I don’t think, but I think defensively it hopefully won’t be as big a step down as the dark ol’ days of poor ol’ Rob Holding, bless him.

And so for today’s wrap up I think I’ll say only this: I am nervous as I always am with the North London Derby, I am rueful about the injuries sustained and the ‘setbacks’ again from another ludicrous international break, but I am hopeful and positive for a response this Sunday. We will need it.

Back tomorrow with more musings.

I picked a bad day to do it.

That’s because all the talk yesterday was on Arsenal reaching personal terms with Noni Madueke from Chelsea. My initial reaction?

“Really? Another Chelsea cast off?”

I just don’t see why we are looking at this as a deal. There are so many reason’s not to do it and the fact that things are advancing leaves me very ‘meh’ about the situation. Firstly, let’s talk about the fee. They bought him from PSV in 2023 for £28.5million. During that time he has played for them 91 times and had 29 goals and assists. That’s 3.1 games per goal. Gabriel Martinelli is a year older, has suffered a fair few more injury problems, but has 80 goals and assists in 225 games for The Arsenal. Do we’re buying a guy who is less prolific than the guy who we think isn’t prolific enough?

I can hear what you’re saying, which is “Ahh, but we’re buying him as a Saka back up, not on that left wing”, to which my response is:

What about Ethan Nwaneri?

We’ve already heard in the last week that negotiations are not going completely well, that it’s at a ‘delicate’ stage and that he wants a little more assurance on game time. To that I ask what game time can we offer one of the most exciting talents out of Hale End since Saka himself?

1. He’s not going to get time wide right as a Saka understudy if Madueke comes in
2. He’s not going to be given time wide left if we are looking to bring in somebody like Rodrygo
3. He’s not going to be given time left eight if Eze comes in.

So are we basically saying that Nwaneri plays if Odegaard doesn’t play? He’s the captain at the club, so I don’t see him being dropped much. I guess you could argue just as much as Saka, but if Ethan is covering two positions – Saka and Odegaard, then he’s absolutely more highly likely to be racking up minutes. Madueke blocks a path for a player who, actually, I already think is probably better than Madueke anyway. Last season Madueke got 11 goals and five assists in 45 games. Ethan bagged nine goals and two assists in 37. At 17/18 years old (turned 18 in March). Why on earth are we looking at Madueke with Ethan right in front of our eyes?

Then, worse still, Fabrizio Romano said Chelsea were looking at the situation. That would be the ultimate kicker, because they’d be offloading an erratic, inconcsistent right winger, getting in a guy who I think within 18 months would be a regular starter in their team. Forget Omari Hutchinson-style stuff, Ethan goes on to be a regular at that horrible football club and we would have to sit here and watch it all unfold.

Now, of course, I could just be getting a little too irrational for a Sunday morning. This could all be agent posturing to get the best deal for his client and if Arsenal sign Ethan up with a big fat contract soon, then I’m not fussed. But with all the rumblings talking about how this Madueke stuff is advancing, it’s just giving me the jitters.

There’s also the fact that we’re rummaging around in Chelsea’s bins again. That is more of an inconvenience than anything else, but I don’t like the fact that by getting anywhere near their farcical £50million valuation, we’d be giving them an option to flip a profit on a layer. That club buys attacker after attacker and yet they never seem to pay the price; if this deal is going through I really hope it’s one that we don’t pay over the odds for. And for me, over the odds is anything over about £35million. He looks like a £30million player to me, TransferMarkt has him as €40million (£34,5million) player and so unless Arsenal are getting close to that figure, I don’t think we should even be sniffing at him.

I’ve spoken to a Chelsea season ticket holder at work. He says he loves looking at himself on the big screen, you can tell within five minutes if he can be arsed to play and he thinks it’s normally 50/50 based on whether he’s up for it or not. There’s also rumours of attitude problems – as evidenced here when he was accused by Maresca of a lack of effort in training – and for me I am wondering why Arteta is thinking that he needs this guy when he really doesn’t sound like the sort of character that Arteta would want in his dressing room.

So we’ve got a guy over-priced, a guy with rumoured attitude problems, a potential blocker for Nwaneri’s path, plus somebody who would be a back up option for £45million+. Can anybody explain to me in what world this makes sense?

Why not just take that money and plough it in to a Rodrygo or Eze deal, because I don’t think if we sign Madueke, we’ll be getting both of those players. Maybe we go for Eze because he’s slightly different in terms of his position and potential role in the squad, but Rodrygo?

No. Thank. You.

Of course if this progresses, if he signs, he will get my support as all Arsenal players do. But if it happens, I don’t see a world in which this is a complete success of a transfer, for all of the reaason’s I’ve listed above. Incidentally, TransferMarkt has Nwaneri down as  €55million market value, the same as Martinelli as well. It’s always a little up and down, is TransferMarkt, but it’s a good gauge of overall player value. And I’m not seeing the value in this deal at all. Not when we have perfectly capable players who can play in wide positions already at the club.

Right, I’ll leave it there for today, as I’m going to do a spot of bowling I think. Take my mind off dodgy transfers for a bit.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Except two times in my life. The first was when the Super League announcement came and it was depresssing to see that Arsenal were willing to go down that US model route and announce they would break away from the Premier League and other competitions. That hit me and I had a rage and sadness about the way in which my club had acted.

The second was yesterday when, after we’d just released Thomas Partey from his contract, he was officially charged with five counts of rape and one count of sexual assault. And today I am sad. Firstly, I’m sad for the women who are caught up in this, because they have had to sit on this for literal years before it became public. Lord knows what they have been through and whilst I don’t know them, follow them or haven’t seen too much about them, I think I’ve seen some stories about how they have been abused online because of this situation. I’m sorry but that is utterly inexcusable. To abuse somebody because they have been wronged and you have an affinity with the predator of this situation? Unacceptable to me. They will get their day in court and they will be able to tell their side of the story and that is important. We are talking about one of the most heinous crimes you can get; a violation of somebody that no human being should have to go through. Of course at this stage we have to say that these are merely allegations and Partey – via his lawyer – has said he welcomes the opportunity to finally clear his name.

That last bit tells its own story – finally. So basically this is an acknowledgement that everyone knew this existed. Which also means the club knew about this for a long time. Yet no action was taken. Worse than that, Partey has played an integral role in the back end of this season and that in itself is bad enough. I was talking about this yesterday with the wife and we both agreed that there would – and should – have been things Arsenal could have done. They could have suspended him pending the conclusion of this situation. They could have sacked him outright. They could have told the world he was injured. There’s lots of ways they could have handled this. Yet it was swept under the carpet and then cynically it has all come out now that he has departed the club. I’m sure you’ve thought this as well, but I also think about how there were noises that the club wanted to renew his contract! Knowing what they will have known, how on earth they could have even remotely entertained that idea is utterly baffling and really quite tragic to think about. The ‘look the other way’ nature of this leaves a blemish on Arsenal’s history and I hope there are some serious questions being asked about how thie should have been handled. More importantly, that this never happens again.

I am also slightly concerned that it wasn’t until he was released that this process has been made public. Why is that? I really hope it isn’t because he is a famous and high profile person. Again, I do not know the in’s and out’s of this situation, we all have to be careful how we talk about what is a very serious crime, but the timing of this announcement has left me with a knot in my stomach because I immediately start to think about sinister reasons behind it all coming out now as opposed to previously.

I don’t really want to comment too much more on this, because of the sensitive nature, but let’s just say it’s not a great day to be an Arsenal fan.

I wanted to say a few final words about Tomiyasu though, as a way of looking at a positive contribution to the club. I remember when we signed him – I was in Portugal and I had Sky Sports News on in the hotel room. The wife was like “are we going down to the pool now?” and I made her wait five minutes so I could read and watch all of the breaking news on it. His first season was immense at right back but that first injury he got set the sad tone for his Arsenal career: Blighted by injuries and unable to put together any kind of rhythm. It’s testament to the man himself that, despite that, the club offered him an extension last summer. But it said a lot that it was just one year with an additional one year, so that he could prove his fitness, which sadly he has not done and now he’s exited the club. I believe he still has four or five months of rehab left so my hope is that the club still offer him their facilities. Tomi, you were a fine player and by the sounds of it a lovely person, so I don’t think there’s a single Arsenal fan out there who wouldn’t wish you the best of luck.

Right, I’m wrapping this up for today, with the hope that we have some good news at some point.

Catch you tomorrow.

Zubimendi’s goal was basically a tap in, so it’s hardly one he’ll remember until his dying days, but perhaps because he’s a guy who sits in that deeper lying number six role and he doesn’t really get too many goals, maybe he will remember it? He only got two goals in 48 games of Real Sociedad, so when he is on the scoresheet it becomes a bit of a collectors piece. Sadly for him and his Spanish teammates, however, it didn’t come to anything as Portugal won that pointless trophy. And sadly for us, there are more pointless international matches still going on. Italy play Moldova tonight, as well as Norway playing Estonia, England play Senegal on Tuesday, Zinchenko is in action for Ukraine in New Zealand, Brazil play on Wednesday against Paraguay, the Netherlands play against Malta. I think that’s pretty much it, so it means Arsenal players will all finally all get some rest towards the end of this week. They get a couple of weeks and then all return back to light training in July I think. That’s where the hard work starts but it makes you think about the life of a footballer. The Premier League season and competitive football may only be going on for three-quarters of the year, but in reality these guys get two weeks of holiday and that’s it.

It’s kind of mad when you put it in to a context of the average working person. You and I get anything between four to six weeks if you’re in full time employment (if you’re in the UK). The guys who are internationals get the second half of June off and that’s it. And they don’t get public holidays like Christmas or Easter; Arsenal played on 27th December and on Easter Sunday this year, so there aren’t any bank holidays to speak of for the players. Sure, they get paid crazy big money, but all the money in the world doesn’t heal the body after untold work and stress they are put through.

It’s worse for this Club World Cup abomination. This time next week Chelsea play in the competition and let’s take one or two of their players as an example. Marc Cucurella is rat-looking little SOB we all know that, but he’s just come off the back of a season in which he’s played 48 times and 3,700+ minutes for Chelsea. He played the full 120 minutes last night. He now has to report back to training and be out in the US on Monday for their game against Leon. Chelsea then play on the Friday against Flamengo, before having their final match of three against ES Tunis on 25th June. If they progress then it’ll be anything between two to five days later that they’ll be playing in the Round of 16, followed by a Quarter final three days after that, then a semi final another three or four days after that, then a final on 13th July.

The Premier League season starts on Saturday 16th August – less than a month later.

For my part, I hope it is a Chelsea v Man City final. There might be a ton of money on the table for Chelsea to cheat their way through PSR, but it means if they’ve been taking the competition seriously and they’ve been playing some of their best players in it, there’s no way it doesn’t come back to haunt them in the regular season, through fatigue or injuries. I heard somebody on a podcast suggest that the players might be a little better at the start of the season because there will be no rust from taking time off, but I can’t believe that having player all that football and had no break, that there won’t just be a mental hangover from the previous season. That’s what we have to hope for, at least. Maybe less so for Chelsea, but certainly for Man City, I’d like to see them as fatigued and knackered as possible because the moves they are making to sign new players – and good ones at that by the looks of it – means I think they will definitely be better than they were this season just gone.

As for our lads, well, after this set of irritating internationals has gone away, we need everyone with their feet up for a few weeks. Because next season the expectation is going to be ramped up again and we can’t afford not to start the season well I don’t think. We need to do our business this summer and ideally do it early, for sure, but we also need to have those already in at the club to come back with a freshness that see’s them ready to go that next step onwards – trophies.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Meh.

I was thinking yesterday afternoon about why I am feeling so ‘meh’ about this season. I think it’s the most ‘meh’ I’ve felt about it for a long time and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why. Arsenal are comfortably one of the best sides in the league, we’re up there for the third season in a row and will more than likely finish second for the third season in a row. I’ve seen the season in which we fished eighth two years in a row. We had those season’s in which we just seemed to fight for top four and that was pretty much it. We’ve seen any hopes of any trophies extinguished before now, yet here we are about to take on Real Madrid in a quarter final of the Champions League. I should be more buoyed by that and the fact that we win more than we lose or draw this season. I’ve felt more invested in season’s where we’re battling for top four, or we have a League Cup final to aim for, than I am right now.

And yet…meh…

Why?

I think some of it is injuries. The fact we’ve lost another player in Big Gabby for the Madrid tie has dampened a few spirits for sure. It’s been the worst season I can remember for injuries and the result of it feels like we’ve never really been able to get our season truly started. It’s been a ‘bitty’ season that hasn’t really been able to properly ‘kick off’ and that’s been frustrating.

I also think our inability to break down compact teams hasn’t helped. Coupled with the injuries in forward positions that we suffered at the end of January and beginning of February, it’s felt like we really have to slog hard to score goals, whereas despite only getting one or two chances (look at West Ham at home in February for the second season in a row) our opponents seem to get that opening that wins them games or at least picks up draws.

The draws too haven’t helped. There are some instances where you pick up a draw away from home and you go “I’ll take that”. But the draws this season haven’t really felt like that at all to me. The Brighton one at home felt like we’d been shafted, the City won away the same because of the late goal, the 2-2 at home to Liverpool should have had us winning it but for a makeshift back four on the pitch because of injuries and suspension, the 1-1 at Chelsea should have been a win, as should the 1-1 at Fulham. We had that frustrating 0-0 at home when Everton parked the bus the first time, then we got shafted with a penalty against us at Brighton that you won’t see given again. United away was a wretched game of football and Villa at home was a frustrating 2-2. The 0-0 away to Forest felt very much like United away and then you have the game at the weekend. All these draws just had elements of frustration on our part, or being shafted by decisions, or having clustered injuries that meant we were makeshift in a part of our team. Which all leads to the feeling of ‘meh’ about every single one of those draws.

And a big part of that is the refereeing as well. I’ve now seen so many instances this season of terrible refereeing – worse than any other year for Arsenal, than I’ve ever seen. I won’t roll them all off again because we all know them and it’s been a consistent theme throughout the season. And what’s worse is that the media and PGMOL have made the situation worse by doubling down on the gaslighting. From the early stages of the season with the “he’s got no choice there” nonsense, right through to now in which all we get is the whole footballing world saying “it’s a bit soft” from the weekend’s penalty Everton were given. It’s not soft, it’s just simply not a foul. It’s a dive. Call it out. It’s cheating and doing it in plain sight of a referee, who also should be corrected by video replay, but that’s getting ignored.

And this all just leads me to be a bit more ‘meh’. The standard of refereeing in this country is so crap, that Arsenal fans – and other fans as well to be fair – are becoming apathetic to the appalling levels that we have to watch from a collective of not-fit-for-purpose referees every week. We all know their names by now, every fanbase, because we’re getting to the stage where all of them have shafted us for one reason or another in the season. It’s pathetic.

Tomorrow night we have the Champions League quarter final against Real Madrid. Now, we know that the refereeing in European competition isn’t great, but I bet you it’ll be a darn sight better than what we have to deal with in the Premier League and domestic cups in England. Why? Not because the referees in Europe have better eyes, or are designed any differently; they are just as human as you or I. But because they apply the rules based on UEFA mandates, they leverage technology like semi-automated offsides that UEFA has asked to be implemented, they are officiating the game as UEFA decrees. And, broadly speaking, it works. Yet what we get in England is PGMOL making mistake after mistake every week, avoiding the use of some technologies that would clearly aid the decision-making process, as well as be part of an inherently biased and borderline corrupt collective that promote from within, have had years to deliver geographic as well as other diversities, yet remain an Old Boys Network that self-regulates. Poorly.

And that all adds to my general feeling of ‘Meh’ about this season. And next Saturday we have to sit through it all over again until this season can be finished.

Back tomorrow with a Real Madrid preview – at least that will be something to get excited about.

But it can’t be all laughs and giggles for us today. In what is now a recurring incidence for Arsenal fans, the club, the manager and the players, we have to deal with the fallout of another player getting injured, another hamstring going pop and the chances of finishing the season on a high further reduced in probability as a result of this news that Arsenal shared yesterday about Gabriel. It’s a massive blow to all involved in Arsenal and not just because this kid has been our best defender this season, but he’s also a threat from set pieces, a leader in the team and his partnership with Saliba feels like it could become iconic if we can follow up the last few years with silverware. Now we’ll not see that until next season and that makes me sad.

I’m also mad. Frustrated at what feels like an endless flow production of injured players with similar injuries. All hamstrings going pop and the most maddening thing about it all is that there is no real answer that anybody can truly put their finger on. You can’t say that it’s because they are overplayed compared to others, because Saliba, Timber, Rice, etc have all had a large volume of minutes this season. Gabriel, Saka and Havertz are players who are so robust normally. You can’t really say it’s the training because they all do the training and as Mikel said earlier in the season, the problem is not the training but the loading that happens. They don’t give the muscles time to relax because there are so many games. There will be some that say you have to rest players when you can, but how can you rest somebody like Gabriel? Which games could he have been rested in? Perhaps the second leg of PSV? That’s about all I can think of in 2025 and we’ve played 19 games since 1st January. Girona is the other one you could argue the toss over, but that’s still two matches from 19, so that’s still a lot of football for his hammy to go twang.

In the absence of any evidence of universal answer, I fall into the murky world of superstition and once again, find myself saying:

F*ck this f*cking season.

That two-legged tie of Madrid feels like the only thing left we have to focus on. If we go out of that one, the remainder of this season is going to feel very long indeed, because we’ll still have another six Premier League games to go and if we’re out of Europe, we’ll be treading water against the likes of Ipswich, Palace and Bournemouth. Meh.

Mikel will be having his press conference today ahead of the game tomorrow lunchtime and of course he’ll put on a brave face, but I bet he’s investigating a small patch of land at London Colney in which he can grow four leaf clovers, put horseshoes above doors, buy up a collective of rabbits to harvest their feet and asking everyone to bring in a lucky coin to keep in their socks or something on match days – because it feels like we’ll need that based on the season we’ve had.

Or, if you’re like me and you want to believe in karma, what we have gone through this season has re-calibrated some of the previous season’s and next season, I wanna see the footballing gods shine down on us because it’s been a horror of a season, as I mentioned yesterday and so won’t re-write my thoughts on the situation.

Instead, I’m going to focus on this Everton game tomorrow, in which I suspect we’ll get an Everton team who will tuck in and be compact against us, but not as low block as they were at the Emirates earlier in the season. That day they used every trick in the book, but also sat essentially camped in their own box and frustrated us. With them now sitting on 34 points in 15th and a solid 14 off Ipswich in the relegation zone, they’re all but secured safety and so my hope for tomorrow is that they’ll try to be more expansive. Moyes’ natural tendency is to be more cautious and so naturally they’ll have things like inverted wingers, compact back four, Gueye sitting in a defensive midfielder position and they’ll go for long balls over the top to the likes of Beto, but my hope is that we’ll create at least some chances against them. I doubt it’ll be the most classic game in the world, but hopefully it won’t be a complete sh*tefest.

They’ve just lost the Merseyside Derby at Anfield too, so their home fans will be wanting for a bit of a response, I suspect. More on that game tomorrow as we build up to it, but for today I’ll leave you to your respective Friday and hope you have a good one.

Laters.

I don’t know why I bothered to check out the farcical pantomime that was “Match officials mic’d up” whilst browsing through Sky Sports’ website last night on the way back from work, but I did. And it was the review of the MLS red card at Wolves that had Howard Webb and Michael Oliver trot out their usual PR spin and drivel.

They did acknowledge it was the wrong call and that most people accept that a yellow was the right decision (which could have cost us any lingering title hopes, by the way. This is being glossed over because we won…), but as is wont for PGMOL and their narcissistic head Webb, they couldn’t just firmly hold their hands up and say “yep, got it wrong, apologies, we need to review this and see how we can improve”. Nope, instead we got a “yeah but” in the form of Howard Webb with Michael Owen nodding on next to him in a classically irrelevant stooge-like manner, that “the VAR didn’t want to re-referee the game”.

It’s funny how that line gets trotted out when it is convenient for PGMOL, eh? Where was that logic with the disallowed Martinelli goal at Old Trafford a couple of season’s back? Where was that thinking when they sent William Saliba off at Bournemouth? As usual, we get the rules delivered sporadically and the narrative set based on what makes PGMOL seem like they are being painted in the best possible light. These shows are nothing more than an attempt to re-litigate poor decisions instead of learning and improving. And as I have said – like a broken record at this point – there is no way we get a better refereeing body until it is ripped up, those in charge are kicked to the curb and we start again with something new. Disband the old Boys Network of North West referees, get more diversity of geography, background, etc, then let’s have some referees without their inherent biases who have their tracks covered by their mates in higher positions.

Now, I need to turn my focus away from the bad taste that Webb, Owen and PGMOL leave in my mouth and look towards that game at Villa Park happening this evening. It’s one of four games that will most likely decide whether this season is going to go to the latter stages as a Premier League title fight, or whether it will fizzle out with Liverpool leading a procession march to their second Premier League trophy.

Villa at Villa Park is no easy game, Liverpool weren’t wholly convincing on Sunday, but Aston Villa have been a bit all over the place with their form of late. We put some faith in Everton because it was the last Merseyside Derby, but whether or not we can do the same for the Villains remains to be seen. They do have Marcus Rashford who looked pretty decent in the game at the weekend, plus I think Ollie Watkins is back fit for them. But they drew with a struggling Ipswich side and whilst a night of the Barclays under the lights might get the home crowd up for it, I do worry that this might be another Liverpool smash and grab.

If it is, then we’re looking at a ten point deficit and whilst we would have a game in hand, that kind of distance between them and us will inevitably hit a psychological blow to any title chances we are desperately clinging on to for dear life. Ten points is a mountain to climb and with us not able to respond until Saturday, it feels like it might be too much.

Conversely, any kind of dropped points for them tonight and suddenly Arsenal’s tails are up. If Villa were to somehow get a win this evening – something only one team has been able to do all season, let’s not forget – then Arsenal have the opportunity with that game in hand to drop that lead down to four points. It’s still a position I would swap with Liverpool in a heartbeat and you’d have to still have them as clear favourites for the title, but at least it would make things a little more interesting going in to the final three months of the season.

Arsenal fans, players and coaching staff can only look on thiws evening though, hoping that Villa can take points off Liverpool like they have done off us this season and last season. Let’s hope Villa are the heroes rather than the pariahs that we’ve seen them as. Let’s hope Emi Martinez is getting his flowers from Arsenal fans for time wasting Villa to a win under their own fans.

There’s not really a lot else going on, to be honest with you, with some rumours I see that Paqueta might be injured for the weekend. Apparently he came off early from midweek training and looked “devastated” but, as we know with players like Martinelli when he waves his hand in the air having been hit before, then is up five minutes later (I appreciate the irony of me mentioning this whilst he IS actually injured this time!), until we get some kind of confirmation from Graham Potter on Friday, I am going to assume that he’s fine and we’ll see him at the Emirates on Saturday.

Right, that’s me done for today methinks. Back tomorrow with some thoughts on whether all is lost (Liverpool have won) or “it’s back on lads” (Villa have won).

Catch you wonderful humans then.

“All on red for us”

“Erm….yeah, i’ll take black please…”

I am, of course, referring to the news that Sami Mokbel broke yesterday about Kai Havertz, who is rumoured to have suffered a hamstring injury whilst on the Dubai trip that the team returned back to England from yesterday. Sami is a respected journo, but I’m not linking to the publication he works for, as I think think it’s a horrible paper – so here’s Arseblog’s reporting on it for more info.

To extend out my metaphor further, if Arsenal were a person, you’d follow them around in the casino to make sure you were there on whatever game they were playing afterwards, because they aren’t winning any cashola on the slots, that’s for sure.

We are just over a week since the transfer window has shut – about nine days – and we’ve lost two players (rumoured) since then. We’ll get confirmation from Mikel when he does his press conference on Friday, but unless he can give us some Lazarus-esque news on both Martinelli and Havertz, then we’re down to one recognised first teamer, one loanee who has looked absolutely turgid so far for us, then a 17-year-old with bags of promise that we’re hanging most of our creative hopes on.

Who could have predicted such ill-fortune for us this season?

Oh, I don’t know, how about every single Arsenal fan on God’s green earth, perhaps? This season has been disruption after disruption, injury scare after injury scare, PGMOL blunder after PGMOL blunder and the second that January window slammed shut and we saw briefings about being “impressed that the club didn’t panic” I think most of us guessed that it would not be long before we ended up with a problem in our attacking end of the pitch. No Saka, no Jesus, no Martinelli and now potentially no Havertz means that the decision to ‘keep the powder dry’ was a sensible as throwing a can of petrol on a bonfire.

I’ve seen some commentary about how Havertz has played similar minutes to Salah and Haaland. But just over a week ago we were seeing the likes of Thierry Henry talk about how Haaland offers little in games. He is a man – like Salah – who is deadline in short bursts. I have not looked at the numbers, but I bet if you looked up distance covered on a football field this season, Havertz’s would be significantly greater than those other two elite forwards. Simply put – he has been ran into the ground and that is why we are where we are. We play players so regularly and we ask them to do so much (remember how many times we’ve all talked about how good we are off the ball, at how quick we are to get back into defensive shape and how difficult it is for teams at times because of our ability to cover so much ground?) as part of their roles, that inevitably they are going to break. You can’t compare apples and pears and talking about some player sin other teams versus Arsenal players just doesn’t work – they aren’t asked to do the same things as ours are.

I put a message on social media last night that this season can get in the bin. I was being flippant, I was being silly, but part of me is kind of just waiting for the inevitable final nail in the season coffin so that we can all start looking at next season and hoping the club addresses it’s failings from the last two windows. I know that sounds defeatist, I know it sounds a little spineless, but I just feel like everything that could have gone wrong this season has, so sometimes you just can’t beat the footballing gods.

I don’t even feel like I can be arsed to apportion blame at this stage either. What’s the point? Arteta isn’t to blame because he was very clear he needed reinforcements. The players aren’t to blame because they’ve run through brick walls (and picked up knocks on the way ). Edu left halfway through the season and whilst I am not wholly convinced whether or not Jason Ayto is the answer, I don’t know enough about him or what he does, or how hard he works to understand or really cast judgement and throw some shade on him. I will admit that I have never trusted KSE and that has remained the case even through these recent periods. But I don’t really feel like turning this into a bashing session on them either; I think they have been very fortunate to have a bunch of football people running the club who have got us in the position we are now that we’ve been challenging for the title – it is not because of them or their money though – the money Arsenal have spent is the money they make. KSE might have acted as signatories, but they haven’t been putting their hands deep into their pockets – any money that came from COVID or the intervening years was in the form of loans I believe. I didn’t heap praise on them when the going was good, I’m not going to go in two-footed because of the two windows we’ve just had.

Maybe there are just season’s like this though? Maybe we are using up all of our bad luck this season so we can be prepped for another assault on the league next season? I’m not a superstitious man in any walk of my life except football, but this Kai news, the Martinelli news, Saka, Jesus, Odegaard (I haven’t even mentioned that it sounds like Tomiyasu is out for the season and will need knee surgery), the red cards, etc, etc, etc – it all just feels a little too much, eh?

So we just have to roll with the punches. I’ll enjoy our wins, i’ll be sad about our defeats, but at this stage in this season, expectations need to be squarely managed I think. Time to focus on the journey a bit more folks, because the destination in May might be a little too much to ask for these fantastic group of footballers we support.

Catch you all tomorrow.

If we all thought that seeing Martinelli get on the plane in the Dubai warm weather training trip was a good sign, we should have known better, because yesterday Ornstein dropped one of his unpleasant Ornbombs to state that Martinelli is facing around a month out with a hamstring injury, following going down in the first half against Newcastle.

Honestly, this season and the injuries can just f*ck the f*ck off. If true – and we have no reason to believe not because Ornstein doesn’t put stuff out there unless it’s basically true – then it’s yet another forward out and an already threadbare forward line is now down to the last few remaining players. Cue Arsenal social media channels having a general melancholy lament of our luck this season, or alternatively a rage session of why we didn’t act in January.

It is the most Arsenal thing though, isn’t it? I mean, we were LITERALLYTWO DAYS after the transfer window had shut, before losing another player for a period of time. Two days since we got the messages from some journos saying that Arsenal felt that the schedule is not so hectic, that they could get by with what we had, that the club were impressed by Jason Ayto’s thinking calm under pressure. I’m not going to go two-footed on a guy I don’t know or have any idea of his capabilities on Ayto, I’m just referencing it because I heard that Sami Mokbel from the Daily Fail state that Arsenal had been impressed with him during the transfer window period for not just rushing to sign any old body. The problem is, if we drop any more players then ‘any old body’ will actually be where we’d need to be at this rate.

Arsenal rolling the dice on player fitness this season feels like a gambling addict being handed the deeds to his house, wheeled in to a craps table and handed some dice, then walking away. It’s only gonna end badly. That’s what this season could feel like if this Dubai trip doesn’t have some kind of healing powers of Wolverine these next few days. Arsenal are – this season – Nordberg from the Naked Gun trilogy. If something were to go wrong, it’s going wrong.

The pictures of him in Dubai also mean another thing: You know how some of us got a little excited that Saka could be back soon? Well, based on the same logic that both he and Martinelli are heading out there, this news pours a little bit of ice cold water over the theory it could be ‘soon soon’, eh? I kind of said it yesterday and I personally don’t think we’ll see him until mid-March at the earliest anyway, but these Martinelli revelations from the last 24 hours show that there are players on the trip that won’t be training and are there for the team bonding side of things. That in itself is good; because it keeps the group closer together, it makes those injured players feel more part of the squad instead of sat at home wallowing in misery because they can’t play football, so I’m not particularly worried about that. It’s more that from a fan perspective you get some visual signs of positivity and then the reality sets in and you realise that you’re now reliant on the fitness of a 17-year-old, Havertz who has been flogged all season and Trossard. Those guys are now playing all the minutes, all of the time, until mid March, I suspect. That means Leicester away, West Ham at home, Forest away are all games in which we’re going to need them. The good news is that there is a 10 day gap between Newcastle away that we’ve just played and Leicester away. After that there is a seven day gap between Leicester away. But just four days later we play Forest and as things stands, the only rotation option we have is the rather uninspiring Raheem Sterling. If ever we needed a player to remember how good he used to be, it would be about now. It’s just a shame that Sterling’s super power – pace over small space – is basically gone.

The other issue here is that we are loading these players who are fit up with so many minutes that inevitably they will go down injured at some point. To be fair to Havertz he has – up until this point (and I’m touching wood as I say this. I literally am – it’s making it a little more difficult to type as well) – been a robust footballer. Trossard has been good in that respect too. But we’re relying on Ethan and at 17 that’s so much pressure to put on a kid. We saw what happened to him in January as he picked up a knock – his body is still adjusting to the rigours of elite football. So to now ask him to play the next four or five games feels like a big ask. He’s been great, he’s looked great, we’re all excited, but let’s all also acknowledge that he is still learning. He’s going to make mistakes. He’s going to have quite periods where he can’t impact games. Sometimes we’re going to need to mix it up. And our option when we need that?

Raheem. Sterling.

We’re now in the realms of praying that Sterling is going to come good somehow, when the eye test shows anything but if you’ve watched enough Arsenal this season. Arsenal gambled in the summer. They gambled in January. Both of those gambles have ended up being mistakes. I said on the day that the window closed earlier in the week “I hope Arsenal know what they are doing…” That statement still remains today, only now we are another attacking player down. We’re three attacking players down who, incidentally, three year’s ago were our starting front three.

There’s nothing we can do about it now though. We just have to get behind the lads and hope that this warm weather training session has the transformative effect – or even a percentage of it – that last season had.

Fingers crossed.

Back tomorrow.

We were – as you and I both know – given a reprieve. A marginal offside call had saved us, but it was the way that we were cut open on a loose ball in the middle of the park that had me the most worried. We looked rattled after only a few minutes and the evening wasn’t going to get any better after that, unfortunately.

Arteta’s naming of the same XI from the weekend kind of made sense. After all, the players had performed so well, had executed his tactical game plan to perfection and City didn’t have an answer. This would be a different game entirely though; Newcastle and their vociferous fans would be loud and would be aggressive and it would call for a different mindset if we were to overcome what was already a pretty slim chance of getting to the League Cup final. But what we ended up getting was anything but what happened last Sunday. For starters, I think Arsenal’s intention was to press high, to try to catch Newcastle out early with a goal by blitzing them, then to take stock of the situation in that first half. Against City we did get that early goal and it enabled us to get our foot on the ball and invite them on to us. It also allowed us to dictate the narrative of the game. But that was a game in isolation; this match had a two-goal deficit to overcome and so I think Arteta and his charges had a mindset that urgency was imperative and we had to ‘get at them’ to quieten the crowd down before we could start to dictate the game.

I think that early goal – even though it was disallowed – rattled our defence though. Because even before Newcastle got the first through Jacob Murphy, we’d seen Saliba and Gabriel wobble on the ball a bit and as Newcastle pressed us aggressively, I was surprised to see how poorly we reacted to it. It’s so strange, because the way we normally play is to invite pressure, invite teams to press, draw them in and then evade the press with good passing into those triangles that get us further up the pitch. But last night we saw players misplacing passes, dallying on the ball, just look generally uneasy and the result was that it emboldened both the Newcastle players and the Newcastle fans.

We know the Newcastle approach. We’ve seen it for the previous three games up there. They press aggressively, they give away ‘bitty’ fouls, they try to break up play and disrupt rhythm. Sometimes within the laws of the game, sometimes without. Sometimes the referee calls them up on it, sometimes he doesn’t. Rotational and repeat fouling is something that happens, Gordon gets away with a few, but as an opposition team you have to deal with it. You have to be up for the counter punch and whereas normally in these types of games Arsenal are, for some reason up at St James’ Park in recent years, we just haven’t been.

I’m trying to put my finger on it. Is it because Eddie Howe has found a blueprint that works against Arteta? Maybe. They’ve tended to get the first goal and that enables Newcastle to sit in a defensive shape, low-block if they need to, then wait to draw us out and counter on us with their rapid transition. And with players as quick and on form as Gordon and Isaak, you can understand why, because they are potent and will punish you – even if they only get one or two chances.

But it’s also in our attacking third that I’ve been really disappointed three times in a row up there now. We created a golden chance at 0-0 with Odegaard and I’m sorry, but if you’ve got the talent in his boots that he’s got, you really have to be burying his chance. Just moments later and we were behind. The difference between the two sides – one finishes its dinner, where the other doesn’t. And all we’ll hear from the media for the next 24-48 hours is how we missed up a chance to bring a forward in this January transfer window.

Except it’s not just the media, is it? Because we’re all doing that too and with Martinelli going off with what looked like a hamstring injury, we find ourselves less than three days past since the ending of the window and we’re already starting to fret about our forward options. We have Nwaneri and by George, we’re all grateful of that, but beyond that we’re staring down the barrel of the washed up Sterling. At this point the best thing about Sterling is that we don’t have to be the ones worrying about how to offload him in the summer – we can just hand him back to Chelsea to be their problem.

Ours right now is how we pick ourselves up from this disappointing performance and defeat, in which every player looked off it last night. Perhaps that’s just the fatigue from a mental schedule. Perhaps we’re going to get a reset from the players as they head off to Dubai once again to get recharged. They need it. We need it. Odegaard even talked about it last night after the game.

And to be honest with you, us fans probably need it too. It’s been a bit relentless of late and it feels like every time we take two steps forward, we have one step back. Arteta needs to get his players on the training ground, he needs to get their heads and bodies recharged, then we go again against Leicester in just under 10 days time.

Back tomorrow with some more thoughts.

I think for me personally it has to be seen as a poor window, because the need was known from the 1st January, it was exacerbated with Gabriel Jesus’ injury at the midway point in the month, yet all we’ve really heard in the form of faint whispers has been that we were offered Ollie Watkins for £60million from Villa, but decided that was a deal that was too much for a guy who will be 30 in December this year.

And to be fair to Arsenal, I get it, because as much as I’d have loved to see the Gooner make his way through the door yesterday, the fact that so many Arsenal fans were saying “no way” when it was posed that we could go back for him in the summer, tells a bit of a story in itself. June is just four months away and so that deal which seems so appealing now, that looks less palatable by the team we’re getting to the end of Spring, should tell you all you need to know.

Watkins is a ‘now’ player and he’d have helped us this season and next. But he may have also been a blocker to a big move in the summer, because if we’re blowing £60million and a big wage packet on him, we’re probably not going in for one of the big named targets in the summer.

If one of those targets is Isaak for £100million though, that’s a worry for me, because as talented and hot as he is right now, that injury record and the fact that Newcastle will drive a hard bargain has me thinking I hope we go back in for Sesko. More up side, more ceiling, more opportunity for him to evolve into our version of Haaland. Hopefully a better fitness record too.

As for the here and now, I guess all that keeps going through my head is “I really hope you know what you are doing, Arsenal”, because they are taking a massive gamble on the fitness and return to form and fitness of a very small crop of players. The club were clearly briefing their side of the story relatively quickly last night; Charles Watts stating that the club feels that because of the easing of the schedule and the return of players like Saka in March, they think they have enough to get by. But in central attack the numbers are worryingly thin. Is Kai going to play every game? What happens if he gets a horror tackle on him? What happens if Bukayo has a set back? Can we really rely on Leo to play false nine? Will Arteta actually start considering Nwaneri as a centre forward?

These are all questions for which the answers are less than palatable. Havertz has had (so far) a remarkable ability to stay fit and we have to hope that remains, but football is a game of so many variables and it only takes one clobbermeister for us to be staring down the barrel of a remainder of a season with not one recognised striker. Like, LITERALLY not one. Not even when you start looking at the youth team, it’s not like there’s a guy who you could promote to play understudy. There’s nobody who has got near the first team and so we are taking an almighty gamble between now and the rest of the season.

And as James said on the Same Old Arsenal pod last night – which I wholeheartedly agree with by the way – by not doing any business this January, we’re leaving ourselves with a mountain of work to do in the summer. Whoever comes in as the Sporting Director this summer (and I’ll be surprised if Jason Ayto gets the job because this was hardly the perfect dress rehearsal, was it?) is going to have a rather long ‘to do’ list of signings they have to make:

1. New back up goalkeeper to replace Neto
2. Defender to come in as a rotation option (we can’t rely on Tomiyasu and Tierney and Zinchenko will be off – so that’s at least one player that comes in)
3. Midfield replacement for Jorginho and probably Partey (do we need two?)
4. Wide forward to provide cover (we’re not signing Sterking permanently after his ‘meh’ loan this season)
5. Central striker (for obvious reasons)

That’s me being conservative, because even if we get a striker in, if we pick up an injury to that striker or Havertz, we’re back in to the same position we are in now. James estimated that we might need to do between eight to ten deals and if you think that the likes of Kiwior is going to want to probably move on to play more football, that will leave us short again and needing to look for squad reinforcements.

I didn’t want us to sign a random who means we can’t do what we wanted to do this coming summer. But you can’t say that this January and last summer have been successes when you lay out what has happened. Calafiori has been injury prone, Merino hasn’t set the world alight, Neto has played one game (and that was a bit scary) and Sterling feels like a complete waste of time at this point. So when you couple the two windows linked to this season together, it compounds the need for summer 2025 to not just be a good window, but a pretty much flawless one.

Like I said, I really hope Arsenal know what they are doing, because it feels like they’ve rolled the dice in a season in which we keep coming up Snake Eyes with the injuries, suspensions and general bad luck.

Let’s end today on a high note though, eh? Because crying in to your cereal because we didn’t sign anybody won’t help anyone. We’re all frustrated but come tomorrow if we beat Newcastle the mood will soon change. We’ve just smashed City and after tomorrow’s game the players can undertake a bit of rest and a reset. We’ll have hopefully White and Tomiyasu back and hopefully those Arsenal players will look fresh as we tackle the final 14 games of the season and a Champions League campaign that we’re still in.

Catch you all tomorrow.

So let’s get this straight. The dismissal was ruled to be incorrect, which is why the Arsenal players were furious, the response from the PGMOL was shown to be frivolous PR attempts to double down (I’m talking about their approach, not the abuse – which we all agree has to stop), yet the FA decided to stoke this particular fire just a little more by charging Arsenal. Sounds all fine and dandy to me.

Not.

The problem we have is that this weekend, in at least one Premier League game, there will be players surrounding the referee. So anybody busting out the old ‘consisting’ trope is caught out there, because I bet you by the time Sunday night comes around there will have probably have been a few instances identical to this.

On the ‘surrounding the referee’ stuff, to be fair, this isn’t just an Arsenal thing. Chelsea were fined on 21st January for surrounding the ref on 30th December in their game against Ipswich. Newcastle and Villa were both charged on 9th January for an incident on 26th December. But having looked back at the FA Spokesperson social media account – where all of these announcements are made (mainly the high profile aka Premier League – although they do others too) – I can only see those three incidents going back to 21st December last year.

So you’re telling me that only four sets of players have surrounded the referee during that time? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

The reality here is that the FA and PGMOL are trying to salvage what is left of the petrol-doused wreckage that was this instance last weekend, trying to make some kind of small skirmish victory by dropping this fine on Arsenal. It’s farcical. What they should be doing is working out how to avoid this stuff happening again – something Pete at Le Grove has long talked about and addresses again how imperative it is to make changes and how to do it here. It’s not rocket science, it’s going to take a bit of work but not a lot, but there is money and there will be interest to change – so why are we not changing?

A lot of it clearly has to do with keeping an old boys network together, as I’ve bleated on about for years and if you want an example of this closed club crossing sporting entities (PGMOL, FA and Sky Sports), look no further than the circling of the wagons that Sky did in the aftermath of the incident last week. Deleted tweets, changing of focus towards abuse (it should still be highlighted, of course, but it should also be treated as two separate incidents), some journo’s weirdly rounding on Lewis-Skelly (one even used inflammatory words to suggest he was the criminal in this piece), then you get nonsense like The Overlap; a hypocritical charade masquerading as TV entertainment (because it isn’t analysis, that’s for sure) that this week talked about how Michael Oliver won’t hold a grudge now that this incident has happened. And might I say kudos to Terry Flewers for highlighting this, because check out Gary Neville’s response this week versus something just a few months ago (fast forward to about 7:05 minutes in to get the jist):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Jy5BVWYR62I

Nice one Gary – you have helped to prove Arsenal fans’ points here – you are in cahoots with PGMOL as Howard Webb – rather than try to improve the standards of his broken organisation he heads up – looks to cover its tracks with PR so transparent that even a basic Business Studies student who’s just learned what the acronym ‘PR’ and PR spin’ is’.

Rip it all up and start again. And stop idiots like Neville and Carragher sensationalising stuff – tell them to stick to their evening jobs – do analysis on football and bin your stupid ‘hot takes’.

Also – P.S. Gary’s point is rendered completely redundant anyway, because Premier League referees can’t ref the same team two week’s running. It is LITERALLY the rules, Gary.

Right, now I’ve got that off me chest, how about we start looking ahead to what’s in store this weekend? Because it’s a heck of a tough one and I don’t care what state City have been in, our record against them has been crap and to win we are going to have to be at our absolute best. That starts from the back and hopefully it starts with Arteta telling us Raya is fine, because if he isn’t and we have to play Neto after his shaky game in Girona, I don’t think I’ll be the only Gooner chewing their fingernails when the ball goes back to him every time. There’s also some noises about Ben White back in training but I suspect Arteta will just dismiss any talk of that. He’s been out for over three months and it’ll take him a couple of week’s of full training before he’s ready to play any football, so I suspect they’ll be earmarking his return after the stint of warm weather training has finished after this weekend and midweek’s Carabao Cup game against Newcastle.

He’ll probably be asked about Ollie Watkins, but I think that’s already pretty much done as a potential deal after Jhon Duran was making his way to Saudi Arabia for a big money move yesterday. If I was to put a percentage chance on it I’d probably say 1%. There’s no chance Villa are selling both of their strikers this window and so that deal is done and besides, if the rumours are true and Villa value him at £80million, that has to be the point at which Arsenal say “thanks but no thanks”. Sorry Ollie, no Arsenal dream for you, my friend.

That article is behind a paywall so I’ll drop another titbit in there for you – apparently we offered £45million for him and not the £60million, so I suspect that was including some bonuses and add ons. You’d expect Arsenal would have to go to £60million plus a load of achievable add-ons, but even now I think it’s unlikely given the timing and lack of ability for Villa to find a replacement. The only way this deal happens is if Watkins refuses to play and I just don’t see that from the player. He might want the move, it might be a dream come true, but Villa hold the cards and you just have to say “fair enough” sometimes. I just hope we’re exploring other options now.

We won’t have long to find out, because by Monday night the window closes and if we haven’t got a striker in, I don’t think I’ll be the only Arsenal fan disappointed at the lack of movement. But we have to hold our tongues until we know what is shaking out.

Catch you all tomorrow for a post-press conference de-brief.

Congratulations to VAR. A few weeks back we saw the Brighton player Estupinan get away with the most reckless challenge you’ll ever see a few weeks ago. It endangered and opponent and could have caused serious injury to Max Kilman of West Ham. But nobody on VAR decided to do anything. Yesterday there was an opportunity for Darren England to call Michael Oliver to the screen, or to have a word in his ear and say “you might want to just have another look at that” on the monitor. But instead you decided to just ‘back your mate’. Because that’s what VAR does. It doesn’t bring true impartiality in to the game. It doesn’t afford an opportunity for referees to admit that they are human. It is used merely as a rubber-stamping exercise to validate a peer. We’ve already heard from Mike Dean last year about how he didn’t want to go against an Anthony Taylor decision because his mate had had a tough game. Here is what he said:

“I said to Anthony afterwards: ‘I just didn’t want to send you to the screen after what has gone on in the game.’ I didn’t want to send him up because he is a mate as well as a referee and I think I didn’t want to send him up because I didn’t want any more grief than he already had.”

So we have a man who worked on VAR admitting that they make these kind of calls with the knowledge that they want to help friends out rather than apply the laws of the game.

Congratulations to PGMOL. You have manufactured this ludicrous situation. You and Howard Webb, who want to make it all about you, about putting yourselves in the centre of the spectacle, have exactly what you want. And the fans and everyone who watches football suffers. Last season we got “He doesn’t want to ruin the game” from Howard Webb, as a defence of his ‘top’ referee . Please show me that same rhetoric this coming week, Howard, I beg you, because you will just once again underline how broken the institution you head up is. This happens on a weekly basis and instead of addressing the problems, we get gaslit by PGMOL-favoured media like Dale Johnson and his absolutely mental ‘takes’ on VAR that are essentially designed to exonerate poor calls.

Congratulations to the Arsenal players. You stepped up lads. After the red card in that first half I thought I was going to be in for an absolutely horrible time. I thought that second half would be a ‘backs to the wall’ 45 minutes of us clinging on for a 0-0 draw, which wouldn’t have been enough anyway, because Liverpool were trouncing Ipswich. What I didn’t expect from that second half performance was a team who would come out and use the clear injustice dished out by Oliver to their advantage. Those Arsenal players were everywhere. They dominated the ball, they created chances, they pinned Wolves back and were absolutely magnificent. We can all be very proud today as Arsenal fans, because they represented the shirt brilliantly and whilst the bulk of today’s analysis will be focused on refereeing, we should not forget the absolute shift those Arsenal players put in.

Congratulations to Mikel Arteta. Whatever you said at halftime worked. We were already on top of Wolves before the red card, but we didn’t quite seem to have that killer touch. Thankfully the introduction – your introduction – of Calafiori, was the right call. It was the right call from a defensive point of view, but it was also the right call at the other end of the pitch, because his finish was good enough to find the net and I don’t think I have shouted that loudly on my sofa for years. It felt like a pocket of justice had been given back to us and with Wolves already down to ten men as well (that Gomes ‘challenge’ was worse than Lewis-Skelly’s, by the way, but only warranted a second yellow), we knew these players had enough to see out the game against a Wolves side who created a couple of chances and forced Raya in to a couple of good saves. It was a tough game for the lads, there were some knackered bodies out there by full time, but every single one of them did an amazing job and Mikel Arteta’s half time team talk must have inspired them.

Congratulations to all and to all a good night.

I’ll be on the Same Old Arsenal pod at 9.30am this morning – join us live or catch up afterwards here.

It’s my last working day today and also my last in the UK for the next three weeks, as I jet off to South Africa for the holidays, so it was fun to learn that the Scum almost blew a three-goal lead in the League Cup last night. Ol’ Mate-Mate was smiling in the end, but that team is batsh*t mental and it reminded me of that Sebastian Squillaci quote from about nine years ago:

It was very open, and often we found ourselves defending in the middle one on one with the opposition attackers. It was never easy.

Oh to be a defender in the peak Banter-era Wenger sides. Must have felt like that Jon Snow Meme:

Anyway, hopefully they learn nothing, they’ll most likely get smashed by Liverpool, so if we progress against Newcastle it’ll be us against the Scousers on neutral territory and that should be interesting. Of course we’ll have to go back to St James’ Park for the second leg, having played them at the beginning of the first leg and although we all knew whoever we played would be a tough opponent, the way the domestic cup chips have fallen has hardly made it easier for us.

The Scum also have basically a completely makeshift backline, which I only bring up because guess who they are playing this weekend? Yep, Liverpool. So Liverpool have played us with a completely decimated defence away, as well as now them down the road with the same. They played a Southampton side without a manager in the League Cup during the week, which meant they got to do a lot of rotation, whilst they play Accrington Stanley in the FA Cup after the League Cup, which will mean they can fully pull out all of their big guns and rest them for a weekend, whilst we get Man United at home, which means Arteta is less likely to be able to do that.

I reflected on how everything seems to be going Liverpool’s way – fixtures, lack of key injuries for a prolonged time, playing opponents with injury problems – whilst for us it is the opposite (we played Everton with them having had 10 days off, as an example). Arteta has been good and hasn’t moaned, but I’m a fan, so I get to do that on his behalf. It’s a little navel-gazing-y I know, it’s also a little too melancholy I admit, but I can’t help it. On the Same Old Arsenal pod we get constantly asked who is going to win the league and I am always a glass half empty guy, but this season it just doesn’t feel like it’s going our way. The silly suspensions, the constant injuries (admit it, you’re looking at the fact Rice didn’t make the squad in midweek and worried, right?), playing teams at the wrong time (I know everyone has to play everyone, but sometimes there are good times to play teams and bad times, right?), all seems to have added together to be working against us. Last season it was the opposite; we played a few teams when they were decimated by injuries (I feel like we played Wolves in a crisis on one game, as well as Liverpool without Salah) and we profited, but it’s almost like we’re having some kind of Footballing Gods punishment for some small slices of fortune last season.

I know, I know, it doesn’t work like that Chris. But maybe it does. Maybe, to win a title, you need to be good, have the right conditions, but also get your slice of luck. City previously mitigated it by essentially having 22 – 25 players who were all £40million+ players they built up over a number of years, but even their chickens are now coming back to roost. In the last time we won the league in 2004, we had a stable of players who basically stayed fit for the whole season; sure, we had injuries, but we also had core players who stayed fit. We were a superb team, but we also had things going for us, like the game at Old Trafford where van Nistlerooy hits the bar for the penalty. He leans over the ball a little more and keeps it down and we don’t go unbeaten and who knows, maybe we don’t go on to win the league.

Football can so often feel like a bit of Sliding Doors moments and this season it feels like every door is opening for the Scousers, but for us we’re walking in to them.

Then you realise that we still have two-thirds of the season left and that nothing is decided right now. There is still hope; the season could turn on its head and much like how we looked to have fallen out of any reckoning after the home FA Cup defeat to Liverpool in January of this year, suddenly things turned on its head and we went on that brilliant run post-Dubai. The games that preceded that trip were ones in which we battered opponents but looked profligate in front of goal. We got one spark – Crystal Palace at home in January as I mentioned previously this past week – and suddenly it all turns itself around. Maybe, in the most unexpected of twists, the spark from Wednesday night and Gabriel Jesus’ hat-trick, can be what we need to go on a goalscoring rampage? I certainly hope so.

There’s that privilege of the archetypal football fan – that word ‘hope’ again.

Maybe we can hope that Gabriel Jesus can go on a bit of a streak of scoring now? It’s not completely inconceivable. I feel like he’s always been a bit of a streaky player; his goals in his career have tended to come in spurts. His last season at City he scored seven in the space of about four games towards the end of the season and I think the season before he had a couple of spells of that. With us needing a ‘spark’ as I’ve bleated on about a few times in the last couple of weeks, and yet the January transfer window still two weeks and three games away (I’m counting 1st January as we’re not signing somebody the second it opens), we do need something to come from somewhere left of field. Perhaps Jesus can be our Christmas saviour (sorry-not-sorry)?

We have to hope so. But it will also be interesting to see what Arteta says in his press conference today and whether we get any hints as to whether Jesus is going to get another start on Saturday. He’s certainly put himself in a good position to do that.

Back tomorrow with some pre-Palace, post-presser, thoughts.

If he’s coming off on 37 minutes then it doesn’t sound like a ‘he felt something so we took a precaution’-type move. We’ll have to wait and see what Arteta says towards the end of this week, but I’d be surprised if he’s available for Forest now, so when you add that to the news that Ben White is going to be out for at least six weeks. This is another international break that has proved costly for us. Yes, I know White doesn’t go away with England, but it has still come during this period.

And it really seems like we can’t catch a break this season. As soon as one player returns, it seems another one goes down. Arteta even referenced how brutal the injury setbacks have been pre the international break, so I bet he’ll not be thinking his luck is changing with this latest round of news, that’s for sure.

So by my reckoning – and using the Premier League in isolation via TransferMarkt – we’ve now missed a total number of 51 absences across 11 games this season. An ‘absence’ is counted as one player, missing one game, of which I’ve counted those who are listed as first teamers for Arsenal. I’ve got KT in there although clearly he is not in the plans, but he is part of the 25-man squad for this season.

Let’s let that sink in for a second, because if you work that out as an average, it is that Arsenal have missed just under five first team players for every single game this season on average. To put that in context, Liverpool have had 30 absences and City – who I have seen a lot of news about in the press and their injuries right now, have had 41 absences – that’s a player less on average this season.

And this data only shows what has happened. If we have bad news on Saka and Rice, then this weekend could be White, Calafiori, Tomiyasu, Rice, Saka, Trossard – all could realistically be out this weekend coming.

It is bitterly disappointing at a time in which we are just looking to crack on and get our season started. We’ve all been frustrated with the form, it has been annoying to have to keep fielding mix and match sides, but unless we get some good news on the immediate horizon (and so far this season we’ve hardly had that, eh?) then we’ve still got more time to wait before we can start to see this Arsenal team feel a little more whole again. Arteta, to his credit, has tried his best to avoid being over melancholy about it and has regularly talked up the fact it is not an excuse and the team just needs to get on with it. He’s sought to find solutions with these problems like playing Timber in at left back, Partey at right back, as well as having Trossard and Havertz job swap as the roaming left eight/false nine, but it is no real substitute for having players like Calafiori playing in at left back, Partey in at six (which he has been very good at this season), as well as Odegaard in at right eight. But that can only get you so far and I think Arteta was probably looking at the return of Odegaard as the opportunity to start getting the more regularly recognised XI back together and playing regularly to see if we can go on a run.

If you’re going to go glass half full you might say that Trossard’s form has been such that he probably wouldn’t start anyway against Forest, but any injury that may be confirmed by Arteta this week does rob us of options. We have Gabriel Jesus and Sterling who can play in those positions and perhaps they might see this an opportunity for them to get more minutes and be that first name to be called from the bench, but we haven’t exactly seen inspirational cameos from them so far, have we?

The good news is that we now have until the new year before we have to deal with another round of these horrendous international matches and I for one couldn’t be happier about that. Get in the effing sea, international football.

There doesn’t appear to be any other noises of players going down so hopefully that is a good sign, but I suspect Arteta is definitely looking at his options at the moment and wondering what jiggery-pokery he’s going to have to deal with this weekend when every player returns from international duty. Brazil play in the early hours of the morning tonight against Uruguay at home, so Gabriel Martinelli and Big Gabby won’t be back until Thursday at the earliest, so we still have to cross everything that something doesn’t happy to one of them. I really pray we’re ok on that front but given the luck we’ve had so far this season nothing would surprise me less than to see one of those guys break down. Hold on to whatever lucky charm you’ve got folks.

That’ll do me for today I think. Back tomorrow to see if we’ve lost anyone else from the squad to injury.

David Coote. Winning of the “I’m going to send Tomiyasu off for breathing on Jordan Ayew” award for farcical refereeing, was yesterday suspended from duties by the PGMOL, pending an investigation into his conduct. The video that leaked – a pretty clear-cut case of two blokes having a bit of a laugh on a sofa and maybe somewhat intoxicated – was pretty damming from Coote’s side. Liverpool were the centre of the controversy, with Klopp specifically being called a c*nt by Coote, following a spat between them during lockdown games.

First and foremost, this is a terrible look for both him personally, as well as the PGMOL. He showed a moment of stupidity by even allowing his mate to film him talking about things that would directly impact his job. And he knew it, with the subsequent video saying “just to be clear, this can never go out” or words to that effect. I think that he has reacted in a moment of weakness (probably drunk or stoned) and that will ultimately cost him his job.

But the damage that this might do to the PGMOL as a whole is something we are still to find out. For too long we’ve been talking as fans (I’ve bleated on consistently) about how the PGMOL isn’t fit for purpose. The decisions their staff make on match days have been getting progressively worse over the years. In Mike Riley we had one of the worst referees picking up the mantle of the head of referees and his successor, the PR-hungry Howard Webb, has done little to improve the quality. Instead, he has attempted a charm offensive by appearing on just about every mainstream media outlet, podcast, YouTube streaming channel that would have him. The purpose? Not to improve relations and get us to a point where we are all one harmonious set of people, able to understand all sides of any particular football story, but instead to try to pull the wool over our eyes in a faux attempt at transparency. Webb’s double act with Michael Owen is a painfully obvious attempt at justifying whatever decision/mistake that has been made previously. When the decision is contentious, they delay the release of this Refs mic’d up for a couple of week’s so they can get their story straight.

PGMOL have been working in tandem with broadcasters like Sky – fronted by the likes of Neville and Carragher – to try to press home this charm offensive; less and less decisions are more regularly contested and it feels to me like the only ones that really get the “hold our hands up” treatment are in games that you might describe as a little less box office in the Premier League. We’ve had Webb and his unofficial cheerleaders like Dermot Gallagher tie themselves up in knots trying to justify decisions by talking about application of the laws, but what Coote has single-handedly done with the release of this footage, is showed that these referees carry inherent biases with them.

We all already knew that. But we have had years of media and PGMOL tell us that it isn’t true. We’ve been gaslighted into it. Despite the fact that everyone knows that they are human beings and by that very fact, therefore carry some kind of (even small) inherent bias, we have been led this merry dance by an organisation not fit for purposes and media who they are in cahoots with.

Not all media, mind, because you can still read some journo’s talking about bad decisions, etc. But I’m talking about the likes of TalkShite, Sky and TNT, both of whom get a far-wider coverage and therefore power than the tabloids, broadsheets, etc.

We all know that referees will carry some kind of biases – even if they can’t help it. But instead of trying to work to counter this in some way, PGMOL just double down on the gaslighting. Fans who question why most of the referees seem to come from the North West are dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Those that pipe up after a terrible decision on their team are mocked by opposition fans and the media, which deflects the attention from the reality, which is that we have a broken officiating body and there has been little attempt to correct it.

Why not have an independent body to have some checks, balances and oversight?

Why not scour the globe for the world’s best referees?

Why do the same small selection of officials get the same teams and so called ‘big games’?

Why not have some diversity measures in place? That happens with other businesses that are large enough and are in the public eye, so why not PGMOL?

We know that even those measures will still not eradicate biases in human beings. But what it will do is show that the PGMOL is taking steps to ensure that they have a variety of different people, from different backgrounds, to officiate in one of the biggest leagues in the biggest sports in the world. It would show they are doing their bit. The taking control of Howard Webb of PGMOL hasn’t changed the way in which PGMOL has functioned or is put together. All he has done is put a shiny PR face on the refereeing body. To coin an old footballing phrase, all Howard Webb has done is “put lipstick on a pig”.

What will happen now then? Will we see this as the catalyst for PGMOL to conduct proper change?

I think you and I both know that is unlikely. They will talk about the investigations, they will talk about ‘learning lessons’, they will most likely eventually fire David Coote. But he will just be the fall guy. He’s the guy that has to dive on the grenade. Just as Lee Mason ‘forgot’ to draw lines for Brentford’s equaliser a couple of year’s back, then found himself back in a job months later training referees, Howard Webb and PGMOL will find a way to weasel a PR response out of this that will be as hollow as a drum.

What should be happening now is real fan pressure for change. But that won’t happen, because all we’ll hear is rival fans ‘bantering’ each other every time a decision that stinks goes against a club they don’t like. All for clicks, likes and ‘clout’. Instead of calling out bad decisions or pushing for real change, banding together, it’ll be the same as always – rinse and repeat.

Sigh.

Back tomorrow with more Arsenal-related thoughts.

Arsenal’s defeat at St James’ Park – their third in the last four going up there – was thoroughly deserved. Arsenal were out-fought, out-thought, out-gunned and outplayed. They were second to almost everything on the night and there isn’t one player who played in red and white yesterday who got minutes up there who could say that they had a good game. We got stinkers from almost every player and Arteta too must shoulder some of the blame today too, because his set up was just wrong from the off.

The line up he picked included Thomas Partey at right back and whilst of course we have to admit that we don’t know the physical condition of Ben White, I think there were other options that we could have gone with rather than him out of position. Partey himself didn’t play that badly, but it was his poor header in the middle of the pitch that led to Newcastle’s winning goal in that first half.

You have to say that Newcastle were excellent and it was a superbly worked goal. They moved the ball quickly, Gordon put in an inch-perfect cross and Isak’s header was a bullet. Not a lot Raya could have done with it but perhaps one of Saliba or Gabriel could have been closer? Maybe. Maybe it was just one of those inch-perfect goals.

What you can do if you are Arsenal is react. That goal was conceded within the first 15 minutes, so Arsenal had 75+ to show a reaction, to put Newcastle under pressure, to deliver the goods to get us back on track. But the Arsenal players offered little. Last season the talk was about how we were the best out of possession team in Europe. Yesterday we got none of that. Newcastle hassled and hurried us when they were off the ball. They pressed and that battled. And our players had no idea. We didn’t move the ball quickly enough, we played with a lethargy in possession and we didn’t chase the spaces to put Newcastle under pressure. Newcastle popped the ball around us like we were a rudderless late-Wenger side.

It was embarrassing at times.

Embarrassing because we’ve been told – and tell ourselves – that this Arsenal team are in a title challenge. Not now we aren’t. Talk of the title needs to be shelved completely. Because unless we get out of this funk that, let’s face it, has been with us for at least a month now, we are going to be out of any reckoning by the time the Christmas period comes around.

I was really surprised at how slow we were with the ball. It was like we had no idea what to do just because Newcastle held a relatively robust shape. We just horseshoe passed ourselves to death all afternoon. Martinelli looked like a lost boy. Saka was doubled up on and kept quiet all afternoon. I barely noticed Havertz on the pitch. But the midfield was just off. I thought Merino was meant to be a duel merchant? How many duels did he win yesterday? It doesn’t feel like many, that’s for sure.

The passing was weird yesterday too. Balls being massively overhit from Merino, Rice, Partey, Saliba, Gabriel, etc. All of them were at it. But there was one player who stunk the place out more than most, which was Leandro Trossard. He was selfish with a couple of chances in the first half when a better option may have been to shoot. He mishit passes again and again, he ran into blind alleys and when you add that to the Bournemouth performance, as well as being average on a few occasions recently, it feels like he is on borrowed time in terms of a starting place in this team. Odegaard can not come back quickly enough, I tell you that much.

But Odegaard alone doesn’t salvage that game yesterday. Even if he was fit and pressing like he does, the rest of the team would have let him down, because we were just so flat. It didn’t look like an Arteta Arsenal and you have to say Howe got his tactics spot on. What’s maddening though is that this was a carbon copy of what happened last season. Arteta seemed to have no idea of how to answer when Howe just rolled out the same approach for the second year in a row:

1. Commit and press bodies high up the pitch when Arsenal have the ball in the back line and particularly with it at Raya’s feet
2. Double up in wide positions on the wingers
3. Force them to go long into the centre halves to win the aerial battle with Havertz isolated.

Two year’s in a row. Six points gained for the home team. Just so, so, poor.

Arteta tried to change it, but the subs offered little. Nwaneri showed a little bit of a spark, but by the time he was on Newcastle were in shape and able to react to his cuts inside. At least the kid showed a bit of spark though. That’s more than I can say for the rest of his teammates. Zinchenko came on and almost immediately lost the ball carelessly. There was one Newcastle chance that he gave them on the counter attack just because he misplaced a pass about five yards in front of him. This guy is supposed to be on the pitch to give us more control in possession, yet he’s struggling to trap it?

It was just all wrong yesterday. But the fact that the team just seemed like they didn’t want to fight was the most worrying thing. It was like they were devoid of ideas. It’s not as if they had all played in midweek – many of them hadn’t even got on the pitch at Preston, or at least they only played a half or less. So fatigue is not an excuse I want to countenance today. It was mentality. Those Arsenal players just didn’t want it enough. And that is the biggest worry of them all.

I’ll leave it there I think. Back tomorrow with some more thoughts. On the Same Old Arsenal pod this afternoon. Let’s see if I’m still as angry as I was post game yesterday and first thing this morning writing out these thoughts. If you want to you can join us here.

I suppose it’s my own fault. I said yesterday that we’d paid our international dues already and therefore we were due a bit of a pass for injuries for this round of fixtures, so the footballing gods obviously took a look at what I committed to print and said “oh no you didn’t just say that…we’ll have you now”, striking again at our team and at our best player who is in blistering end product form right now.

And it’s yet another potential injury blow in a season that doesn’t even feel like it has properly started yet. Saka has – once again – proven just how integral he is to our team and is a player we rely on: we’ve essentially become a bit blasé about his availability but he’s a guy who gets kicked every week and seems to always get up. Maybe this was one game too many and now we sweat on his availability for our upcoming matches – Liverpool in particular looming on the horizon in a few weeks time.

Carsley only offered up that he ‘felt something’ and although I didn’t watch the game, I’ve seen the Greek goal in which Saka was on the pitch and hobbling. I’ve also seen some comments online that suggest that he seemed to be walking around a little more naturally after the game, so the hope is that it is just a knock, with Carsley also confirming that he ‘felt something’. But I think you and I can 100% agree that Saka should be on the first Uber back to his family home this morning. We cannot afford to risk him and England should absolutely take some responsibility for the players’ welfare and forget about testing him – just send him back to Arsenal to begin to recover. If I hear that England are keeping him around because it’s not as bad as first feared, well, I’m going to be pretty grumpy. So will a few million global Gooners too.

England’s next game is against Finland and it makes absolutely zero sense for him to play a single second of that game. Carsley should look to rotate his squad and he should be sending Saka home and letting Rice sit on the bench and watch from the side lines. On Saka you’d hope he’s ok and that happens, but on Rice you can absolutely bet that he will play another 90 minutes. That’s because these international managers rarely think about the players, they are all about getting results in pointless international matches that – in the grand scheme of things – mean very little at all. You can talk about the World Cup qualifying stuff, but at this stage it doesn’t really matter and there’s always another round of qualifiers for England to get through.

So all-in-all, this is a complete mess of a competition that should have never had existed and I just hope that Saka’s knock is not serious. If he’s out for any length of time then it’ll be another injury to add to the list, for which we could now be up to 13 players this season who have already missed at least one game for us. In terms of number of games and injuries/suspensions/absences, it’ll be 34 matches – you can see the details here for more information. To put some context in to this:

• Liverpool = 14 (not including their third ‘keeper in this like I haven’t included Setford)
• 115 Charges FC = 22
• Villa = 24 (there are a few names in there on top of that to bump those up, but the fact I’ve never heard of them suggest that it’s youth players, which I’ve obviously excluded)
• Chelsea = 29 (and they’ve got about a billion players on their list – I’ve excluded Ben Chilwell given that he’s not even a registered player for them I don’t think)

So you can see in that list that we have been severely hit this season, which makes the fact we are even within touching distance of the top a minor miracle, especially given our fixtures we’ve played, something I highlighted earlier this week. Our squad depth is certainly needed and it looks like it is going to be needed a little more when this international break is done for.

I talked yesterday about how we get 2022 Gabriel Jesus back, but I didn’t think it might be to play him in Saka’s position if he is injured as a result of last night’s match! If you’re looking at the good news it is that we have senior players who could fill that position like Gabriel Jesus, or Raheem Sterling, but as good and experienced as those players are, they aren’t our Starboy. Nobody in the world is.

Other than that there’s not really a lot else going on today. There’s the usual transfer click-baity nonsense you always see, but I’m not minded to spend any length of time on it, so instead I’m going to leave it there for today and get on with my Friday of work. You have yourselves a good one and I’ll catch you all in the morrow.

International football can get in the f*cking bin. And then that bin can be thrown in the sea.

Because you – like me I am sure – will be pretty cheesed off about the Martin Odegaard injury last night. He landed very awkwardly, there has been confirmation of what looks like an ankle sprain for the Norwegian (and our) captain and after the game Stale Solbakken said that in the dressing rom “it doesn’t look good”.

Balls.

Martin Odegaard is one of the key pillars in our team. He is an essential cog in how we progress the play and not only is he our captain that drives us forward, but he’s also a man that often leads some of our press, who’s passing range isn’t really matched in our team and has contributed towards goals and assists in each of our last two seasons. If he’s out for any length of time, it’s a huge blow for us.

Now all eyes turn to how bad it is and I suspect by the time Arteta has his press conference on Friday we’ll have an idea what type of sprain it is, but a quick Google search gave me an answer that depending on the grading of the sprain, we’re looking at anything from a week to potentially six weeks. If it’s the latter, we really do have a problem, because Merino is out for about six week’s too. That’s two big players for us but it is compounded by the fact that Fabio Vieira is in Portugal playing for Porto and Emile Smith Rowe is in West London for Fulham. I think most of us understood the Smith Rowe move, but the Fabio Vieira one now – with the benefit of hindsight – does look a strange one. Perhaps the faith is so strong in Nwaneri that he was seen as the de facto understudy to Odegaard, but giving a 17-year-old kid the keys to the creative engine is a lot of pressure that for me personally is a concern. He’s great, we’ve all loved what we’ve seen this summer, but if he is playing for the next six weeks, he’s going to have patchy games and when you are hoping to be fighting for a title, that’s a lot to ask.

There was a lot of talk last summer from pundits saying “yeah, well, they haven’t had any injuries, have they?” which of course was nonsense. But I don’t think anybody can label us with that now. We’re three games in to the new season and as it stands you can argue that for one of the biggest games of the season, we’re going in to it without a first choice midfield (Rice, Odegaard and Merino). It’s rotten luck and when you add to it the fact that we’ve had Tomiyasu out, Gabriel Jesus has been out and Calafiori was sent home from Italy at the weekend, this squad looks like it’s being stretched to its fullest.

And yet again I have to lament the very existence of international football. Why-oh-why on earth was there an international break after just three games? What is the point? The Euro 2024 final was just over EIGHT WEEKS ago. We had a whole summer of international football. Yet almost as soon as the domestic season starts there’s another pointless break shunted in there. I hate it with a passion. There will be some that will say “yes but there’s always been an international break during this time in the season”, but that is not a reason for there continuing to be one every season moving forward. This dressing up of glorified friendlies in the ‘UEFA Nations League’ is pathetic. And to add insult to (literal) injury, we had the Norwegian manager coming on Norwegian TV last night after the game chuckling and saying “I don’t think Arteta will praise me”.

You’re damn right he won’t praise you, you tw@t, because Odegaard reported with a knock and you and your medical staff should have been more sensitive about the welfare of one of your players. But instead you just laugh it off, throw him in to a pointless glorified friendly, chew him up and hand him back to The Arsenal medical team in pieces.

There might be some who suggest that if there was no international break this weekend, there might have been a Premier League game and he might have had the same problem in that match anyway, so perhaps it was fate or something like that. To that argument I say “bollocks”. Firstly, he’s had to travel which of course has it’s impact on the body, however minor. But secondly, Arteta’s motives would have been purer to assess his availability because he knows that if Odegaard exacerbates any problems he picked up the weekend before last against Brighton (we all saw him hobbling around and after he took a kick to the knee he wasn’t quite the same), then he misses him for longer than a game. A couple of season’s ago Arteta pulled Odegaard for the Brentford away game due to injury because he knew that it’s better to not risk it so you can get the player back the following week. Solbakken doesn’t worry about that. He knows that he won’t need Odegaard for another eight weeks or so until the next international break, so even if he has a knock, for him it’s worth the gamble on the player because he doesn’t have to face any consequences in terms of his job. Why should he care about a player he doesn’t have to see for another couple of months?

I suspect we can almost certainly rule him out for this coming weekend and suddenly, after just three games, we have a potential injury crisis brewing. The squad is already smaller in terms of first team players than it was last season and we’ve got – by my count – question marks or confirmed absences of potentially up to seven first team players. In September!

We’ll need to see what shakes out in the coming days, but when you add to it the fact that we’ve had one of the most difficult starts to the season in terms of fixtures that I’ve known, it’s all looking a little troublesome at the moment. Let’s just hope we can have some positive news in the coming days as we count down to the NLD.

Back tomorrow with some more ramblings.

And as if to rub salt in to our collective wounds, new signing Calafiori was taken off after a sort of freak accident after Dembele from France tumbled in to him last night. I’ve watched a clip of it and the most worrying thing is the way his teammates were furiously gesturing over to the bench to get somebody on. When that happens you immediately fear the worst, but with Spaletti saying that it’s not so bad and he might be fit for Monday, that’s at least some crumb of comfort. Riccardo should really be on the first flight home though. It’s ridiculous that he is even remotely in contention for playing another game after coming off injured but therein lies my biggest issue with international football during the season: The international managers just don’t care. Got a friendly against a big nation? An international manager will play your player for the full 90. Borderline whether they are fit? International manager will play your player for the full 90. We’ve already seen that Declan Rice isn’t 100% right now, but instead of resting him, you can bet that Carsley will play him this evening. I guess Rice is suspended so he’s getting a rest next weekend when we play the Scum, but that’s besides the point. The point is that these international managers chew our players up, run them ragged and spit them out/chuck them back to us in pieces.

Even Kevin De Bruyne has spoken about the number of games they play and how FIFA and UEFA are just chucking in more games, so it’s not just us fans that think this is pointless, but the players too. But as he says, money talks.

I know I am a broken record on this and I’ve been peddling this line for years, but that’s because it’s been frustrating for years. Arsenal pay these players’ wages. Arsenal have all the risk. But it’s the international teams who get to do what they want. It’s maddening.

And so now we sweat on the fitness of the rest of the players on duty. Rice and Saka are with England tonight, as is Timber with the Netherlands, Havertz with Germany, Zinchenko with Ukraine. Odegaard played the full 90 against Kazakhstan this week and Partey seems to have done a full 90 for Ghana against Angola. That tells me he’s at least ok. So that’s a relief. What is weird is that I can’t see Trossard in the Belgium team line up from their game against Israel. I don’t know whether that’s because he’s picked up a knock or not, but there’s nothing I can find online, so hopefully he’s just fallen out with his national team manager and is going to Ben White his international career. That would be nice. Focus on being in the Arsenal team Leo, we’ll appreciate you much more than any of those Belgians would.

I’ve seen some links suggesting that after the Saudi bid, Arsenal want to open talks with Trossard over a new deal. That makes sense to me. He doesn’t usually get too injured, he’s not the kind of wide forward where his pace is his biggest asset and that will start to dwindle as he reaches his 30s, plus he’s already shown this season how valuable an asset he is. He’s the best finisher at the club by a mile. His current contract runs until 2026 so in January he’ll have 18 months left on his deal. By the time we hit June 2026 he’ll be 31 by the time his contract is due to expire and is reportedly on £90k-per-week, so it’s not as if he’s on a massive wage in comparison to others; if the rumours are true even Reiss Nelson was on more than him!

But it’s a bit of a weird age. He’ll want more security in his contract length, but Arsenal won’t want to bump him up and slap another three years on his deal. So perhaps it will suit all parties to give him a pay rise, maybe bolt on an extra year with a ‘plus one’ on the end, then perhaps drop an extra £20k-£30k which he gets now to reflect his improved status in the team, as well as give him a little more security. All parties win and it nips the Saudi interest in the bud, so that’s good.

Right, I think I’ll leave it there for the day. Time to go for a walk in the Northumbrian air.

Have yourselves a splendid one and I’ll catch you all tomorrow.

Laters.

It was pre-meditated, it was fully intentioned, it was a professional footballer looking to provoke. The mistake Rice made, was to offer the slightest of touches on the ball as it was rolling, which gave Chris Kavanagh – intent on refereeing two sides on the pitch very differently – all the opportunity he needed to give Rice the second yellow (he’d deserved the first, by the way).

Rice has said he holds his hands up and it was naive of him, but that’s his public commentary, because he knows that this is an incident that we will never see again. And in fact, across the Premier League weekend this weekend, we have indeed not seen happen in any other game.

This referee – as appalling as he is – has never done that before. Last weekend he was the one that allowed Joelinton to clothesline Neto. Two year’s ago he was the one who saw Declan Rice flick the ball away against Granit Xhaka whilst playing for West Ham. There was no need to say or do anything that day. But yesterday he decided to change that approach and fundamentally change a football match that Arsenal were fully in control of.

We were already one up. We had created a ton of chances. We had forced Verbruggen in to a number of smart – if not spectacular- saves. At halftime Brighton had created barely anything; their xG was at 0.08 – which means we’d completely limited them and we started off the second half in the same fashion.

Kai Havertz had his second goal of the season after good work from Saka to challenge Dunk, followed by the perfect ball to the German to set up a sumptuous goal to get us up and running. It was deserved, it was class, it was us showing just how good we are. Every Arsenal fan was happy and we were looking at extending that lead and securing the points in the second half. And as I and James both said on the Same Old Arsenal pod this morning, I was convinced that we were going to replicate the perfection of a performance as we did last season.

And then everything changed. Kavanagh – who had been giving Brighton 60-70% of decisions up until that point anyway – decided that he wanted to make an impact on the game, even though he didn’t have to. Common sense with decisions like that yesterday should always prevail; last weekend with Saliba, McGinn and White in that incident saw common sense do so, but Chris Kavanagh showed just what sort of poor officiating he delivers on a frequent basis by showing he had no intention of applying some logic to a situation.

I keep hearing this “letter of the law” phrase trotted out for the incident. It is more flawed as an argument than can ever be imagined. And here’s why:

1. By the letter of the law, Joao Pedro should have been booked for kicking the ball away. He wasn’t.
2. By the letter of the law, Hinzelwood should have received a booking for a shirt pull on Saka in the first half. He wasn’t.
3. By the letter of the law, perhaps the high boot on Odegaard should have been chalked up as dangerous play, the Brighton player could/should have been sent off. He wasn’t.
4. By the letter of the law, Veltman shouldn’t have taken the free kick from the position he took it from – the ball was about 10 yards back. He didn’t.
5. By the letter of the law, you can’t strike a moving ball as a free kick. He did.
6. By the letter of the law, his intention on Rice was to kick through him, so violent conduct comes in to play and he should have been given a red card. He didn’t.

This is absolutely farcical that the ‘letter of the law’ seems to have been arbitrarily applied. And we’re not even talking about separate dates and separate minutes.

THIS IS THE SAME GAME.

It was just plain wrong. It was an example of two teams being refereed differently. It made a fundamental impact on the football match.

After that the game became attack versus defence and Brighton – a possession-based team and one of the better teams in the league – were always going to dominate. Had that incident not happened, or had it been refereed properly and how 99 time ms out of 100 I suspect it would have been, then we would all be talking a different story today.

Arsenal seem to be the test case for ‘things you only ever see once’ and frankly, we Arsenal fans are all sick of it.

• Tomiyasu at Palace last season getting a yellow card for holding on to the ball for seven seconds.
• Granit Xhaka against Swansea.
• Martinelli two yellows in one move. Against Wolves.
• referee ‘forgets’ to draw lines against Brentford.
• apologies for ‘interfering’ with decision when they shouldn’t against United at OT – for Martinelli’s goal where Odegaard was adjudged to have fouled Erikson.

What happened yesterday won’t happen again. Yet we are the ones who have to deal with it. Last season we lost the title on two points. What happens if the same happens this season?

We can talk about the defending for the Brighton goal, for sure, and I think Partey could do better with tracking Joao Pedro, but aside from that you cannot argue that this whole match was defined by a referee who wanted to make a name for himself. It’s pathetic, it’s infuriating, it’s unfair. I said it yesterday on social media and I’ll say it again today:

This sort of stuff doesn’t happen against 115 Charges FC.

But it does happen to us. Quite frequently (Kai Havertz getting chokeslammed two weeks ago, anyone?).

And we’re doubly punished now, because we go in to the North London Derby away from home without one of our key defensive pillars. Rice missing for that game will be massive.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the PGMOL. I’m tired of the same conversations about the same group of officials. I’m tired of the lack of change or ownership of accountability (we’ll be seeing referees and the PGMOL talk to us about ‘good process’ here for sure over the next few days). I’m tired of the inevitability of this stuff happening again.

Be back tomorrow with more Arsenal thoughts. Catch you all then.