Well, I say ‘derailing’, but our first priority this season was getting top four and although our metaphorical ‘goal posts’ have shifted because of the way in which we tackled the first half of the season. So even if we fall away now but manage to get top four, it would still mean we were ‘on track’ for what the club set out to do in July. Of course it wouldn’t feel like that and of course we’d all be gutted, but let’s not forget how young this team is; for many the journey is just beginning and that’s something to be pleased about.

I wrote yesterday that the club is being viewed in the media as some kind of ‘bad guys’ if you listen to what some sections of the punditry world tell us, but if you take away what some muppets in the press say, you can’t argue that Arsenal act with class. They don’t have to, but they really take time to try to connect with fans – or at least have done since the Lockdown for sure. When people talk about the ‘class’ of Arsenal, I think many who don’t follow the club as closely as we do, really know what it means. An example of it is how the club have tried to reflect the history, culture and voice of the fans in the external fascia to the ground. I was there for the Brentford game and I have to tell you, it looked class. That came about by the club listening to the fans and applying the principles of what the fans told them to the artwork that was created.

But another example of the class of arsenal is with the announcement of the new Elneny contract. He’s just suffered a long term injury, his contract is up in the summer, so it could have easily have been an opportunity for the club to say ‘thanks for the memories, Mo, and goodbye’. But they haven’t. They’ve moved to give a guy who has been nothing but a good servant and loveable guy a new one year extension. That isn’t a football move, because as I’ve said before, we’ve moved on from Elneny and even in Jorginho we have a player who is an upgrade in the same position as Elneny. It is very likely that Elneny may never play for Arsenal again. But by giving him his new deal they’ve moved to thank a player for his service and enable him to continue his rehab – which by the sounds of it will go in to next season – without having to worry about his next club. The noises are that it is on reduced terms too, so it’s not breaking the bank. It’s a good move on all parts. A classy move of goodwill by the club, Mo has a little more job security, plus there is an additional player in the team for next season that can come in if we need him, which of course we hope we won’t.

If we get a big midfield move that we’re all after in the summer, like a Rice or Caicedo, then Elneny will be fourth choice for that number six position. He’s not getting game time for that. I’ve never been his biggest fan but I appreciate that he’s never really moaned, is clearly well liked at the club, so has a positive impact in some sense.

The contracts that we all DO want to see, however, are that of Saliba and Saka. At the start of the season I feared we’d lose Saliba in the summer and I still kind of feel like that could happen, but with the way we are playing, the fact they both play every week, plus that Arsenal looks like a team that is on an upward trajectory, makes me feel like this is a good place to be and a place that players want to be.

Just look at all of the Declan Rice noises. In the summer it was basically universally accepted that he would go to a United or a Chelsea. Supposedly Chelsea have courted him for over a year now. He has history at the club having been an apprentice there and to me with the way Boehly has been spending, I could easily see a mega move made. But with the mega-long contract deal loophole being closed in the summer, I don’t think Chelsea will be ‘amortising’ their way to a £100million+ bid for the West Ham player. They also have Fernandez in there too. Added to that is the fact that if you’re Rice and you have the choice of an Arsenal team where they are now, or a Chelsea team where they are, which one are you choosing? If I try to take my Arsenal hat off for a second, he’s already said over the World Cup that he wants to play Champions League, but he won’t get that at Chelsea next season. At Arsenal he can see his natural progression in to the first team as Partey reaches 31 and continues to struggle with injury. Apparently he’s been impressed with Arsenal and the way they play, as well as with Arteta. So whereas nine months ago I’d have laughed off some Rice-related rumours, I find it increasingly believable that he could be a viable option.

Of course there are many moving parts in a transfer and just because it seems realistic, doesn’t mean it’ll actually happen, because you don’t know what other teams will do if they try to blow Arsenal out of the water with mega bids. But all I’m saying is that it feels moredoable now and that is a positive sign of where Arsenal are going.

Right, that’s it from me today, so I’ll take my leave and catch you all tomorrow with yet more of my usual ramblings.

Have a good one.

But that’s all for tomorrow, because today it’s all about pouring over what Mikel said in his pre match presser yesterday ahead of the game, as well as the team news.

I guess the main update was the confirmation that Mo Elneny is out injured and that is something of a frustration for the club I’d expect. We all know his limitations, we all know he’s not exactly the best understudy for Thomas Partey, but with the games due to come thick and fast and the need to rotate Partey from time to time surely being something that Arteta will have in his mind, having him out injured again for a prolonged period of time is not ideal. The real issue, however, is if it’s a long term injury. All Arteta said is that “Mo never complains about anything” and so I guess the club need to get a proper detailed analysis on how bad his knee injury is, but the timing is rubbish. It’s rubbish because we’ve all heard about the rumours, about the possible pursuit of Rice in the summer and how the club are clearly earmarking the summer to try to get a deal done for a top class midfielder. Elneny’s contract is up in the summer and I suspect the club thought they might be able to get away with him as understudy for the remainder of the season. But if he’s out for a couple of months, that represents a big risk and we’ll be given an indication of his injury based on whether they move swiftly in the market by next Tuesday. I doubt they’ll be able to bring for a ‘big’ move like a deal for a player like Rice (assuming he IS in fact the target) to this January, plus we’ve seen how Sambi probably isn’t the player to play in that role Partey plays – not yet, anyway. So what do they do? Stick or twist? I guess it depends on Mo. But they need to make a decision fast and this weekend I reckon.

Cedric is the only other player there is a question on and it appears he’s joining Fulham on loan until the end of the season. If it’s true they’re covering his £100k-per-week deal then great, but the fact we’re paying him that money in the first place is an utter travesty. It’ll mean a good £1.8million saved off the wage bill so I guess that’s no small change and if he plays regularly then maybe we can get some money for him in the summer.

On to the game tomorrow and some of the other stuff he said in the presser, I thought it was an interesting comment he made about the Kiwior signing, because he made a point of saying we had three centre halves and this adds the fourth. Hmm…so that means he’s counting Tomi and White as right backs? I suspect he would have played White or Tomi if were needed, but perhaps it’s positive that in his mind he’s clearly thinking the ol’ “two for every position” and that doesn’t include having those versatile players counting double. Personally I thought we were pretty well covered before Kiwior’s arrival but this obviously just absolute guarantees that. Which I think is fair enough.

But will he play the new signings tomorrow night and rotate his team? That’s a difficult one to answer and reading his words on the official site and listening to what he said on the videos, it feels very difficult to predict. I have only a gut feel on this but to me it feels like he might sprinkle one or two in rotation. Players like Turner, Tierney and Tomiaysu probably deserve the game time and they’ve been on the verges of regular football. You can tell Arteta wants to keep them motivated because he brings them on as much as he can. But ultimately you can’t change a winning team and we’ve been winning. Like, a LOT.

So tomorrow will give an opportunity for a bit of rotation and I think he’ll do it. I don’t normally write off the Fa Cup but as I said yesterday, I’d rotate the heck out of the team based on the fact it’s an away game and we’re probably going to lose, but also when Arteta was asked about the impact a defeat might have he was semi dismissive about it. I think if he rotates most of the team tomorrow and loses, the squad as a whole will probably be able to quite easily brush this off. I worry that a completely full strength team getting beat might have a different effect, so there’s another reason to give it a bit of a rotation and potentially save yourselves some kind of psychological disadvantage for later on in the season.

Right, that’s about it from me today, so I’ll bid you all adieu for now and I’ll catch thee in the morrow.

You have a good one.

Of course we all know how it unfolded and that’s why it hit me, because not only was I brought back down with a bump, but it felt like an even taller fall from where I had started. Then you add to it the fact that the team were so poor against a side with nothing to play for, combined with the Scum getting over the line to get Top Four – which was basically secured after that Newcastle defeat – and it was quite a difficult few days. I stopped blogging, I removed the Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone, I didn’t read a single bit of sports content at all and I stopped listening to Arsenal podcasts on my runs.

It was quite refreshing, but difficult at first, I have to admit. My life is immersed in The Arsenal. I write about it because I love to write and this is one of my biggest passions. I speak on podcasts and used to do some radio because I just love talking about The Arsenal. And I listen to podcasts when I go running every day. So to cut everything out took a day or two to adjust, but I got there in the end and by the time the Everton game came around it was more about meeting up with some mates before and after the game rather than the match itself. I wanted my Arsenal community rather than the match. It was great to be back and see old faces, but in reality I was still smarting and that Everton game didn’t help that much at the time.

But I do love writing and I do love writing about The Arsenal, so this morning I decided to get back in the saddle, so to speak. So for me it’ll be normal service resuming from today and I’ll be back to the daily blogging about all things Arsenal that I hear, read, or think about. Enough time has elapsed that I can think about what lies ahead, rather than what has come to pass, so as the saying goes “we go again” and thoughts now must turn immediately to this summer and how we are going to improve what was clearly a threadbare squad.

And whilst nothing has happened so far from a new player acquisition, the two big Arsenal noises that everyone has been talking about whilst I’ve been away has been Elneny and Nketiah either signing, or on the verge of signing, new deals with the club. On both counts I’m not so sure. I feel like with the one that is done – Elneny – there are many fans suffering from recency bias. Yes, he did fine when he came in and had some good games for us, but this is an end of season purple patch and we should not forget the limitations of the player. He has signed a one year extension with a one year option and so in that sense I suppose it is squad depth at a time in which we are alarmingly threadbare, But if we fast forward to the start of the season and we have another midfielder added in to the team which means Elneny moves further down the list to be a true auxiliary player, then I guess I would be fine with it. The reality is that we do need bodies for the increased number of games we’ll be playing and so if Elneny picks up half a dozen starts in the Europa League and a couple of League Cup games, I can live with it. But we shouldn’t be seeing him – or relying on him – for any matches that have any significance in our season. His limitations will show and I think deep down every Arsenal fan knows that.

I also think the Nketiah deal feels like a strange one too and I think a lot of people are suffering from recency bias there too. Sure, he did great at the end of the season and sure, Arteta should have brought him in much sooner than he did given Lacazette’s woeful showing from about February onwards, but I still harbour reservations about how good he actually is and at £100k-per-week for five years, that feels like more mistakes of the past are being made. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong, I hope I am, but giving Eddie that kind of money will make him very difficult to shift if he fails next season. Teams will not want to pay a premium if they know they’ve got to pay the kid what he’s on at the Arsenal and that would lower any asking price for him drastically. I guess you could argue that a fee is better than no fee, but I’ve seen too many Mustafi, Kolasinac and Ozil situations to not be at least a little bit worried that we’re going to be committing a lot of cash to a player who could end up sticking around quite some time if he doesn’t succeed and is difficult to shift on. I just have to hope that Arteta and Edu know what they are doing.

I’ll leave it there for today I think. There’s plenty of time for speculation and the like, which I’ll probably delve in to tomorrow (Gnabry, anyone?), but for now I’ll take my leave and catch you all tomorrow.

Cheers guys.

Chris.

I don’t know why I’m starting off today’s blog with such unbridled positivity, because I’ve woken up at 5.15am and I feel absolutely shattered. Plus there’s a leaving party at my work later which means a bit more booze and probably more interrupted sleep ahead of tomorrow’s match against Norwich. And I say all of this because I feel really excited about the game tomorrow and I don’t want that excitement to be tempered by sleep depravation and a hangover.

Check me out; I am contemplating drinking less so that I can have a better experience on Saturday when I – ironically enough – will be drinking more ahead of the game tomorrow in the pubs round the corner from the ground.

Of course the difference in the instance tomorrow is that my drinking tomorrow has a purpose: I am trying to make the potentially hazardous performance of The Arsenal seem a little more hazy by consuming more beer.

Anyway, enough of me and my life, what of The Arsenal, eh? Well, Mikel had his press conference yesterday and I did wonder whether he wouldn’t do it on Friday but I suspect that he will want to use as much time as possible today to get the players that have just arrived back from internationals on the training pitch as much as possible to try to assess whether he can chuck some of them in to the game tomorrow. Also, by doing the press conference today it gets the media duties out of the way. If he’d have had that full training day with no media duties today then perhaps the instructions, the discussions, etc, are a day less fresh for some of those players so I kind of understand it if that is his thinking.

There was also an interview with him about the summer and the strategy behind the transfer window and I’ll probably get pelters from some people for this, but I really do enjoy listening to him when he talks about football. What we see on the pitch hasn’t really matched up to how well he articulates himself in front of the cameras over the last year, but when I listened to that interview I saw an articulate, young manager (it pleases me to call him ‘young’, because he’s roughly my age!) who makes his points with an air of authority that makes you believe him. Of course you have to caveat that by saying that the style of football and what we are trying to do is not matching up to that, which I agree, but it is the way he talks that makes me think “come on, let’s just have it all click, can we?” and that is the hope I cling on to at the moment. I am not sure if it can, but I so desperately want him to succeed. As I have every Arsenal manager. Even at the end of Wenger’s reign, I still wanted something to suddenly change and for him to turn in to the Wenger of the first seven or eight years, even if the more evidence each week showed that it wouldn’t happen. That’s because we all want Arsenal to win football matches. All the football matches. All the time. It is why we do what we do. It is why we get up early for matches in different time zones, it is why we spend thousands of pounds on travelling to games and paying for tickets each year, it is why we are all together. To watch The Arsenal win. So what I want is for the good game Mikel Arteta talks to start translating it on the pitch.

So, to the press conference itself, in which he said that later yesterday they would update on team news. Elneny is out with a hamstring, Xhaka is suspended, which really does only leave Partey and Sambi as the first choice central midfielders, so despite the fact that I had a couple of debates – legitimate concerns too – with people on Twitter speculating whether or not Partey should be on the bench for this one, at least from the start, I don’t see how Mikel doesn’t throw him in tomorrow. He hasn’t played Maitland-Niles as a central midfielder much and I just can’t see a midfield pairing of Sambi and Ainsley, so I suspect that’s what we’ll see. More on team set up tomorrow though.

The rest of the team news is pretty positive though. Gabriel is back, White is back, Nketiah is back and you have to think that the two centre halves will play given that they both started in the behind closed doors friendly game against Brentford last week. It’s a real boost for Arteta and he admitted he doesn’t want any more excuses – from inside or outside the camp, they must deliver and he knows that it simply cannot be anything else but a win tomorrow. If we even draw that game you wonder how long he might be able to continue with the form as it is. But, as he alluded to and I might go in to more detail on tomorrow, he also admitted that delivering a good performance is key. You can win 1-0 and be absolutely terrible. We had a few matches during the Emery winning streak that had us a little worried with how we were cut open at times and rode our luck a bit, but we pushed those to one side because the victories were there, but Arteta knows that a scabby victory where we ride our luck may be welcome, but it won’t stop those doubters from their doubts.

He was also asked about Maitland-Niles and his response was obviously to not give too much away, but I just wonder if he might get a little more game time this season. Personally I’d be kicking Cedric in to touch and telling Chambers that AMN is going to get a go ahead of him for a while at right back, then I’d be thinking about him as an auxiliary midfielder too. Perhaps give him minutes there against Wimbledon because if he plays more minutes there and does well, then maybe he can even shunt Elneny further down the pecking order. That would certainly be welcome. He was asked whether he was in the UK after the German national team had to have their plane land in Scotland after some difficulties. I was on a plane on Sunday evening coming from Faro (Calum Chambers was on the same one!) and we encountered some turbulence. The old I get the more I worry these massive metal boxes fuel of flammable fuel will fall out of the sky, so having a plane make an emergency landing like like might have shaken him up a bit. But after 24 hours I suspect he’ll be fine and the next question is whether the delays have impacted training. Arteta said that he will have a look at him but perhaps that leaves the door open for Ramsdale to start?

We shall see. I’ll do some more thinking on how we might line up, as well as Norwich, tomorrow. In the meantime, you kids have a good one.

Laters.

All of this isn’t to excuse Arteta by the way. The one thing we should be able to say is that the players should be interchangeable, but the playing style should be consistent. The problem we’ve had all season and in pre season is that we haven’t seen much of a system. We don’t high press with intensity throughout games,  we aren’t a low-block team, we don’t try to retain possession in zones of the pitch where we can do damage to opponents, etc. I could go on because after these first set of games it hasn’t really felt like we do anything. We’re a bit of a hotch-potch of styles and I suspect that causes confusion amongst the players and contributes towards the poor form we’ve shown.

We’ve all known we’d lose to Chelski and City but what we wanted to see is at least some kind of consistent style and approach. Should we have seen that then I think many of us would have probably been a little less apprehensive about the next few games.

As it is, it feels like this could continue to be apprehensive because the club and gone and bought a whole raft of players who will take time to bed in. A lot of us have been talking about the end to this international break as a line in the sand; it’s time to start the season afresh and look to pick up points.  For me it was about looking at players who would be returning to the team, instantly improving it, kicking  us on and looking very different to the rabble that failed so drastically at the Etihad. Yet talking to Charles Watts on Twitter yesterday, we speculated whether some of those big name returning players would even be available or fit for the game.

Is Partey fit to start? We know he’s been in training with the first team  but as Charles rightly pointed out, he’s only been seen in a couple of the training sessions and given his injury record with us and what happened last season at the Scum where he broke down because he was rushed back, would it not be better to ease him in cautiously. I get that and perhaps it makes sense, but there’s part of me that wonders whether we’re going to be constantly worried about Partey breaking down. At some point we need to throw him in and hope that his body isn’t just Abou Diaby’d since he joined us from Atletico.

The question over who replaces him will be an interesting one and you have to admire the commitment Arsenal have to leaving us with no central midfielders of any real quality available if Partey doesn’t start and Elneny leaves the club today on Turkish Transfer Deadline day. Galatasaray apparently made an approach yesterday for his services but Arsenal rebuffed because they are looking for a better fee. I agree we should try to look for the best possible deal, I also agree we should try to offload a very average player for us if we can, but if Elneny does go today, then we’re looking at Sambi, Xhaka, Partey as our stand out central midfielders.

Does that potentially lead to an opportunity for Maitland-Niles to stake a claim? I don’t see why not, but it will probably depend on how much stock we all take in these supposed ‘clear the air’ talks that Arteta and Ainsley had. A player  going rogue on social media is never a good look and we’ve seen already how Arteta has no problem torching players, but he might have to swallow his pride on that one and just give Ainsley more game time if he’s going to let Elneny leave.

And hey, I’d be more than happy with that, if I’m honest. He’s technically a better footballer than Mo, he is more athletic, offers more progressively with the ball going forward and is more flexible in terms of the positions he players. He’ll also feel a little more loved if he has more opportunities too, so if Arsenal can get the Elneny deal done and AMN is in fact going to get more minutes, then that works for me, personally.

Let’s see how it all plays out today. There should start to be that trickle of information today and certainly during the course of this Wednesday we’ll see if Galatasaray return for Mo. They have to do it today if they want him so it’ll be resolved one way or another.

Catch you all tomorrow.

What isn’t helping is that it feels like we’re largely going in to this season with practically the same team as the one that hobbled us in to 8th in the league and with every Arsenal fan holding their collective breath that Thomas Partey is somehow fit enough to play for that opener away at Brentford. When you have Arteta saying that “it’s not good” then you tend to think the worst. Partey was pictured in the evening without any kind of protective boot or hobbling at all, which is about the only positive we’ve seen so far.

He will have had his scan yesterday and so they’ll have been analysing the results yesterday and probably today no doubt. Whether we get the Ghanaian back for the start of the season remains to be seen, but given how impressive he’s been in pre season, precaution has to be the name of the game here. There’s no way he should be anywhere near the pitch at the weekend against the Scum. He should have a dozen horse placentas strapped to that ankle and be in a cryogenic chamber surrounded by bubble wrap right now.

The reason why he is so important is that after last season we’re all hoping and praying for so much from him. As I mentioned already, the reason I feel a little nervous about this season is because the options for Arteta haven’t really changed much. He can bring White in for Holding, which should be an upgrade we hope, but other than that it is the same group of players.

Now, the good news is that it is not the same players who were favoured last season. We won’t be seeing the likes of Willian, for example, plus we have Smith Rowe who has broken through. The team that finished last season were certainly in better form than the one that stunk the place out in November and most of December. But I look at the fact that Elneny got so many minutes on Sunday and has done all season and that worries me. Like, a lot, I have to tell you. He is not a player who should be anywhere near the first team at this stage and the fact we’ve seen a few impressive cameo’s from Sambi Lokonga makes me think that he should be starting alongside Granit Xhaka in a week on Friday.

Yes he’s young. Yes he’s only just joined a new team. Yes he’s in a new league and yes the Premier League is the hardest league in the world. But we paid £17million+ for this lad and he’s been captain of Anderlecht for over a season. That tells me he’s got some broad shoulders and should be given an opportunity as soon as possible. 

What we’ve seen from Elneny in the last two games has been a couple of mistakes and, as usual, nothing spectacular at all. In the 20 minutes that Sambi was on at the weekend he looked calm, assured, plus played a pretty tasty ball in to Pepe who was only just beaten to it by a Chelski player. That’s what Partey has been doing all summer. That progressive passing has been what Partey has delivered for us and whilst we are all hoping that he’s back for Brentford, if he isn’t, surely Mikel can’t opt for a Xhaka/Elneny midfield?

It would be slow. It would be able to be breezed past when we don’t have the ball and it’d only take one physical and athletic midfielder with a bit of pace to expose just how ponderous that midfield pairing would be. But my worry is that Mikel does have his hierarchies. He does like to do things his way and can be quite stubborn; so unless Partey is fit for that Brentford game, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Elneny and Xhaka trudge their way through the middle of the park at the Brentford Community Stadium. I hope I’m wrong.

Even a Sambi/Xhaka midfield could look pretty good if the youngster is racking up the metres on the pitch given Xhaka can’t. Let Sambi play and let’s see whether he is a good foil for the Swiss. One thing we can certainly do this weekend coming up, which is to give Sambi at least an hour against the Scum. What would we have to lose? We know what we’re going to get with Elneny. He’s had loads of minutes already so fitness-wise he doesn’t need minutes in his belt. But we need to see that Sambi can deliver for more than 20 minute bursts. If he’s going to stand a chance of starting against Brentford in the absence of Partey, I think that is the telling sign, in the game against that horrible lot in their toilet bowl stadium. 

I also thought we bought Sambi as the Partey understudy, no? It certainly looked that way given the two’s respective profiles. Alright, we thought there might be a few weeks, or even months, before he would be needed and surely the preference would have been to bed him in and give him cameo minutes at the start of the season, but we have to roll the dice at some stage. Plus, if we’re going to lose Partey for the AFCON, the more minutes Sambi gets before Christmas, the better, because he’s got at least a month of game time with Xhaka as his partner (assuming he stays at the club and stays fit too) in January and February, so we simply MUST be thinking about him for opening weekend. Another start to the season with Elneny getting minutes ahead of him gives us nothing in the long run.

First and foremost though, we need to see what’s happening with Partey, which hopefully we get some positive news on within the next 24-48 hours.

I’ll leave it there and catch you all tomorrow.

• Resting key players: Check
• Getting minutes for returning players: Check
• Feeble opposition: Check
• Goals for your main striker to help his confidence after a spell out: Check
• Impressive performance from some players to give the manager something to think about on Thursday: Check

It was exactly the tonic for the team and whilst the three points itself do little for our season (moving us from 11th to ninth in the league) the importance that a victory can do for the morale of the squad as they prepare and train this week will certainly have some value I think.

I was impressed by the performance of Bellerin on that right hand side. It was he and Luiz who combined excellently inside the first five minutes for our first goal and Bellerin’s run was a reminder of the player who he has been for us. His future may well be elsewhere in the summer but his performance today showed that he can still add some value to this Arsenal team and I think Arteta should be thinking seriously about whether he should start Bellerin on Thursday. That is especially the case now as Luiz went off with an injured hamstring. Personally I would be looking at Bellerin and Chambers as that right side combination and I thought Chambers coped well enough and there was one instance in which Saint-Maximin got away from him but he recovered to keep pace with him. Holding has been fine this season but he doesn’t have that same pace and that’s why I think with Luiz probably done for the season I would be looking at Chambers as the other option.

And on the other side of the defence there will obviously need to be the question as to who plays in at left back. Xhaka did quite well given he was yellow carded early on but we all want to see him in the middle of the park with Partey on Thursday. If he doesn’t then you are probably looking at Elneny in the middle and whilst the Egyptian isn’t without his flaws, his first Premier League goal yesterday will have done him the world of good and the finish was superb too from Bellerin’s cut back. I though Elneny and Ceballos coped well with what was an admittedly poor Newcastle team who seemed to sit off and look like they were going to try and spring counters off us, but never really did. So we ended up with plenty of the ball and pretty much dominated from start to finish. On our left hand side Martinelli was imperious; his energy and running was a thorn in Murphy’s side all day and he beat his man time and time again thorughout the game. A performance like that should have him front and centre of the managers’ thinking but whilst I doubt he’ll get a start on Thursday, knowing you have a guy like this available to call on should you need it, is very valuable indeed.

It was Martinelli who made Auba’s goal too and for about the 512th time in the game he beat Murphy with ease and put in a sumptuous cross that all Auba had to do was steer home. It was exactly the type of goal Auba loves and seeing him get 80-odd minutes under his belt yesterday will allay a lot of fears many of us have. You could tell he wasn’t 100% fit but his movement was still good and he picked up the perfect position for his goal and our second of the game.

We saw out the match and it was as routine a win as you are going to get in the Premier League. After the game Arteta spoke about how Laca and Tierney haven’t even trained with the team yet so are unlikely to be ready for Thursday, which is why seeing both Aubameyang and Martinelli put that kind of a performance in warms the cockles of ones heart. Both will be needed on Thursday and so those minutes yesterday were vital for our hopes of progressing against Villareal.

There’s not really a lot more to say about this one yesterday. We did what was needed, there were minutes for the like of Odegaard who I thought looked a little bit sharper and that will only help us for Thursday. Arteta has options in the attacking positions and let’s face it, we’re going to need that, because we need goals on Thursday. Plenty of goals.

Right, that’s me done for today. It’s a bank holiday in the UK so I’m off to do some DIY. Standard.

Clock ticking down, time running out, 11 minutes plus stoppage time to turn what would have been a disappointing draw away to Olympiakos in Athens and up steps forward two unlikely goalscorers with two super goals to put us in control of this two-legged tie.

We don’t tend to finish games too strongly this season and so when we edged towards the 90 minute mark, I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t expect us to do anything as Olympiakos stuck nine men and a ‘keeper behind the ball with one man up top in case of a lucky break. I thought to myself “this is it, still work to do at home next week” and I couldn’t see where a goal was coming from. After all, we’ve faced low-block teams again and again this season and last and so many times been found wanting. But when Willian – yes WILLIAN – clipped a decent ball in to the box for Gabriel Magalhães to leap like a 6ft 4inch salmon to nod home, I was stunned, shocked, happy, elated and all of those good emotions associated with football.

But that wasn’t even the cherry on a cake that had threatened to be half baked on the hour mark, because just for good measure and to send Twitter pundits like me into a “told ya so” death spiral, Mohammed Elneny pulls out a finish that was all kinds of sublime. He doesn’t often strike the ball that well – if ever – towards goal and I’m surprised he didn’t check back and pass back to his defender, but boy aren’t we glad he didn’t, because the howitzer he unleashed has given us some proper daylight in this two-legged tie.

It was just the tonic on a night in which we once again shot ourselves in the foot earlier in the game and means that Arteta can have a proper think about who he deploys in the home game and how next Thursday.

We should really have been out of sight a lot earlier to be honest though. We controlled possession, we created three times as many shooting chances as Olympiakos (18 to their six), we forced the ‘keeper in to a few saves and we looked like we were popping the ball around really well in that first half. We looked controlled, composed, like we could strike at any minute I felt and in commentary Steve Sidwell was saying the same. So when the excellent Ødegaard took the ball from about 30 yards out and drilled one home to put us ahead just after the half hour mark, I was thinking to myself “come on Arsenal, put this game to bed now”. At halftime it felt like a question of “how many” more than anything else.

But of course Arsenal be Arsenaling. So when Bernd Leno sold Ceballos a wee bit short, then the Spaniard couldn’t get his feet sorted out quickly enough, of course Olympiakos scored with one of only two shots in the entire game. That is what happens with us. Teams do absolutely nothing, then get one chance and ruthlessly punish our own brain farts. It is becoming a weekly occurrence. All I saw on social media after that was Arsenal fans digitally rolling their eyes at our ability to stupidify ourselves in to giving the opponents impetus and motivation. And for about five to ten minutes after that goal Olympiakos seemed to have a little bit more renewed vigor about their play. They seemed a little emboldened and I wondered whether another skanky goal for them was in the offing.

But the reality is that after that initial five minute spell after their equalizer, I think they realised that a draw at home was probably a decent enough result, so they sat back in to that low block I mentioned at the start of the blog. They were content with their lot and just wanted to see the game out. Which is why I am glad we got those two goals. For obvious reasons in terms of the game and tie, but also as a reward for Arsenal being the team looking to go and grab the game and get the win. We deserved it, we were the better team, we got what we should have got: a cushion to take back to the Emirates.

You could tell that Arteta wasn’t too happy though, despite the win, and cited the fact that we gave three really good opportunities away and they scored from one. His face told a picture and I’m glad that he probably got in to that dressing room afterwards and probably told the players that this has to stop. We won’t get much further in this competition if we keep giving opponents opportunities like we’ve been doing this season, but specifically each game in the last month or so. It has to stop.

He did take one interesting angle though, saying that it is positive because the fact it is our own mistakes means it is in our own control and in some sense, I guess he’s right. If we eradicate our own stupidity, we might actually be quite a formidable team. But I just question whether some of these players are good enough to remove those dumb moments completely. I just think that for some of them it is who they are. Which means that in the summer we need to be looking at moving away from a few of them. I think Arteta knows that and games like tonight – whilst ultimately pleasing – will give him more data and more information about his side and where he needs to replace some of the component parts of it for the 2021/22 season.

I think i’ll leave it there for today. A win is a good thing, we go in to the North London Derby in a positive frame of mind, so hopefully we see another good performance from the boys against The Scum on Sunday.

See you tomorrow.

When I write about Arsenal in a post match review of what went on I tend to view games in a very binary way. I either feel positive about the performance or negative. Often the result has a big bearing on the side of the line I tend to fall on, but this morning I feel like I’m wandering through some sort of footballing ‘No Man’s Land’ because I feel both negative and positive at the same time. I can also kind of compartmentalize this game against a team who have won 18 games in a row, look like they are romping their way to the title, who have swept aside everyone in the league including going to Anfield a couple of week’s ago and smashing up the current champions Liverpool.

I also look at the situations the two clubs find themselves in for  the build up to this game and it feels like a bit more mitigation for Mikel. Man City played Everton – a short trip to Liverpool for them – on Wednesday night. We traveled to Rome on Thursday. Man City welcomed back De Bruyne. We still have Partey missing. Man City have the money and the squad to rotate on a large scale. Mikel had players he said were struggling in training because the toll this season has taken on them. So it feels to me like there were a few elements that were working against us.

Which is why I could understand the rotation in the team yesterday and why I understood that Arteta felt he needed to mix it up a bit. Personally I didn’t think there was any hope of us picking up a result against a City team in this form at the best of times, but when you are naming players like Elneny in your starting line up then you are always going to be in trouble.

And so it felt that way in the first ten minutes. Man City have scored in the first 15 minutes of games against us in each of their last five matches so perhaps it should have come as no surprise that we went behind within two minutes. But what should come as a surprise is the manner in which they scored. Raheem Sterling is five feet seven inches tall. Rob Holding is six feet two inches tall. That’s a difference of six inches and there is no way in hell Holding should be so unaware of Sterling in the box for that goal. It was a mistake of a goal in which three of our back four were culpable; Tierney shouldn’t have let Mahrez have so much time to cross the ball in and stopped it at source, Holding’s positional awareness should have been better and Bellerin, who can see Sterling, should have moved to make life more difficult.

One down in the first couple of minutes and the following 15 saw a shell-shocked Arsenal team get caught out on a number of occasions. We went into ourselves for the opening exchanges and there were moments in which I noticed our defensive line as a flat seven. That allowed City to make their runs in behind and they probably should have got a couple of more in that period. Mercifully though we rallied after that and managed to regain a bit of possession as the halftime period drew closer. But as I had wondered in my pre-match ramblings, I wondered if we could actually ‘lay a glove’ on Man City in this game and in the cold light of the next day it is clear the answer was ‘no’. That’s what it felt like to me, anyway. There are people who have pointed out that losing to this City side 1-0 is nothing to be ashamed of given how they’d smashed so many sides in their current run, but to me it feels like we never really forced them out of second gear at best and that adds to my frustration this morning.

We were just so passive at times and when we did get the ball in to good positions our decision making in the finall third was either off or just ruined by poor passing accuracy. All players were guilty of it. Hector Bellerin passed the ball out of play under no pressure. Tierney blazed a cross into the stands with nobody near him and Aubameyang miss-controlled, miss-hit and miss-passed ball after ball all night. And then behind them you had Mo Elneny, who didn’t do anything massively wrong, he just…well…didn’t do anything. Any time a simple forward pass is on he will opt for a backwards ball for one of his centre halves. It is depressing that we have had to rely on him so much this season. It is time we moved on from him and I hope he’s on his way out in the summer because you can’t progress as a club when you are relying on average midfielders like the Egyptian.

But that is Arsenal this season. We are average. We sit 10th in the league and our form is patchy. We have one win in our last six and have been beaten by average teams like Villa and Wolves. We go to Leicester next weekend in the league and I don’t hold out much hope for that game either to be honest. Not unless Partey makes some kind of recovery so we don’t have to see the likes of Elneny again.

I haven’t even mentioned Odegaard, who seem to have let the game pass him by but against the best team in Europe right now I guess that is understandable for a new player still adapting. Whether he plays against Benfica on Thursday I don’t know, but I suspect there will be more rotation for that game and hopefully that means starts for Gabriel, Luiz, ESR, etc.

On final point to note before I clock off for the day, which is that Mikel left his subs a little late, I felt. Dani Ceballos could surely have come on earlier than the 85th minute, for example and I wonder if Arteta will be thinking whether he needs to be getting better at his decision making with subs. Often they can change a game and it felt like we left it a little too late to make our changes. But hey, it’s done, it’s over, we don’t have to worry about conceding early goals to City and playing out similar frustrating games against them and not scoring until at least next season. So That’s something.

Catch you all tomorrow with more random thoughts.

We all love the FA Cup. We’ve seen Arsenal win it more than most and certainly in the last 20 odd years Arsenal have been pretty good at doing the business in the competition. However, as I said yesterday, this was a game in which I think rotation was the right approach and if we were to lose it, then there are worse things in the world. I am also tempering these words by saying that I don’t think our squad is good enough to deal with a fixture backlog. And again, I think the word ‘squad’ is important, because what we saw yesterday certainly bore that out.

Let’s spare a thought for Maty Ryan though, eh, because I suspect he thought he might get some FA Cup and Europa League games for us this season. Well one cup comp is gone, we’re not in the League Cup any more thanks to the City defeat and Runarsson’s chocolate hands and with Benfica in the next round of the competition in the Europa, I suspect Bernd will get the nod again. If we lose that then our newbie will probably not get any game time at all barring injury.

But back to yesterday’s performance, in which Arteta gave some of the fringe players the chance to demonstrate that they are in with a shout and a run of games in the immediate future. Unfortunately however, what they proved is that they are far away from deserving of it, as we crashed out in a bit of a ‘meh’ game against Southampton.

Southampton pressed us well in the first half and bits of the second but in reality we never really made them work too hard. In the second half they simply slotted in to a low block and our attacking players just look out of ideas pretty quickly unfortunately. It made for a painful watch as we laboured to the final whistle.

At the back Holding was back to the player that I thought he was and was guilty of a few misplaced passes and poor attempted tackles, but I’m not going to dig him out too much, because his form is such that he can get a pass. Not least because I do subscribe to the view that if you play with other poor players they can often drag you down. That was the case yesterday and there were many more shoddy performances from some of Holding’s teammates. Gabriel looked rusty having not played for over a month, so maybe he too gets off a little lightly. He had to self isolate during that time and that means two weeks of no training at all, so I suspect that he might need a few more minutes on the pitch before he gets back to the player that won our player of the month for three months in a row in September, October and November last year.

Arteta went for Bellerin at right back and Cedric at left back. Now, given that the manager talked about the fact Cedric can play as a left back as an option for cover for Tierney, you’d expect that he could show that in a game like yesterday. But what he did show is that he can’t cross with his left foot and he’s also just as prone to foul throws as Bellerin. I’m sorry, but if you are a paid professional footballer there simply is no excuse for foul throws and also the inability to use your weaker foot. Work on it! You literally have nothing to do in between games other than go to London Colney and train. So train on it. And if you are training on it and you still can’t develop muscle memory after weeks of trying it, then what the heck are you doing at The Arsenal?

Cedric’s depressingly overhit crosses weren’t the only problem we had though, as Pepe also showed us that he has neither a right foot, nor the confidence or ability right now to influence a game. I have been a big supporter of his, I think there is talent in there and whilst he looked at times like he might kick into gear in this game, it never really happened. The fact that Arteta is having to come out and defend him in games now shows that it just isn’t working and I think even I’m getting to the point where I think a summer parting of the ways is on the cards and best for all. It’ll be Haller at West Ham all over again, although whilst West Ham only got half of what they paid for the striker, I’d be surprised if we were able to get £36million right now. What a damning indictment of our previous regime. ‘Don Raul’? ‘Don’t Raul’ more like it.

In midfield we saw an Elneny stinker and Xhaka couldn’t really impose himself on the game at all. Again, when you’re playing with somebody as shoddy as the Egyptian (also at fault in the build up to their goal), maybe he drags Xhaka down to his level.

So that’s a defence looking ropey, a midfield looking lame, surely the attack couldn’t ‘out-stink’ them, right?

Wrong.

That is, in fact, where our biggest problem lay because we had Pepe miscontrolling and under-hitting passes and crosses, Nketiah getting a couple of chances and mis-hitting, Gabriel Martinelli never really touching the ball much, then Willian as a number 10 doing his Willian thing. That ‘Willian thing’ is, of course, to stink the joint out and collect your six-figure weekly salary at the end of the evening. What an utter trash signing that has proved to be and I simply don’t want to see him get any more game time. There are no more games in which we can rotate. The FA Cup was a chance, should be his last chance, so let’s hope he slowly disappears into the background and we find a way to pay him off to play football elsewhere in the summer. We’re all praying for it.

We need to do the same with Eddie too. 12 months left on his deal, England under-21 international, should fetch a tidy sum and we have to do it. No more keeping players around to decrease their value. Get your money from him now. He isn’t good enough for us, but I’m sure he’ll make a decent Premier League career elsewhere. We can’t wait another two to three years to see if he comes good. His minutes need to go elsewhere.

The only positive we can draw from yesterday is some rested legs and hopefully a better team performance on Tuesday. We might be missing Aubameyang because of a family emergency which sounds serious, so hopefully we have a resolution for that left wing spot. It has to be Martinelli and perhaps that is why he was hooked before the hour mark. A front line with ESR, Saka, Martinelli in, then Partey behind and Tierney left back and we instantly look like a much better team.

I am hoping for a much better performance on Tuesday.

Catch you tomorrow.

There’s also been plenty of rumour around Marcel Sabitzer from RB Leipzig given he is entering the last year of his contract in the summer I believe. He sounds like he fits the mould. High-energy central midfielder, 26 years old, probably wouldn’t mind a big pay day in the Premier League and Leipzig will be mindful that they don’t want him going in to next season just running down his contract. He can play in central midfield or attacking midfield and is their captain too, so he clearly has a positive voice in the dressing room.

I can’t remember us having too many Austrian players either, so that’d be a nice change. I remember Manniger but that’s where my memory starts and ends. But back to Sabitzer for a second and I’ll admit I know little of him in terms of playing style. So I Googled him and found words like ‘versatile’ and phrases like ‘roaming central midfield playmaker who operates in the half spaces’. Sounds pretty bang on for what we need, eh?

Emile Smith-Rowe is a player who plays in between the lines, finds half spaces and is connecting the team, but he’s deployed further up the pitch. It doesn’t sound like Sabitzer plays in exactly the same way, but in terms of those two midfield slots behind someone like Smith-Rowe that sounds ideal. I feel like that is what Arteta and Arsenal want Ceballos to be and he has shown only flashes of it so far. With that in mind, whilst I personally thought Sabitzer would be coming in to play with Smith-Rowe and alternate minutes (assuming he’s the one Arsenal want now), my mind started to wander back to a conversation I had on Twitter after the game on Saturday evening, which is that Arsenal do indeed need a creative connector who can operate in the same position as Smith-Rowe, but actually we probably also need another midfielder to potentially play alongside Thomas Partey. Perhaps Sabitzer is it? Then perhaps the club will wait until the summer for him?

That would make sense. After all, we can’t really be planning to give Elneny any more minutes than we have to, can we? Not in the long term I mean. On Saturday he was poor and I saw one quick clip yesterday of Xhaka on the left hand side playing the ball in to the Egyptian. Xhaka played the pass and skipped beyond the man who was close him down. It was the clearest one-two you’ve ever seen and all Elneny needed to do was play the pass. It is not as if he couldn’t see him either as his body was opened up to Xhaka making the pass all the more simple. Yet Elneny’s first thought – probably a decision he had made before he even received the ball – was to play it backwards towards one of his centre backs. In that same video you see Xhaka visibly frustrated not to receieve the ball back as he had clearly called for it.

I’m highlighting this example to show you just how much players like Elneny are hampering our style and in every game that he plays I believe there are at least six times in which he does that. That instance I saw from Saturday could have resulted in an attack for us but instead turned into a bit of defensive possession across our back four.

We need players to be able to find space on the field and look to progress the ball. That is especially true with the style that Arteta is trying to develop where we play from the back, try to draw teams out and then need to move the ball quickly from back to front to catch them out. That simply doesn’t happen when you have players who slow the ball down with too many touches, or who will always look at the backwards pass like Elneny did in the example I’m thinking of.

We need more risk takers. We need players to try that difficult pass because the rewards are so much more than if you just drop a simple ten0yarder back to our centre halves. We need midfielders with vision and who make decisions in a split second. Elneny just doesn’t have that vision. He makes his decision on what he is going to do and then executes that no matter what variables are in place. It is not his fault, he just doesn’t have the radar or ability. But that just means we need to move on from him. We need players who will change their decision making for a pass based on what is going on around them. Could somebody like Sabitzer, for example, have seen the movement Xhaka made to evade the oncoming man and find space a few years forward, then play the pass and move in to another half space to be an option? It sounds like he could. so I am keen.

But the important point to note here is just how much work is needed. Having gone through all of this thought process yesterday on needing another central midfielder as well as an attacking midfielder in the creative spot, it really highlights to me just how much work is needed on this team, also why offloading so many players this January is important. The club needs to keep going in that regard because we are going to have players like Elneny that we should also be moving on in the summer. We all know about those running down their contract but if we’re going to get to where we want to be there are a few in the team on longer contracts that we may need to shift in the summer too.

I thought this summer would be the big purge at the club but it is becoming increasingly clearer to me that Arsenal and Arteta need two windows: this one in January to start the cull, then the next one to offload even more.

Back tomorrow with some thoughts.

Wellety, wellety, wellety. How about that then, eh? The German must have one heck of an agent and one heck of a PR Team because the fact Barcelona want him is both hilarious and baffling. He has fallen down the pecking order at Arsenal, he was very poor in his last game and at least at fault for one of the goals conceded against City a couple of games ago, plus he has been a divisive player for a couple of years now.

Mustafi represents the worst of Arsenal and the current governance at the club and, sadly, he is indicative of all that is wrong with us right now. He was signed for a vastly inflated fee that was a complete waste of money, he has been error prone throughout his Arsenal career, plus he is another guy who didn’t want to move on for two summers because of his big wages that he was picking up at Arsenal that he couldn’t get elsewhere. He and a few more of these senior pro’s at the club are the leeches that are dragging us down and news that Barca want him is great.

We won’t get a fee and it’ll happen in the summer, but if I was in Arsenal’s shoes, once I know that he has a pre-contract agreement signed I’d be going back to Barcelona and asking them if they want him now for nothing. It would get his wages off the books and at least begin the clear out of overstocked and under performing centre halves we have at our club. Let Mustafi be the first of the cull to begin.

And it does need to begin in January. We have too many under-achieving players and we don’t have enough room in our squad. So the likes of Mustafi should be able to leave for free if they have already found a club. The same with Sokratis. Just get his wages off the books and get him out. Ozil is more troublesome because nobody would be stupid enough to pay £350k-per-week for his services, however if you can find a club to pay £100k-per-week, then you just need to fund the remaining £250k-per-week and get him gone. The culture within the club with all of these hangers on is all wrong and so what we need is for the culling to start now.

If Torreira is supposedly coming back from Atletico, then get his agent flights to Italy to secure a permanent move over there. Take the hit. If somebody can offer £15million then we just take it. That’s where we’re at right now. I have been one of the people who rated Torreira, was glad to hear the club holding out and not wanting to sell him too cheaply, but we just need to trim this squad and start the fire sale because as I wrote about a few days ago, we’re in free fall and there needs to be lots of changes.

Send Ceballos back if you can. Find a buyer for Elneny. Then bring in another midfielder or a Hale-Ender for the rest of the season. Play Maitland-Niles there for christ’s sake! He’s an infinitely improved option than the backwards passing Egyptian, so take the hit on Mo and get him out of the door to a buying club. Even if they only give you a couple of million. Just take it.

Where we’re at right now has to be about freeing up space, removing deadwood, as well as cutting some of the bad eggs out of the club and that to me feels like some of those senior pro’s stinking out the joint. If the rumours are true about Willian and Real Betis, then let him go. Give him to Betis for free just to get him off the wage books. Take the hard decision and the swift decision that it hasn’t worked and so we move on. It’s the right thing to do for the club.

But we need to make proper decisions. Offloading Xhaka to Inter but getting Erikson from them is just more of the same and will end up with the same results. Take low money on Xhaka but get money that can be reinvested on a different approach.

But the problem we might have is that Arteta has chucked his lot in with a few of those players. I hope he is sat at London Colney right now thinking about ways in which he can bin so many of them but I think he will stick by them until the end of this season at least. And that may well get him canned. He needs to be going to Edu and telling him to start the culling process now. He should be having conversations with players and agents now that as soon as the new year hits then there are some players out the door.

It will get some goodwill back from the fans too. They’ll see that Mikel knows there is too much fat in this squad and some trimming needs to happen straight away. Wins will make things better, but showing you are ready to cut out the rotting flesh from this team will also do him good.

It is time we saw action.

Catch you guys on Boxing Day with a pre match preview.

Mohammed Elneny is the victim of the virus and once again what this has done is highlight to me at least that these internationals are even worse now than they’ve ever been. Not only do I generally detest them when we’re outside of a pandemic, but now they are actively costing us players through having to self isolate for two week’s. It is an utter joke.

There will be people who might argue that players get injured on international duty, so what is the difference? Well, yes they do indeed, but I guess you’d put injury down to ‘occupational hazard’. You cannot say the same about the Coronavirus because, simply, it is avoidable in terms of international travel. Arsenal – and all of the top clubs in Europe – have strict protocols and whilst I appreciate that some will say you can contract Coronavirus anywhere, I fail to believe that Arsenal have minimised that to essentially just Arteta right at the start of the pandemic. That has been beacuase the football clubs are a little more controlling, can be a little more precise with their players. When they go away on international duty who knows where they are off to. Mo Salah went to a Wedding, Aubameyang is pictured at a Gabon airport with a load of people and Elneny has contracted the virus. I doubt he contracted it from his teammates or sitting in a hotel room waiting for a match to start.

Nope, to me, this is yet another example of why now, whilst we are still in the midst of this global pandemic, the international football is a joke. Why are they doing it? People can’t travel overseas, so why are we risking footballers for meaningless friendlies? Or these stupid qualifiers? It is mental. And what’s more mental is that the federations are exacerbating the situation by cramming extra games in during these windows. England, for example, have three matches within a week. THREE! Even if that was The Arsenal we’d be worried about fatigue of the players. Yet the international federations are trying to line their coffers as much as they possibly can and it is to the detriment of the clubs that pay their wages.

We have the same problem with Saka and England. The kid has played a couple of games in which it looks like he’s nursing a knock. Yet tomorrow night I think it is (I’m not bothering to check because simply I do not care about England and the ‘UEFA Nations League’) he’ll most likely be starting at left-wing back for England because Ben Chilwell is injured. So we have a player who has had three games for his national side and then will have to play on Sunday. Do you honestly think we’re going to get the best from him when we travel up to Elland Road to play Leeds on Sunday?

We won’t. He’ll possibly start but Arteta may also be forced in to bringing him on as a sub to try to manage the player and keep him the right side of a muscular injury. And this is where it irks me even more here, because all of these players going down with muscular injuries is because of over playing. How do you counter act that? Bring in the ability to rotate players more ‘in game’. What does that mean? Have bigger match day squads and more subs. That helps to manages players, bring them on, as well as ensuring you can still stand a good chance of giving your best players at least some minutes on the pitch. But this was voted down by Premier League managers. Why? Because they felt it favoured the ‘bigger’ teams with the bigger squads. Well yes, of course that is true. But what is also true is that Burnley, Southampton, West Ham and Leeds don’t play in midweek European competition. They also don’t have many of their players going away on international duty. If my estimations are right, Arsenal have around 13 players away on international duty. Burnley have seven. And in their last game four of those seven were on the bench i.e. they are not regulars. Leeds had seven players. One of which wasn’t in the squad for their last game. A reminder of the 13 that Arsenal have sent away, I would guess that the following players will be in the first team – or at least close to it – for Sunday:

• Bernd Leno
• Hector Bellerin
• Gabriel
• Bukayo Saka
• Kieran Tierney
• Granit Xhaka
• Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
• Nicolas Pepe

You could argue Pepe, but the rest will probably play. That’s eight from a possible XI. So, after most managers voted against the five subs rule to stop an advantage for the bigger clubs, what we actually have is the bigger clubs now at a DISADVANTAGE because of the volume of games our players have to play in. It is an utter joke and with every passing week that decision not to allow more subs looks not just silly, but reckless, in my opinion.

But we just have to sit here and take it. It is frustrating, it is annoying, but we are powerless to stop it. We just have to cross everything that we get no more unwelcome news.

The good news out of all of this is that after these pointless collective of games, we have no internationals until March next year. Let’s just hope things are back to a bit more normality by then.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Then you’ve got the question around the game against Villa and who plays then. I hope he gets asked some proper questions that can draw out at least some of his thinking because I think tomorrow’s team sheet is particularly interesting. The reason I say that is because the United game threw up some interesting selection decisions. Elneny was the talking point in terms of his selection, but what I find most interesting in that choice right now is the fact that he played the full 90 minutes against Dundalk. Because of that I had assumed that there were certain players that were shoe-ins to start or be benched, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Take Pepe for example. He was brought off on 60+ minutes against Dundalk and that had all of the hallmarks of a “you’re playing this Sunday mate, so I’m saving something in your tank for United”, yet when Sunday came, he was nowhere to be seen throughout. Now, some of that may have been the natural evolution of the game state against United and how it played out, but what I think it does show us is that there is no simple formulae from game-to-game. Which in itself is no bad thing because it means opposition teams are not sure exactly of the line up and how to plan for us. Remember all of those times when Arsene would always name the same XI? In the early days of his reign it would be fine because we had basically the best XI players in the league, plus opponents in the league were no great shakes. But these days every team has a lot more technical ability and they also have a better understanding of their opponents. So you need to be able to spring surprises and that’s certainly what happened to United at the weekend.

I think from a morale in the dressing room it also helps to band the larger squads together. Again, think about when we first dropped in to the Europa with Arsene; he essentially rotated the entire team and what ended up happening was that there was a clear delineation between the first team that played in the Premier League and the reserve team that played in the Europa League and League Cup. I’ll be honest and say I was always fine with it, but I’ve heard some ex-pros talk about knowing that you’ll never get in to the first team – or at least thinking that – when there are such clear differences, so it kind of makes me wonder if by mixing it up like he has, Arteta has effectively shown the players that anyone (except Ozil) has an opportunity to stake a claim. In some cases (Elneny as our current frame of reference) players could play twice within a week.

And when I think about it, that makes sense, because if we were in the Champions League Group Stages we’d be seeing the first team on a Wednesday and a weekend, wouldn’t we? So why does it suddenly become a worrying thing to see more players play Thursday and Sunday?

We/mainly ‘I’ need to shake this mentality of players getting fatigued. Especially at this stage in the season. The benefits of resting players so they are better at the weekend, like Auba, can be a worthy conversation. But we wouldn’t be moaning about keeping them fresh if we had to play him in the big competition.

So having moaned at Arteta for his team selection last Sunday, having wanted him to go further in his rotation on Thursday against Dundalk, I’m going to try hard not to get too hung up on player injuries and fatigue in the coming games. I can’t say I’ll actually achieve it, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Before I clock off for another day though, a quick shout out to Lucas Torreira, who bagged his first goal for Atletico at the weekend against Osasuna in a 3-1 win. I don’t really watch Spanish football so am not sure how he’s doing, but he’s made three appearances in the Champions League with a combined total of 31 minutes played, plus 140 minutes over three games in the league, so it looks like he’s being used mostly as a sub for Diego Simeone. Hopefully he can get more action because I always liked him as a player and what we want is a player that returns to us next summer who has improved and got his confidence back. If he’s managed to play lots of football it is win-win for us. We either get a good midfielder to reintegrate into the squad, which I suspect is unlikely, or we have the second option which would be a sale at a decent price. However if he’s used sparingly then we may find ourselves with a challenging market with which to recoup our cash for a player with one year less on his contract. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that stage.

Right, I’ll catch you all tomorrow for a match preview and some thoughts on how we’ll set up against the Norweigans.

Laters.

It’s a lovely feeling to start the week having seen your team get a big away day win. On somebody else’s patch it always feels a little sweeter and the fact that we had gone 378,000 games without a win to a ‘Big Six’ side dating back to 200BC, this one feels that extra tastier to savour as I write today’s musings.

I’ll be honest thought; I didn’t fancy our chances coming in to the game and when the team sheets were announced I equally worried about how we’d fair against a United side who had beaten PSG away, then put nine goals against Newcastle and RB Leipzig combined. When you add to that the fact we hadn’t won at Old Trafford since 2006, as well as our nemesis Mike Dean running the refereeing proceedings, it felt like we would get very little change out of yesterday’s ‘Super Sunday’ game. But here we are having picked up a morale boosting three points and where I was a little critical of Arteta’s line up as kick off approached, I have to hold my hands up, tip the cap and say “thank ye” to our boss, because he got it spot on yesterday.

We went three at the back and Arteta opted for Holding, Gabriel and Tierney to keep out Rashford and Greenwood and my fear was the pace of those two would run somebody like Holding ragged if they are in a foot race. Which is where Arteta’s game plan was spot on, because the way we set up yesterday was designed to completely avoid that. We pressed higher up the pitch and made the errors forced in United’s half. that meant the combinations in our defensive third were just not there as we controlled the possession and won the ball back well. That was also in part to the midfield two that Arteta picked. In Partey and Elneny you have two guys who you know will harry and chase, will close down space quickly and put opposing midfielders and attackers under pressure to force turnovers, which allowed us to control the ball more than United and never really get their two striker goal threats in to the game. Greenood had one chance midway through the first half but that really felt like it to me.

It meant we were able to impose ourselves more but what I will say about yesterday is that I still don’t think the forward line worked. We got the win, I’m so happy with the way we were able to stifle United, but I really hope Arteta looks at the forward line and realises that those three as a combination doesn’t work. Aubameyang out wide coming in I can handle if he’s getting in to those spaces, but Lacazette had another pretty average performance. I saw people online talking about he was improved but I didn’t see that. I kept track of his touches, movement and impact and what I saw was a guy who lost the ball, didn’t always get into great positions and there was one break on around 65 minutes where Willian on the right had the ball and as he was driving forward I saw Auba sprinting to get in towards the box. Behind him jogging just beyond the halfway line was Lacazette. Not bust a gut to get in to the box, not showing the same hunger as Auba to try to score, just jogging along. Often a win can cloud my opnion on some players but last night I just saw another example as to why we need to move away from Lacazette. And probably Willian too, who lost the ball a lot and I didn’t think was that impressive. If Pepe gets pelters for that then why not those two?

Anyway, no need to dwell on any kind of negativity on a day like today because ultimately we won and that will give the team a massive boost of confidence. I was worried that the Leicester City defeat sucked some of the air out of the positivity we were all feeling; I certainly felt like I had been metaphorically punched in the gut and was winded a bit. But as much as that defeat stung, this one now feels like it has expunged a lot of the bad taste that home defeat had left us with.

Let’s talk about individual performances now though. From back to front most of the players were great, but a few stood out to me. Firstly Gabriel, who is looking to be an absolute colossus in the heart of our defence. He picked up an early yellow yesterday but he was brilliant for the whole game, winning battles all over the pitch and looking like he’s played for Arsenal for a decade. He’s strong, physical, looks tailor made for the Premier League and put in a proper shift yesterday. I think we’re all rather happy that we found him after a succession of questionable centre half transfers, but this one looks legit.

Moving forward up the team and let’s talk Elneny and Partey. The Egyptian first who had his best game in an Arsenal shirt. He was forward looking in his passing, his distribution was excellent, he covered ground all night and that gobbled up the space that some of the creative United midfielders would have loved to have. His redemption is striking and after yesterday’s game you wonder if Arteta might do a flip for this coming week and give Partey and Elneny the Premier League starting place, with Xhaka and Ceballos on in midweek against Molde. That would represent quite some turnaround.

But perhaps Elneny was also helped by the imperious Thomas Partey. Yesterday’s performance showed why we broke the bank to get him to the club. He was strong, aggressive, physically dominant and just doesn’t give the ball away very much at all. There was one moment in the second half where he did to Pogba, but within 30 seconds he had won it back. It was the kind of complete midfield dispplay that if we see for the rest of this season, will go a long way towards us meeting our objectives.

This was a good win, a morale-boosting win, a tactical win. We still have to do more in the final third I think and had Pogba not been a bit silly in the box to leave his leg there for Bellerin to get clipped for the penalty and win us the game, we might be talking about another frustrating away day. But they all count so we can park any lingering concerns on the front three for now. At this stage it is “up the Arsenal!” and “thank you Ole for the three points”!

Catch you guys tomorrow.

There’s something exciting brewing under Mikel Arteta and we are seeing that every week little by little. And look, perhaps there will, and should, be some caveats given that Fulham are only just promoted and decided that they wanted to continue their possession-based game against Arsenal, but we still had to do the business and last season at times it didn’t matter who the opponent was because we just couldn’t finish those ‘lesser’ teams off. I think even Tim Stillman posted a fact on Twitter that last season we only picked up three points against the newly promoted teams, and seven in total away from home against the bottom six or seven sides.

So getting this win under our belts was important and particularly given the really tough run we have coming up. We need to pick up maximum points on game weeks one and two because after that it is scary and I don’t think we can expect to be unbeaten by the time the end of November comes around. So I’ll absolutely take the performance and result of yesterday even if it was ‘only Fulham’.

The starting line up for yesterday was always going to be an interesting one and much like with most seasons, it was going to be a little unusual feeling, because not everyone is fully up to speed. If you remember last season we started with a win at Newcastle that included Mkhitaryan, Willock, Chambers and Monreal. But none of those guys were regular names by the end. That’s because so many players weren’t ready and that’s how yesterday’s match was. We seemed to have been running out of centre halves and it meant one of the new boys was thrown in, in the shape of Gabriel, right into the centre of a back three. And after a couple of minutes I’m sure there were plenty of us who wondered whether the early miscommunication between Leno and Gabriel would be a worrying sign of first day news for our young defender.

But I tell you what, we needn’t have worried, because after that he was superb. I’ve heard people talk about his aerial ability, as well as his ability in one-v-one duels, but I didn’t expect we’d see evidence of it so quickly in a different league. He was great. His debut goal off the shoulder aside (thank you Willian for a great corner – more on that anon) he was imperious. I loved his ability to stay on his feet and win the ball back so effortlessly; he’s like the anti-Mustafi!!

He will have sterner tests than those Fulham front line players but he dealt with that with such ease that I’m already excited to see such a strong and physically imposing centre half deliver on an opening day like yesterday. Either side of him I thought Tierney was good and although I bemoaned Rob Holding’s distribution at times (he is terrible with his longer ball accuracy!), all three did really well in essentially keeping Fulham at arms length for the majority of the game. Apart from that very early hiccup in which Leno had a strong palm to stop Kamara from putting us behind, the German didn’t really have too much to worry about, which is very comforting given how many shots we were haemorrhaging last season.

The formation worked but it worked because of its fluidity, as we talked about almost immediately on the GunnersTown podcast straight after the game. In possession and out of possession we are different beasts. At times I saw Maitland-Niles – supposedly taking up the left wing-back position – in between Aubameyang and Lacazette in a pocket of space, then there were also some instances of Bellerin driving in field more centrally. Positions on the field are fluid with this Arsenal team and that makes it very difficult for teams to predict what is happening.

The second goal is a perfect example of that. Rob Holding juggling the ball about 15 yards in front of the opposition D before winning a corner isn’t something I thought I’d ever write. Yet here we are. A good ball in from Willian (I will get to him, honest!) and fellow new boy Brazilian Gabriel doubles our lead and I’m starting to think “we look very comfortable here!”. I haven’t felt like that for some time!

We were in control. Possession was good, Elneny was acting as a very simple receiver and distributor of the ball, whilst not really looking spectacular. That’s his game though, although when Ceballos came on you could see the difference in class, so I suspect Elneny’s position may be different next weekend. But he did well, as did all of the Arsenal players on the pitch and in particular, the new lad Willian.

Talk about an ‘oven ready’ Premier League footballer. He was one of Chelski’s best players last season and you could see why. He presses, he retains possession, he dribbles his way out of trouble and he has end product. I don’t think we can count the first goal – honourable poachers mention for Lacazette on that one – as an assist, but he was in the centre of the pitch in the right place to be a nuisance and force the issue with the goal. Shortly after he struck the post with a clever free kick. He drove at Fulham defenders all day and had himself an assist with the corner to Gabriel. But the best goal of the day and also his best bit of football, was the diagonal to Aubameyang to bag a now trademark finish for number three.

That goal was a thing of beauty. Controlled possession out from the back, movement from players to find space, before a splendid ball from Willian to let Auba put one in to get himself off the mark. What was also pleasing about the goal, however, was the number of players who were providing options should Auba need it. That creates doubt in defenders minds and means they can’t just over cover the space so Auba can’t shoot, because it would have left too much room for Tierney on the overlap.

It’s going to be a long season. It’s going to be a tough season. We won’t always play that well. But in terms of starting off on the right foot, we ticked all the boxes there, and I couldn’t ask for more when I write today’s first game of the season match review.

Onwards and upwards lads.

What we do know from some of the pictures that were taken is that Mesut Özil was in the team, as was Pepe, Lacazette, Aubameyang, Holding, Elneny, Willian, Saliba, etc, all got some important minutes under their belts. That’s useful to know because up until this point the question mark for me was how ready some of these players will be. Granted there hasn’t been much time between the two seasons we’re in between, but there has still been a period of time in which players haven’t been training and so the worry is that a little bit of rust would have set in.

So to see some of those players out there gives me hope that we’ll see a more rounded and ready a Arsenal team at Craven Cottage next weekend. Not literally rounded, though!

I was surprised to see Ceballos in there. He’s supposed to be in self isolation so I’m not sure how the club have managed to avoid government rules there, unless he’s already been in the UK for a couple of weeks? I’m not sure he has because I’m sure I’ve seen pictures and videos of him in Spain. So quite how the club have swung it I’m not sure. If he’s been allowed to play for the club in a friendly yesterday though then surely he’s available for selection next weekend? If so that’s a big bonus for us and hopefully Xhaka and Ceballos can pick up where they left off in terms of their midfield partnership for that first game of the season.

The other interesting thing about yesterday – because the result (a 3-2 defeat) is relatively worthless – was that Özil was back in the fold. He’s been pictured on a football pitch and given that this was an opportunity to play a team that might resemble the first team playing next weekend, seeing him on the pitch does make me wonder if the manager has decided that he’s back in the fray for a place in the first XI next season?

I’ve always been an Özil fan, I think at his best he was majestic for us, but we haven’t seen that nearly enough in recent years and to be honest with you i’ve just become sick and tired of all of the circus around him. Possibly like you I’ve just wanted him gone so we can close that chapter in the history of the club but it’s clear he’s not going, so Arteta might as well make him match fit by playing him. We moved on without Özil in the team after the restart last season and we still won the FA Cup, but he’s still an asset and if he has some use this season then so be it, we might as well use him. He might not be as integral to our play as he was once upon a time, but he looks to still be here, available for selection and so if Arteta needs something from the bench then maybe he can be there.

He’s such a polarising character that I’m sure you’re either reading this and rolling your eyes at me, maybe even questioning whether you’ll bother reading my random daily Arsenal thoughts in future, but for me it never makes sense to cut your nose off to spite your face and so we should just get every player at the club ready, willing and able to contribute for the new season.

It’s the same with Guendouzi. He has got minutes under his belt with the French Under-21s and I think he played the full 90 so from a fitness point of view he should be fine. I just hope that he and Arteta have managed to patch up the relationship. The manager talked about everyone having a clean slate and Guendouzi is a guy who should be available for us if we can’t find a buyer. But unlike Özil who has repeatedly said he wants to stay and he wants to play, Guendouzi has been very quiet, which makes me wonder whether he’ll be the problem. Unless he’s willing to meet Arteta halfway in terms of coming to some kind of agreement on a way forward, then he’ll most likely be rotting in the reserves this season, as the footballing saying goes.

Of course all of this speculation around players playing in friendlies could all be nonsense. After all we know Elneny is available for transfer and he’s played what feels like every minute of these pre season friendlies. Arteta will no doubt love his energy and work rate, but he’s still such a limited player, so I hope we can move him on.

Holding also started and we all know he’s rumoured to be attracting the interest of clubs like Leeds and Newcastle. So again, it could just be that the players are being selected to keep them fit enough and also showing clubs that they’re in decent condition.

That’s me done for the day I think. There’s only so much waffle you can probably take from a game in which we haven’t seen and doesn’t really matter too much in the grand scheme of things. But we’re nearly back with the Premier League proper and as usual the excitement is building in my head.

Catch you all tomorrow.

So I tuned in to have a little watch last night and sure enough it was a smattering of senior first team players with some younger players lining up on the bench. I did wonder if this would be like the time when I was a kid where an ‘Arsenal XI’ were heavily advertised for weeks over the summer in Harlow Town back in the 90s, for about 2,000 people to show up and pay an entry fee, to be greeted by a mixture of old vets and some really young players. But no, we got Leno, Saliba, Holding, Tierney, Soares, Maitland-Niles (??), Nketiah, Xhaka, Saka and evening Aubameyang all starting.

There was even an Elneny thrown in there! Unbelievable stuff! Especially when you think that he got himself on the scoresheet to put us one up. The forgotten man of Arsenal scoring from 35 yards after the Dons ‘keeper had fluffed his lines from a kick out. Real fairytale stuff…

And it was an opportunity to get that first look at Saliba who, I have to say, looked pretty good. in all truth he didn’t have too much to do in that first half, but what I did notice was a front-footed player who liked to step out from the back and play positive forward balls. There will be tougher and sterner tests – this weekend alone against Liverpool in the community shield for example – but this was at least a 45 minute cameo that can start to get us excited about what can be with this player. He also had a hand in a very good second goal to be fair. A good ball out from the back to Soares, who fed Saka who continued where he left off with his grand end product by cutting the ball back to Nketiah in the box to see the ball home. It was a good goal but the finish from Eddie was fine too. It was almost effortless. Again, I know we need to ‘caveat’ it by saying it was only a friendly against lower league opposition, but you’ve still got to show the composure and I thought he certainly did that.

In terms of the game itself we did look a fair few notches more polished and impressive against an MK Dons team who for most of the first half were chasing shadows. The inclusion of Maitland-Niles was a weird one given he’s supposed to be on the brink of a departure to Wolves, but perhaps Arteta just wanted to sew the seeds of doubt on that transfer, or perhaps Arsenal are not quite as far along in that deal as the Ornacle suggested earlier in the week.

Whatever the situation is, he played and until he is no longer an Arsenal player he looks like he’s part of the managers plans, as are a fair few players who didn’t even travel yesterday. There’s been rumours over Hector, Torreira and Lacazette, but whilst one could read in to the fact they didn’t travel yesterday as something, there were plenty of others who stayed at home. Luiz, Willian and Pepe weren’t there and we know they’re all going to be in the managers plans. Martinez wasn’t there but I suspect he might be around on Saturday. Likewise Lacazette because the rumours are just spurious ones from Atletico Madrid at the moment. They’re also a bit of a joke if they think we’ll take a failed Lemar or Vitolo in a straight swap.

I suspect that’s just journo nonsense because they can’t seriously look us in the eyes having supposedly repeatedly turned us away when we’re offering players for Partey, only to do the same if they truly are after Lacazette. So I’m not particularly reading too much into the number of first team absentees from yesterday.

I also think that Arteta was probably just trying to give a load of young players a taste of first team football and to their credit, aside from one or two shaky moments (a couple from Matt Macey in the second half stick out), the kids did alright.

Like Mark McGuinness, the centre half who at 19 looks like a monster. He’s got to be six foot four already and at 19 if he’s still growing he’s going to be a monster. he powered one heck of a header in to make it 3-1. There’s something about a powerful header that the traditionalist only us all love. And you can hear the thud and shout of celebration with no fans in the stadium so it adds an extra dimension of course.

We also saw Reiss Nelson in that second half and he popped up with a penalty win and conversion, but I thought he looked a little introverted in the game actually. He showed a couple of nice tricks and turns of pace, but I do wonder if he’ll get the chance this season, or whether he’ll be moved on. The arrival of Willian must surely raise that question. so I’m wondering if this was a bit of a ‘shop window’ exercise for the wide forward.

It might have also have been for the younger kids too, to be fair, because there were a few that I thought did already. Emile Smith-Rowe showed a couple of good turns of pace and beating of his man when one-on-one, but he’ll be in the managers plans I think. The likes of Azeez and Cotterill did well I thought and I wonder if there’s a couple of clubs that will have a sniff around them both for a loan. The club will need to have a think about it though I suspect; they’ll end up with nobody to compete in the under-23s if they do loan out all the promising youngsters!

So we’ve had a decent little fix for the week and now we can countdown to Saturday’s ludicrously scheduled Community Shield. Will catch you all tomorrow as I’m sure we’ll get more from Arsenal and Arteta over the next 24 hours.

Laters folks.

Because during that era there were still plenty of hardships a people began to try to patch up and rebuild lives, the economy, etc. That will happen with us too and in a football sense we’ll most likely have more than just an instant return and normality kicking in.

So this morning I’m thinking about The Arsenal and, specifically, how much of the current family china will need to be sold to keep us resembling somewhat competitive against the oil whore and country-owned clubs.

It’s going to be hard. Our billionaire is a silent partner that delivers little value. And with his interests in the States keeping him permanently busy we have seen that The Arsenal needs to be run with a self sustainability model that doesn’t work when the dice are loaded as they are in the Premier League.

So with that in mind, and back to my original thinking about selling the family china, how are Arsenal going to recoup some cash given that revenues have tanked so hard?

And, by the way, i’m talking about sales only today. Imagine you have to fund your current situation without being able to rely on your income from your normal work. That’s where we’re at right now, so I suspect what Arsenal are going to have to do is to sell assets we own and try not to just see the cash come in from one source and go out on another by signing another player.

The good news is that because of the bloated nature of our squad over the years, we’re in a position where we not only have some talented youngsters who could fill some voids, but we also have some stars who still carry a bit of value.

For example we’ve Mkhitaryan, who this week has supposedly told Arsenal that he wants to stay in Roma, and apparently they want him to stick around too. Raoila his agent has already denied the stories of Mkhitaryan telling Arsenal to come to Roma because he’s not setting foot in England, telling people via Twitter that it’s ‘fake news’, but a sale right now works for everyone. That’s if Roma can afford it. According to TransferMarkt he’s valued at around £18million. In the current market I can’t see us getting anywhere near that, but if Roma coughed up around £10million I suspect Arsenal might be happy to let him go. And if you think that we’ve got Saka and Martinelli who can play in those advanced positions, as well as Nelson, we have an ‘internal solution which would mean we could ‘bank’ the £10million.

You’ve also got Elneny and Mustafi, who will most likely be out the door given one is on loan and we have an impending transfer of William Saliba when the season eventually finishes. Again, based loosely on Transmarkt’s values, the Egyptian would make £4.5million in market value, which if we halved sounds more like it. Then you’ve got a £10million Mustafi who will probably again only get half the value of, but it’s a good £7 – £9million we’d recoup, if I’m being conservative and assuming clubs can afford it. If they can’t and they want swap deals, then Arsenal will have to have a sniff at what Roma have on their books but I’m not sure life will be that simple. So for now I’ll just focus on these hypothetical assumptions of value and purchases.

So we’ve managed to bank some of the Mkhi money, we’ve got £7million in for Mustafi and Elneny and that’s being used to give Saka a new contract and then bank a bit more cash. We’re probably at this stage doing alright in terms of the numbers – again, i’ll caveat all of this by saying I’m not a numbers man so don’t chastise me, as I’m just speculating in my head – so what else needs to be looked at?

I think Sokratis has made some suggestions that he doesn’t want to play second fiddle, but at 31 and with just a year left, he’s not going to get much close to his £13million Transfermarkt value. Let’s call that another £5million. Ainsley Maitland-Niles is also most likely to be out the door, and for him I think we might be able to get some kind of value closer to his £13million. In the old market we might have hoped for between £15 – £20million for a player who has so much Premier League experience at such a young age, but if I play conservative again and say £10million, then I think we’re probably up to about £15million of cash to play with.

New contract for Auba to pay for that maybe?

If we do then we can write off that £15million as going to him, so we still need to sell a bit. This is where we start too run out of obvious candidates and we have to start looking at regulars. Are Atletico Madrid as hot on Lacazette as we’re led to believe? If so then we could be looking at some kind of swap deal for Partey if both parties are keen. But that still doesn’t bring in any cash, does it? Hmm….so who’s left? Guendouzi? Nketiah? It would be tough because the squad starts to be thinned out a bit. So really, what we’ll be looking at when the season finishes, is Arsenal just trying to do a bit of shuffling of their squad, rather than focusing on big acquisitions. And hey, maybe that isn’t the worst thing in the world. After all, our big signings have hardly all been a universal success, have they? So maybe we look to go back to being a little more wheeler-deelery. Looks like we’re going to have to.

Anyway, just some thoughts on a Friday morning for you, so hope you enjoy yours and are safe and sound as well as the family.

Catch you guys tomorrow.

p.s. I haven’t spoken about Ozil because my assumption is that nobody is paying his wages!

But this deal – expected to be announced soon – doesn’t feel like one that was on the cards when both Josh Kroenke and Unai Emery separately admitted some players might need to move on. We all thought he was talking about Elneny and Mustafi and whilst the Egyptian appears to be attracting some clubs in France, the German is getting little attention from mainland Europe it seems. the noises from Monaco appear to have quietened and sadly it’s not as if there are an army of suitors for him. That’s what happens when you’re prone to high-profile gaffs but by and large your stats show that you’re not as bad as everyone thinks. The club will be wanting better price and if the rumours of £25million are true they might find themselves without a buyer and having to integrate him back in to the first team.

We all know that our budget this season has been tight and we know that outgoings to boost the coffers would need to be a thing for us. But I don’t think many of us thought that Iwobi, Koscielny and probably Monreal, would be some of those players heading out the exit door.

Like I said at the start of today’s ramblings, this all feels a little too risky to me, because it’s not like everyone is fit. Kolasinac still hasn’t started a Premier League game yet and we’re going to be asking him to jump right in for the North London Derby on Sunday afternoon. Perhaps he’s going to play and put in a beast of a performance, but it doesn’t exactly match the pragmatic approach of Unai Emery this season in bringing in returning players with truncated preseasons, gradually, to mitigate any risks of injury, etc. It all just feels a little weird to me.

And what happens if Kolasinac goes down injured between now and when Tierney is available for first team football? Who steps in? Maitland-Niles as a left back? He’s done it before I guess but then you’re looking at trying to find a makeshift solution on the right. We have Chambers and Mustafi who can do that but if Mustafi is shunted out of the door that leaves Calum Chambers who, let’s be honest here, has hardly been exemplary as a full back when we’ve seen him.

Again, I think it’s important that I get across that I understand the motives for moving Monreal on and getting a few pennies for him, I really do. I just don’t get the timing of it. It feels like a perfect January move once Tierney is fully integrated in to the first team squad.

But I guess ultimately we’ve been calling this summer a success and the new transfer team appear to have done the business with so many players coming in and going out, so it’s hardly to question their thinking at a time where optimism seems to have returned to the club, having had anything but in the months of May and June this year. Perhaps Raul and Edu have a master plan they are enacting and we just have to watch and appreciate as it plays out.

I just hope Kolasinac stays fit for the foreseeable future, because we’re really gonna need him to.

Catch you all tomorrow.

If only there wasn’t the pesky notion of having to play Liverpool at Anfield, eh? I could do without wearing my tin hat this weekend, watching us face down Liverpool’s attacking trio with our back line, but I guess it’s better to get this game over and done with now rather than have a battering over Christmas like last season.

Unai spoke to the press yesterday and delivered the team update and his thoughts ahead of the game. As usual with these events he said plenty without really saying much at all. Comments like “we want to play with our players in this moment with great togetherness” are a mainstay of his press conferences but don’t tell you much about his thinking. He did say that he’d be checking up on Özil and Xhaka today in the final training session before the game tomorrow but call me a cynic, because something tells me Özil at least doesn’t make the trip. It’s not the sort of game we’ve seen him boss in the past and after the good performance of our midfielders last weekend I suspect he’ll want to give them another crack, so I have a feeling that Xhaka and Özil won’t ‘quite’ be 100% ready yet. Just a feeling I have.

One change he might make is for Nico Pepe to come in. He obviously wasn’t giving too much away yesterday in his presser, but the fact he said he’s ready for more minutes having played 15 against Newcastle then 45 against Burnley, lends me to thinking that we might see Pepe from the start. That’d be an exciting prospect; Pepe, Lacazette and Aubameyang as our front three, basically sticking two fingers up to pragmatism and saying “blow it, we’re going to concede anyway, we might as well see if we can do some damage to their defence too.

Quite whether Liverpool will be overly concerned I’m not sure. Both they and City still look streets ahead of every other team in the league and barring some spawny luck and over-reliance on VAR like Tottenham had last weekend, they are both going to win the majority of their home games.

What we need to do is at least have the cutting edge to give them something to think about and maybe that’s Unai’s thinking for tomorrow. I hope it is. I hope we’re aggressive against Liverpool because I don’t think we can contain them. They’re too good. So what we have to do is try to surprise them and an aggressive formation would do that.

Emery was also asked about Guendouzi and his contract and to be honest with you, I’m glad that these rumours are already coming out that we’re talking to the guy about a new deal. He’s made himself a regular in the team and at his age and potential growth in his game, it would seem silly not to tie him down to a nice long contract now. That’s what we’ve always wanted and getting players whilst they’re happy to get that pay rise and there is so long before they can start holding ya to ransom because they only have 18 months on their deals, is sensible contract management. It once again shows that whatever the previous regime we’re doing was so far from best practice it beggars belief.

But we’re beyond that now and we can be happy that we seem to have a structure in place that is at least acting like a modern football club. All the players have to do is deliver that improvement that we’ve wanted to see for the last five years or so.

The final part of the presser that seems to have been picked up by most of the media sites is the Mustafi and Elneny situation. Emery said yesterday in pretty plain terms that he’s told both that they can go. Of course he dressed it up as “I want them to be happy” but ultimately the message is clear: you won’t get game time this season.

Whether or not that is the case if both players are here beyond the end of the transfer window remains to be seen. We’ve seen with the Bale and Real Madrid situation that despite being told he isn’t wanted he has a manager who has said he’ll use the Welsh forward from now on. That’s because nobody will pick up Bale’s wages, I know, but ultimately when a manager has a player he can use he will do so when the window is shut.

Mustafi and Elneny are hardly quality players like Bale that have just fallen out with the management though. They’re footballers who have fallen down the pecking order and seen new players come in ahead of them. Mustafi, for example, will have four defenders ahead of him in the pecking order this season. Even if he stays he’ll not even be guaranteed games in the secondary competitions. Elneny is in the same boat – probably worse – so I suspect both players will get the hint and want to move on in the next week. It’s best for everyone’s sake.

And with that my words are done for another day. Enjoy whatever it is you have planned and I will catch you tomorrow for a pre match preview.

Laters.

Unai Emery rotates once again and I’m came Jenkinson, Mavropanos and Mustafi in defence, followed by a midfield duo of Mohammed Elneny and Matteo Guendouzi. He started both Auba and Laca up top and Özil behind and despite the fact that it is a terrible midfield, on our own patch that team should be good enough to get over the line ahead of a Crystal Palace team who place a lot of reliance on Wilfred Zaha.

Yet yesterday we got our noses blooded by counter attacking football and frankly comical defending.

For the first goal Palace scored Jenkinson played Benteke onside. It was poor from the Corporal and an example of why he hasn’t played much this season and probably won’t play much more. He was hooked by Emery at halftime and I suspect that’s the last we’ll see of him in an Arsenal shirt. But even though he was to blame for playing him onside, we need to look at who was marking Benteke because he had the freedom of the Emirates.

And Palace should probably have been further ahead in that first half, but for an excellent double save from Leno, one of the few players who can come away from yesterday’s game knowing he’s done his bit.

We can have complaints that we should have had a stonewall penalty for handball in the first half but in truth our play didn’t really warrant us going in at halftime level. Inevitably Unai changed it at halftime and we looked to have a bit of drive about us. Iwobi looked good when he came on, Özil got a good early goal, then you’re expecting Arsenal to push on and win the game.

But you’re always making life difficult for yourself when you defend like we did yesterday. One long ball over the top and Mustafi should have dealt with the ball. Instead he just let Zaha through and Palace were further ahead. It was shocking defending and the type of error we’ve seen too much from him over the last few years. It’s why we need to be searching for a new centre half and it’s why we should be cashing in our chips on him because that wasn’t acceptable.

Neither was the marking for Palace’s third goal. THIRD GOAL. You can’t concede three goals at home to a team who have literally nothing to play for. It was totally unacceptable and whilst we can question the managers selection decision he tried to change it at halftime and he can’t legislate for the clown defending that Mustafi gave us yesterday.

We responded through a goal from Auba but it was about the only thing he did yesterday. Lacazette was busy but offered little, Özil flitted in and out of the game, there were just too many players who delivered average performances.

The midfield pairing of Guendouzi and Elneny just doesn’t work. Emery has to try something else. It gives us no control, we look like a pub team and the space they fill just feels like they’re in the team just to make up the numbers. Guendouzi has run out of steam in his first season and I get that, but Elneny offers nothing whatsoever and I just hope he isn’t starting any more games. We miss Xhaka and Torreira so much and I pray both come back in for Wolves and Leicester away.

They are two teams who also have nothing to play for but yesterday was a warning to us that this team aren’t home and dry by a long shot. We are poor away from home and we were poor yesterday. We have three away games and one home game left and if we’d have won yesterday you’d think that we’d have had a buffer for at least one or two defeats away. As it stands now I think we probably need to win three of our final four to stand a chance of Champions League football. Chelski will win tonight and that will put them three points clear of us. Which means we simply must go to Wolves and win. If we don’t have a fully fit midfield duo of Xhaka and Torreira that feels increasingly more unlikely.

Unai needs to go back to the drawing board. Yesterday was unacceptable.

Today is no different and after Man City just about did the business against the Tiny Totts, today there is an opportunity for us to go back in to third spot if we can beat Palace on our own turf.

If we’d have had a full week of rest then I’d be feeling more confident but there aren’t many teams who are playing in Europe at the moment who are also able to pull out impressive performances in the following game. So I’m expecting today to be one heck of a grind.

Palace are a better team away than at home and that’s because they have pace on the counter. Lots of pace on the counter. At home teams sit deep and the likes of Zaha and Townsend don’t get as much space to run in to, but away from home teams have a go at them and that’s what I’m expecting today, so my hope is that we are sensible enough not to be hit with too many bodies forward and Crystal Palace countering is today.

Palace will most likely ply with a variation on 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 depending on how you see it and they will rely on exploiting the wide areas. Both Kolasinac and Maitland-Niles played in midweek and I’m expecting both to start again today in a 3-4-2-1 style formation and if that happens there may be space afforded to Palace’s wide forwards to give them time to attack whoever plays as the right or left sided centre half.

Alternatively Unai could go with Monreal at left back and Mustafi at right back but with Koscielny now having played two games this week I can’t see him partnering Mavropanos in a four man defence. So I suspect it’ll be Mustafi, Mavropanos and Monreal in the middle as Sokratis serves the final of his domestic bans for picking up a bazillion yellow cards this season.

That’s Palace on the counter and I suspect we might concede today, but the key for us will be scoring and I think we’ll see a return to the team of Özil and Iwobi, both of whom will be fresher having not played or only played the tail end of the game on Thursday night. Lacazette was pulled off on Thursday and so I think he might start as somebody who is fresher and I suspect that means it’ll be Auba from the bench if we need it at some stage.

The biggest worry for me, however, is what Unai Emery does with his midfield. Xhaka supposedly picked up a knock, Torreira was holding his groin, Ramsey is out, so if Emery wants to rotate the only options are Guendouzi and Elneny. That midfield was a travesty to watch against Everton but if we go with it again today then you have to assume that it is because Unai has looked at the numbers and sees just how ‘in the red zone’ his midfielders are. There might be a few angry people on social media if he picks those two in midfield but let’s not forget that we have Wolves on Wednesday away from home. At home and with some rotated firepower we should be stronger than Everton away and although that midfield doesn’t off us as much control as one with Xhaka and Torreira, you’d hope that it can at offer a little bit of protection against Palace counters.

Actually, the more I think about that, the more I worry that it won’t. :-S

But I think if it happens it represents the fact that Emery doesn’t really have any other options. He could try to Chuck Willock in but that’s harsh putting a kid like that under pressure in that area of the pitch.

Whatever options he has I just hope that he sets the team up with plenty of goals in them, because I think we will need it today, so let’s hope for an Arsenal performance that is as professional as the one last Thursday.

I was feeling surprisingly confident for the two Napoli games. I don’t think I feel the same about today. Palace are safe, the pressure is off, they can play with the kind of freedom our side can’t and that is a real cause for concern from my perspective.

Let’s hope Arsenal can do the business though.

Come on you reds!

Yesterday was the first of a collective of games we’ve been building up to where our fate is in our own hands. The Newcastle game may have been the first match back after an extended break and some time in Dubai, but this was the first proper ‘test’ of the teams mettle, which they failed miserably.

And it was a miserable failure because we never really looked like we were going to score yesterday. I’d like to be able to say it was one of the most lacklustre performances of the season, but I watched the West Ham game, plus the Brighton game on Boxing Day, which all felt very familiar to this.

Arsenal have been a Jekyll and Hyde team by halves this season at times, but also in home and away matches, to which yesterday played out the narrative that we all feared. At home we got a comfortable victory against Newcastle but away we gave Everton the most comfortable of victories on their patch.

And I think the reason I’m quite maddened by the performance yesterday was not just the inclusion of clearly sub or players like Elneny, but the complete lack of intensity shown by us at a crucial game in the season.

Everton are a team with little to play for this season. They’re fighting for a few extra million to get themselves a spot or two higher in the league. Yet had you watched yesterday’s game there’s no way in a million years that you’d believe Arsenal were the ones who still had something to fight for. There was a complete lack of intensity about our play and when you consider that the team has had six days rest since the last game (which in itself was hardly a gruelling endeavour) then I’m afraid you have to start looking at the mentality of some of our players.

And probably the manager too, although I’m more inclined to blame some of the individuals on the pitch yesterday, but Emery did get it wrong and that was in midfield. He said afterwards that Aaron Ramsey probably wasn’t fit enough for 90 minutes but it was the first 45 that cost us the game and that was when we effectively gave up any control in the middle of the park. Elneny was beyond woeful and Guendouzi looked lost at times. Take Xhaka, Ramsey and Torreira out of our midfield and we’re in big trouble and that bore out yesterday.

The midfield two couldn’t take a stronghold in the game and that allowed a pretty average Everton team the rub of the green because they snapped in to tackles as Elneny wandered around aimlessly only to occasionally get involved in the play to pass the ball backwards to one of his defenders. He was a pointless tactical decision from the manager and I’m sure if he had the time again he’d have played Ramsey from the start and then brought him off sometime in the second half.

But we were poor all over the pitch. Both fullbacks were woeful and the only reason Maitland-Niles stood out as being poorest was because he was left on the pitch after halftime and his game just got worse. He even contrived to gift Bernard the loveliest of flick backs to put him one-on-one with Leno. Blushes may have been spared by our German ‘keeper but that was just one of a number of chances our back line gave away all day.

Monreal was overrun time and time again on the left hand side and he’s starting to look every bit his age right now. Sokratis looked like he had no idea what to do with Calvert-Lewin and Mustafi was erratic at times like usual. It was a car crash at the back.

Then when you add the lack of control in midfield as I’ve already mentioned, to the fact the forward players had a day to forget as well, and you’ve got a pretty woeful performance from an Arsenal team who I think might have their season finished within a fortnight.

I say this because whilst we might see a different Arsenal on Thursday at home to Napoli, our defence will still concede chances and Napoli will be waaaaaay better at finishing them than Everton. Then we’ll have an away leg which I don’t even want to think about right now.

It was a bad day for almost every Arsenal player yesterday. Lacazette was quiet and when he wasn’t quiet things weren’t clicking. Mkhitaryan reverted back to the player that we’ve all seen for most of his Arsenal career; ducking out of challenges, losing the ball and generally being ineffective bar one shot wide of Pickford’s goal. Özil dropped deeper and deeper and the result was that he could affect play further up the pitch and when Aubameyang came on he almost disappeared immediately.

It’s like I said at the top end of this blog: this Arsenal team has a psychological issue with it when it comes to away games. Something has to change and change immediately because we aren’t getting anywhere near a Champions League spot if we continue away from home like we have.

Catch you all tomorrow.

Now I don’t know about you, but I like that, regardless of the opposition. When I was a wee nipper or a grumpy teenager I used to get frustrated when Arsenal didn’t do enough of The Goals, but now that I’m a little older I try my darnedest to just embrace those moments regardless of the opposition.

Because in truth this game should never have been close and in reality it really wasn’t. A sort of decent Ukrainian League team came to a big European night with the aim of being as compact as possible for as long as they could and even though they did do the inevitable and score a couple towards the end – the Arsenal defence being the gift that keeps on giving of course – this was never really a competition between two teams they could win. So they packed their defence with what looked like a flat back five at times and looked to frustrate.

Certainly when Unai named a rather stronger starting XI than we all thought it showed that he knew this would be a case of grinding down a team and perhaps that’s why there were so many first teamers in there. Steve and I sat with raised eyebrows in the pub before the game when we saw Sokratis, Nacho and Auba all in the starting line up. Didn’t Unai realise we had a proper game at the weekend? Isn’t this a bit of a risk given that we don’t have another left back?

It seems to have been fine in the end but Vorskla did go to ground a lot and when you’ve got players happy to dive in at ankles it does lead to the odd chewed fingernails that’s for sure. When Torreira went down twice in the first half it looked as though he might be heading for an ice pack and the stadium all held a collective intake of breath.

Thankfully, again, he managed through it and in the second half I suspect his substitution was more precautionary than anything else.

Up until that point he’d been a central point for which a lot of the balls in the middle were played and with Arsenal dominating a lot of possession he was often on hand to distribute. He was tidy and always looking forward and whilst it’s pleasing to see that he managed to stay on the field, I do wonder if he’ll finally be given a chance in the Premier League from the start on Sunday.

I suspect not though. It feels like Guendouzi has the jersey at the moment and the mop-haired Frenchman came on and looked tidy enough in possession in the second half. There’s a few players that would have wanted to stake a place for inclusion on Sunday but as I sit here thinking about who might have actually done it, it’s hard to come up with a definitive conclusion.

Mkhitaryan was very quiet in the first half and didn’t seem to spring to life until about ten minutes in to the second, but as soon as he did, we looked much better. I can’t say that it’s enough to depose Özil just yet though. He’s a guy who is just that little bit better than Mkhi and his vision outshines anyone else in the team. But Mkhi had bright spots and so I can’t work out if I’m pleased with his performance or not. And that happened with a lot of players last night. There were so many different up and down players and that probably explains the 4-2 scoreline.

The other name that might have people pondering is Iwobi. His performance was classic Iwobi last night. At times he looked unplayable, energetic, with the ball stuck to his feet as he ran at pace. He looks like he’s in such a hurry when going forward and it panics defenders. But the only trouble is that it seems to panic Alex too. I feel like he’s the most ‘ying’ and ‘yang’ player ever. For every fantastic move there is an equal and opposite shocker. Despite a fantastic assist for the first Auba goal, he still has moments of what feels like stupidity. It’s mental and it is literally hurting my head trying to work out whether he played well or not last night.

But that’s how the whole result feels this morning. Auba got two confidence-vital goals. Özil got one and that will have done him good too. Sokratis looks better and better each week but given the inexperience in the team he wasn’t really at risk of losing his place for the weekend so you can’t exactly say he won’t play on Sunday. But still, seeing him NOT do a Mustafi and terrify the crowd every time he goes to ground, is a nice feeling to have.

It’s just too confusing to think too much and read too much in to the result I think. There were some good patches, some sloppy patches (including ambling back from Elneny on the second Vorskla goal), but against an opponent like this it’s just about getting the job done and minimising the exertion for some of the players who play on Sunday.

And that’s where we must look to this morning. A show down against an equally unpredictable Everton side with enough pace to worry us, but with a forward line in ours that are all contributing towards the goals. This feels like a microcosm of the whacky season we’re going to have. Perhaps we should all just accept the ride? There won’t be clean sheets, there will be goals, we might get some highs and some lows. It still doesn’t feel like it’s clicking properly but there were glimpses yesterday, like the great build up just before Mkhitaryan kicked the floor after getting through to the ‘keeper.

We’re going to get more games like this until Emery finds the balance, something again he seemed to allude to in his presser, but the good thing is that we have a few home games still to play and so hopefully some more wins to be had.

Catch you all tomorrow.

There were a few reputable places online reporting it yesterday and when I read it whilst on my way to work, the days of the ol’ ChampMan “The Board have announced that <usually your own name or a variation of>’s job as manager is safe” announcement came ringing back into mine ears.

It’s normally the prelude to a sacking a few weeks later, but in Arsenal’s case it feels like Unai will get time.

Quite why the club felt they needed to do that though is a bit of a mystery. I know they’ve become PR crazy since the departure of Arsène and in the main it’s been welcome. But perhaps this was one briefing that didn’t need to happen.

Mainly because from what I’ve seen the fan response has been very understanding. We are all frustrated – especially after such a good home record last season – but most normal people have thought that we’re a work in progress, Sunday was always going to end that way, so we move on.

And we can move on quickly because it’s already Wednesday and we’re just a few more days away from there being another game. It’s a great feeling to know you can quickly look ahead. No more pouring over any words said, we can just focus on real, actual, football. Lovely stuff. Delicious stuff. More and more please. Especially when we get to two games a week. Yum. Anyway, let’s just hope Unai is prepping his team, tweaking for Chelski, looking at how he can get only our second win there in something like ten years. I like the idea that we’re actually looking at a way to counter an opponent. It’s refreshing to imagine that he’s analysing Chelski’s first game, that he’s looking how they press us, that he’s wondering just how we avoid their high press putting us under pressure, whilst in response breaking that and hitting them on the counter. And who are the best men for the job? Who will do the business for Unai?

Will he be doing it without Mohammed Elneny though? That’s the latest rumour circulating after he’s been linked with Marseille and whilst there are plenty of Arsenal fans who would be happy to see the back of him, I’m not so vociferous in my opposition, because I think there’s a bit of a narrative that has struck up around Elneny.

We know what type of player he is. He covers ground, he doesn’t have a great passing range, he’s not the most amazing tackler in the world, but he does offer a squad player with energy that will get games in the League Cup and early stages of the Europa League. Perhaps there’s an argument to be had about his place in the team taking up space for a future prospect, but I take the view that if players are good enough then they will supersede players like Elneny.

Players like Maitland-Niles, Willock, perhaps even Guendouzi because he is unlikely to play every game and I suspect Torreira might start to get the nod ahead. All of these players might see Elneny as an obstacle but for me as long as Emery treats players on merit and not their age profile and seniority in the team like Arsène did, then they’ll be ok, whether Elneny is at the club or not.

What he brings us is depth but if we’re going to sell him I hope Arsenal don’t take their usual “sh*t, we’ve got to sell him and get him off the wage bill – any takers?” Approach. Even teams like Liverpool with Ings can offload players nowhere near the first team for decent money, so I hope Arsenal are playing the “chaps, he’s on a long contract, we can’t replace due to the transfer window, so you’re going to have to cough up I’m afraid” card. We need to up our game in a sales sense because whilst all clubs make money through TV and sponsorship these days, transfer fees recouped also help to supplement the reinvestment in players in the first team.

We’ve got to get back to The Arsenal who make profit on signings. We can’t afford too many Lucas Perez’s because there’s only so many of them you can swallow before you start to see even more of a decline than we’ve already had.

So let’s wait and see what happens with Elneny, but I’m hoping that the three amigos start to play hardball now.

The other news is that Joel Campbell may go, but that’s not really a surprise given Emery said that might happen, as well as the fact that he’s nowhere near the first time. It was a strange transfer, he almost looked like he might make it, but he’s barely spent any time in this country and if we’re all honest, it’s probably time to cut our losses with that one.

That’s yer lot from me today. We’re at that middle point in the week when last weekend’s action is dying down, this upcoming weekend is just a little out of touching distance, and the club are understandably quiet. I’m quite ok with that to be fair.

Laters people.

My weekend is going to be spent doing a few basic chores, but then I’ve got to do my first ‘proper’ run in a while, which will consist of a 10 mile run around Uxbridge as I prepare for the Amsterdam Marathon. Quick non-related Arsenal plug – i’m doing it for the Brain Tumour Charity so if anybody fancies sponsoring me I’d be most grateful. Link is here. As you can see I haven’t exactly started trying to collect!

But anyway…tenuous segue coming up…as I go for my runs during the day I often listen to some podcasts and I can’t remember which one I was listening to recently, but the discussion turned to existing players and the fact that we’re all getting excited about new signings coming in. Arsenal yesterday released the latest information about players departing the club this summer.It wasn’t really any surprises though as Big Per retires and Santi looks to recapture his form back in Spain with Villarreal, but what has struck me recently is just how many more players will probably need to go this summer in order for us to have a functioning squad and not too much of the ol’ dreaded “deadwood”.

Right now we’re talking about Sokratis, Leno, Torreira from Sampdoria and there is also talk of a wide forward too. We’ve been linked with tonnes of players but for now I’m just talking about players who feel realistic and not just media speculating so they can say they broke the first ‘exclusive’ before anybody else knew.

Assuming we’re taking Big Per, Santi and probably Jack out of the equation as he’s now out of contract and probably won’t sign a new deal, it looks like we have a squad of 21 players who make up the first team. This is the recognised first team and doesn’t include the likes of Willock or other players from the youth set up. Just Ainsley Maitland-Niles is in there.

Now, Ivan said that the new man coming in will have to work with existing players, as well as bring young players through, so you’d expect there to be a promotion or two and perhaps that is Willock and Nelson, for example. If that is the case we’re talking 23 players. Let’s now assume that Leno’s potential arrival from Leverkusen spells the end for Ospina. It’s a like-for-like swap and so that nets out that potential incoming. Now let’s assume that We’re bringing in Sokratis because we need somebody of that age profile, because Koscielny is injured for minimum half of the season and because quite frankly, some fresh blood wouldn’t go-a-miss right now. We’re up to 24 and here is where is starts to get congested. Because unless Emery is player four centre halves somehow this season, we are going to have to ship somebody out. As it stands we have Mustafi, Mavropanos, Chambers, Holding and if Sokratis comes in that makes five centre halves. If we swap to three at the back and Nacho is not seen as a centre half, we might be ok, but as we saw last season with Per barely featuring as soon as we change any kind of structure to a four then there are players left kicking their heels.

I’m just not sure Emery will want that many centre halves in his team and so I have a feeling that somebody is facing the chop. If I had to guess it would be one of Holding or Chambers and if Emery/Arsenal need to raise funds to pay for players in other positions then centre half will surely be a position that they could cash in.

Potentially they could look at Mustafi but with him being a more senior centre back and the narrative from Sven et al being that we need to look for more experience defensively, that doesn’t sound to me like they’d hook Mustafi and but their faith in three players who are in their early twenties (Mav, Chambers and Holding). My gut feel – and I have no intel other than that I’m afraid) is that we’ll see Chambers depart if Arsenal need to raise some funds. He’d probably command a higher fee, it frees up more space for Holding and Mav to try to break through, plus that money can be used to reinvest. If we’re not looking to get some cash in I could see a loan move for Holding happening.

So, back to my hypothesising on the whole team, to which we have Lichsteiner already in, as well as Sokratis, but we’re also potentially bringing in Torreira. I’ve done my YouTubing so I’m clearly now an expert on the player, but he looks good, and exciting. Good with the ball at his feet, can weave out of positions like Santi, yet isn’t afraid of a tackle. A €25million fee isn’t out of Arsenal’s price range too. But here’s the thing; that takes us to 25 players and in our midfield we already have Xhaka, Ramsey, Maitland-Niles, plus talk i’ve seen of Iwobi potentially being moved more centrally. I haven’t even mentioned Elneny and with Torreira in the team (if that happened) we’d be talking about six players for most likely two positions depending on the formation.

So much like the central defensive position I think somebody will be binned by Arsenal this summer. Again, based purely on my own guesswork, I think a lot of who gets binned depends on Ramsey’s contract. If the Welshman doesn’t sign then he’ll be the one to go but even then we’d have five players for two positions. You could argue that Iwobi and Maitland-Niles could play as utility players either in defensive positions for Maitland-Niles case, or in more offensive positions for Iwobi, but that midfield still feels congested. If Ramsey signs a new deal, then somebody else is surely getting canned. Who that would be I don’t know. The most logical choice suggests Elneny. He’ll be at the World Cup, has just signed a new deal and so therefore could fetch a decent price, assuming Arsenal are finally going to be a bit more astute with their sales of players. His exit would free up Torreira and from what I’ve seen of him it looks like he could be a good partner to either Xhaka, Ramsey, or maybe even Maitland-Niles. Of course all of this is based on a little footage and no evidence of seeing him in the pace of the Premier league but, if the noises are true about the player, then we need to assume that Arsenal are gearing for an exit.

I haven’t even talked about a supposed mystery wide forward either, although I don’t think that will happen. I just can’t see how. We’ve got so many players already that unless welbeck is treated like Ramsey with his contract situation and shipped out post World Cup, I think we’ll not see any more incomings. We physically couldn’t anyway because of the squad rule (although I haven’t bothered to look it up and Maitland-Niles may not count in the 25 because of his age and the fact he’s home-grown).

It’s an interesting juggling act that has to happen and I wonder just how much shuffling in the playing staff will happen this summer.

back tomorrow.

Thankfully they didn’t, but before we get into the eventual success that was qualification to the semi final against either Atletico, Salzburg or Marseille, let’s have a look at some of the tripe that we were served with up until that Welbeck goal made us all breathe a little easier.

The first 15 minutes was something I’d highlighted as a pivotal point in the game because I thought CSKA would come out and have a proper go at us. I didn’t expect what we got though; a timid Russian side who looked very familiar to Oostersunds FK when we played them in our first leg away from home. CSKA pressed a little bit in the middle of the park but they didn’t play a high line and didn’t really seem to be committing too many men forward. As I sat there sipping at my Chairman’s Reserve and Cola I began to feel a little comfortable, even though Jack Wilshere was conspiring to lose the ball more than anything else and we’d hardly even seen Welbeck or Lacazette.

We looked like we were trying to control the game though. Not overly committing ourselves forward, not driving bodies in between an ageing CSKA Moscow team and never really looking like we wanted to do anything other than keep a shape and keep CSKA at arms length.

The problem with this Arsenal team however is that we simply don’t know how to play like that. Defensively we simply aren’t good enough to shut out a game and although it seemed like only warning shots had been fired across our bow unutil the goal, the momentum and feel of the game completely swung the second that the goal was headed in. And it felt like an avoidable goal. Elneny could have closed down the crosser quicker, Monreal was weak in the air, then all of the defenders were not alive quick enough to Cech’s save. It felt like a poor goal to concede but not only that, it also felt like we suddenly had no idea how to handle the match.

CSKA’s tails were up and we wilted. I can’t remember the last time I wanted halftime to arrive but even after we’d got back in and tried to re-group with a slight shift in formation, we looked nervous and rickety. Passing was wayward, Wilshere continued to give the ball away or get too easily nudged off the ball, Welbeck was virtually anonymous and Ozil was having one of those games where he looks like he doesn’t really want to be there. Don’t get me wrong he still had plenty of ball, had a few decent flicks, but some of them just didn’t come off and you could see the frustration in his own performance.

If we were nervous when the first went in, once the second was scored we were absolutely sh*tting ourselves. Again I’m afraid you have to look at Cech for the poor save to parry it out into a dangerous part of the pitch instead of out wide, but the fact that no Arsenal player seemed to react to the rebound was a poor show by my reckoning. But that’s what we were like all night. We seemed to second to every second ball and that allowed CSKA to have a lot more possession and create some very good chances, including one a few minutes before our goal that game from a half-hearted attempt at defending led to a ball whistling past Cech’s right hand post.

I must admit that given all we’ve seen in European competition this week I feared the absolute worst last night. Then stepped forward Danny Welbeck with an assist from the excellent Mo Elneny. A nice little one-two and Welbeck finishing like Henry in his prime is what we’ve always wanted to see from the England International, but it just hasn’t been frequent enough, but like any good forward worth his salt he took one of his only chances of the night brilliantly and you could visibly see the CSKA players deflate. It was the perfect tonic to what had been a turgid performance up until that point but from thereon in it was Arsenal hitting CSKA on the counter again and again and eventually Elneny decided to put this game to bed with a great ball in to Rambo and another deft flick from the Welshman. He loves a little flicked goal, doesn’t he? He can be so calm and composed in front of goal and we’re seeing the return of the 2013/14 vintage. That was a fine year.

The argument could be had that it’s difficult to know whether to ‘stick’ or ‘twist’ when you’ve got such a large first leg lead, but really it shouldn’t have been in question last night. I didn’t think CSKA were any great shakes if I’m honest and should the players have tried to be a little less introverted in their play then I think we cold have made life a lot easier for ourselves. There are some worrying signs like Wilshere’s form or the way we all collectively gasped when Rambo went down the tunnel – showing the reliance we have on him – but ultimately we’re in the pot for the draw today.

And that’s all we should be taking right now. We have a few week’s before the next game and a few more Premier League games to play. So we’ve got to get ourselves into momentum building mode and hopefully we can pick up some confidence on our way to a semi final of a European competition. In terms of who we face I would rather avoid Atletico because I just think they are better than us over two legs. In a one-off game any kind of performance is possible, but it feels like we need to avoid them in this round, then hope for a big game in the final if we were to get there. Of course that blatantly means we’re getting them in the draw for the semis. You can thank me later. Not!

Catch you beautiful people tomorrow.

I tuned in to watch Liverpool hang on in the first half and then had some dinner and didn’t bother going back to watch the second after Liverpool equalised. But despite everyone telling us City could overturn a three goal first leg defeat, it was Roma that sounded the ‘careful, Arsenal’ alarm, as they overturned their 4-1 first leg away defeat to beat Barca 3-0 in Italy and pretty much stun the footballing world.

Hmm…4-1 first leg home victory…that sounds familiar…

What it puts into stark contrast is that the mindset of the Arsenal players tomorrow evening needs to be absolutely spot on – something we haven’t exactly see heaps of this season – because in European competition the pendulum swings very quickly.

For example in the City game they scored early, then hit the post in the dying embers of the first half, which completely changed the complexion of the tie. Liverpool sit back and City can probe knowing they don’t have to go gung-ho. They didn’t get that yesterday evening and that gave Liverpool belief and strength going in to the second half.

The same is said for Arsenal in 1989. George Graham was very clear with his team to keep it to 0-0 by halftime and watch how Liverpool will start to wobble as soon as one goal was scored and time was running low. That is exactly what happened.

Timing is everything in Football and mindset is too so I hope that when Arsène talks to his players today and tomorrow he gets them well drilled for what will be a CSKA Moscow team who will want to hit us hard and fast. More on that tomorrow by way of a match preview.

In other quite surprising news, old Mo Elneny appears to have had his suspension quashed, which is a bit of a turn up for the books. It’s a surprise because the FA usually like to look after their own and unless a player is seen to have booted someone in the face or dropped a grand piano on another professional without the ref seeming, they tend to dismiss any appeals. So to have the Egyptian rightly cleared of his slight shove against a Southampton player is good news. It appears there is some sense at FA HQ after all.

What it also means is that our midfield options for tomorrow and Sunday are bolstered. With Elneny back you would definitely say he’ll play on Sunday and will probably be on the bench tomorrow evening as cover. Without him in the league it would leave Arsène with a choice over blooding more youth or playing Wilshere in a deeper role probably alongside Xhaka. That hasn’t really worked so far and Wilshere’s form is such that it probably wouldn’t do anyone any good, so I’m pleased that we at least have the option available, even if he’s a limited option in our team.

Given that one potential suspension of a player in the league has us wondering who plays in the midfield for domestic games does make you wonder about the paucity of our options though. When the summer eventually rolls around it feels to me like the surgery will need to be done in that middle of the park because offloading Coquelin in January now feels like we probably left ourselves one body short. I get that it might be to make way for Maitland-Niles or Willock but that surely has to be as understudy and if Wilshere is off in the summer too, then it does feel like there should be room for one ‘external solution’ at least.

But that’s all conjecture for the summer that we don’t need to concern ourselves with just yet. The focus right now is on crossing everything and hoping those Arsenal players took enough notice of the Roma-Barca game yesterday, but not so much that they’re now sh*tting themselves, because they have shown they have the ability to score against the Russians and they will know they will get chances. It will be about taking them tomorrow evening.

That’s yer lot from me. Catch you all tomorrow.

There’s little doubt that there will be some element of rotation (you can do a bit of betting – as well as some casino stuff here at 1xbet promo code if you fancy it) but should he completely reshuffle his pack and get a new hand dealt to him or should he just swap a few cards from the deck and keep most of what he has?

I have absolutely no idea what he will do. I know what i’d do, but I spent a good ten year’s of my life playing Championship Manager and the difference between on screen and in real life is a world apart. On Champ Man it’s a simple case of numbers. Look at who is available and who hasn’t played in a while, realise this game is fairly irrelevant to us, then pick a complete reserve team because you don’t want to pick up any knocks ahead of CSKA. If that was the case then the side today would probably look like:

Masey, Nelson, Chambers, Holding, Kolasinac, Elneny, Maitland-Niles, Willock, Iwobi, Welbeck, Nketiah.

But I can’t see that happening in a million year’s. And actually if I take myself out of the Champ Man mindset I’m not sure i’d want it because football and successful football teams are built on momentum. The thing that has derailed our season, apart from questionable manager decisions, underperforming players and not making signings in areas we need them, is the chopping and changing of the midweek and weekend teams that has led to us never really building any momentum. We’ve not put together a winning run like the one we’re on at the moment all season and if we want this season to finish strongly and actually win something then we have to have a confident Arsenal team with a bit of swagger. That’s what happened last season. The reason we were able to lift the FA Cup and beat the likes of City and Chelski was because after the horrendous March we had we went on a bit of a run in the league and cups and by the end of the season and the FA Cup final we were a form team again. It feels a bit like we need to do that again this season and that has already started but needs to continue again today.

So I suspect we’ll only get rotation of those type of players who are susceptible to injury. So I think you’re talking about Koscielny, Ramsey, probably also Wilshere, who will most likely all make way. Although given Jack’s form if he plays today I don’t think he’ll start in Moscow.

Then the question should be on players who we have very little other options for, so in my mind that’s Cech, Bellerin and probably Ozil too given Mkhitaryan’s injury. The last thing we want today is for Cech to get injured and so rely on Macey for a few weeks. The kid looks good but it’s a lot to ask to bring him in when the pressure is at the business end of the season. It’s the same with Bellerin though. We have literally no cover for him in terms of a natural right back so why risk him?

So my hope for today is a rather heavily rotated team with a few options on the bench. But what I would do and what Wenger does are rarely aligned and so I think today’s team will look like:

Cech, Bellerin, Chambers, Mustafi, Monreal, Elneny, Xhaka, Welbeck, Ozil, Iwobi, Aubameyang.

If it is that team they should have enough to beat Southampton at home but as we’ve seen recently it has felt like a bit of a grind and that’s how I think today’s game will go to. It’s a Mark Hughes Southampton and they will aim to frustrate. They have had trouble scoring goals all season and Hughes will know that a point away at The Arsenal would be something positive to build on. So I think that’s what the Saints will aim to do today. They’ll want to be compact, not give Arsenal space but also ensure that all of the football is played in front of their back line and not with any balls in behind. The difference between the midweek game against CSKA and today’s game will be – I think – the ability of the team to use the wide balls in between centre half and full back to get in behind. I don’t think our full backs get the same space as they did on Thursday and so I’m thinking this is going to be a frustrating half.

Southampton are missing Davies and Lemina from their first XI but weirdly Fraser Forster doesn’t get into their side at the moment and given that he has always seemed to have absolute blinders against us gives me cause for optimism. Of course that comment is probably now going to leave McCarthy having the game of his life this lunchtime but what are you gonna do, eh?

Against West Ham Hughes went for a 4-4-2 formation and if he does that again today I’d be surprised. If he plays the same team – minus Lemina – then the Southampton threat will come from the pace of Redmond and the two full backs Soares and Bertrand on the flanks, but their front two of Austin and Gabbiadini aren’t exactly the most rapid and they have ten goals all season. And for both players two each of those goals came in the same game. That has been Southampton’s challenge all season and so what I’m hoping for is a quite afternoon for our back line. It is Arsenal though so we shouldn’t really expect there not to be any brain-fart moments at the back. Let’s just hope they’re kept to a minimum.

It’s a game that matters little other than confidence but I really don’t want to have a grumpy Saturday afternoon. So just go out there and do the business Arsenal.

Laters people.