Grand, because we have not seen Premier League football from 3 long months and the opening match between Man Utd and Fulham was shit. So, forget about what happened yesterday and treat this as the opening of the season. I can guarantee much more excitement, enthusiasm, the eagerness to win and the quest for the title begins for Arsenal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the best club in the world plays football today. Arsenal takes on Wolves at 3 PM BST (7.30 PM IST), at Emirates. We have a almost everyone available to play, Fabio Vieira and Jurrien Timber missed the Emirates Cup but they are mostly likely to be available today. Whether they will play is a different thing, since Zinchenko is most likely to start in that LB and midfield is full. Tomiyasu and Tierney are the only two players who will not be available for today’s game but we are not going to miss him at all.
Team selection will be a headache for Mikel, since we haven’t got Merino and if he tries to fit in Havertz along side Rice, the CF position will remain open. He can alternatively play Havertz up top and have a midfield of Partey, Rice and Odegaard. I am expecting to see Martinelli on the left, the rest of the squad picks itself up. Wolves are a bit in a mess after selling their captain Max Kilman to West Ham and Pedro Neto to Chelsea. Two very important players for Wolves missing out today, and we need to capitalise on it.
Mikel Arteta was very positive about today in his press conference –
We are really excited. We’ve been missing the competition for many weeks, it’s too long for us. We are so willing to start and so enthusiastic about it.
source : Arsenal.com
We have got a pretty decent track record against Wolves. We have won our last 6 games against them, we have won our opening games in our last season and before that. We have at least scored once against Wolves in our last 33 games and that’s some achievement.
There are a few things I am expecting to see as the season folds. Timber will slowly take up the space Zinchenko plays in. He showed promise when he joined us in pre-season last season before his injury and there will be some time before he is match fit. It remains to be seen if Arteta takes his time or rushes him back in the team, but it’s going to happen.
Havertz, moving to the CF position for final. Kai had 14 goals and 7 assists last season, mostly playing up top and I am sure Mikel is in the mood to make him permanent in that position. Primary reason why we are looking for midfielder than a CF. Now, would I loved a traditional CF? Yes. Is it going to happen? No. So, lets hope Kai have a great season, ends up 20+ goals this season and become a main character in our winning season!
Third, Calafiori. This one is a mystery to me. I believe he is a back up / competition to Saliba and Gabriel and not brought as a LB or RB. Saliba played every minute for the club last season, and there is always a probability for injuries / sickness / form loss. We needed a back up, we had Tomi and White but Mikel never tested them so yeah, lets see how much Mikel uses Calafiori this season.
Right, I won’t bore you much today. We have an exciting team, an exciting season ahead and we hope Mikel delivers a trophy (or 2 I won’t mind). Don’t forget to share you predictions, expected team and anything related to Arsenal in the comments.
Vieira
Good stuff – I think you’re right. I watched our game and bits of 4 or 5 others. Very early days but there has been a lot of ordinary football so far. There’s an emerging narrative among turd-polishing PL apologists that it’s only to be expected so early in the season. But isn’t that what the preseason is for, ie to get the team firing?
I can’t help but think what might have been if we hadn’t wasted so much time, energy and money on our seemingly endless search for Keepers and defenders…as we speak, we appear to be wasting the last days of the window sorting our Ramsdale and trying to get a 3rd and possibly a 4th Keeper over the line…what the fuck am I missing here…surely there must be a better way to deal with the homegrown quota gig…all this mindless tinkering speaks to just how far MA still has to go when it comes to his learning curve
speaking of which, I read an absolutely ludicrous article that spoke about the new supposedly more cerebral approach we’ve taken regarding transfers…if taking far too long to get what should be a fairly routine 30M mid-level move done and dusted, then this “new” approach sucks even more than our previous sloth-like, less cerebral one
TRVL
People who are good at what they do don’t have to keep telling people their good – people who are fucking useless will keep coming up with new plans etc to divert attention from what they’re actually achieving.
Right now this is the worst transfer window in god knows how long – Wenger had an excuse he got so beaten up in the early days of the stadium move trying to balance the books and then got old.
We desperately need a striker and have spent £40 odd million on a CB. The goal keeping situation is a fucking joke – Raya pulled off a couple of cracking saves at the weekend but is he one of the top 2 / 3 keepers in the PL? I don’t think so, so Arteta’s been through Leno, Martinez, Ramsdale and is now on Raya its a fucking miracle he’s only spent £55 odd million (I’d like to know what loan fee we paid Brentford – why would they give us a player for a season for nothing?).
Can anyone remember a manager (of any club) going through so many keepers in 4 and a half years?
now there’s plenty of folks who’re steadfast in their belief that the PL is far and away the best footballing league in the world, but I would beg to differ…I watch enough football from across Europe to think otherwise…in fact, I would suggest that La Liga is better and Serie A is very close, especially now that Juve no longer dominates the Italian footballing scene…in recent years, we’ve seen the reemergence of both Milan squads, plus sides like Roma, who has performed admirably in Europe, and Atalanta, who took down Pool with relative ease, then manhandled the once undefeated Lever to capture the Europa crown…furthermore, let’s not forget how we struggled against a relatively weak Porto side, who were 4th place in a 3 team “junior” league at the time
that said, I do feel very confident in our chances to at least repeat the performances of the last two seasons…conversely, I don’t favour our chances in the CL, at least not as we’re presently constructed…the reasons are realitively simple…domestically it’s a real advantage when you can run things back after a successful campaign, even though that doesn’t typically take things forward…whereas in Europe, you generally need to have timely clinical finishing and the ability to be tactically brave, two things we greatly lack…this dynamic won’t change by acquiring Merino, should it come to pass, especially with our current crop of Europa League Striker options
Marc—agree in spades…if we had kept Emi, who’s heads and shoulders above every option MA’s bought since his departure, then earmarked all the monies we’ve wasted trying to replace him, we could afford any Striker on the planet, minus maybe Mbappe
head and shoulders
A quick skim through the basic sports news and Merino is said to be close where El B has earmarked his first start or similar.
What’s more worrying is several Havertz spin pieces about what a shrewd decision by El B not to buy a striker when so many were available. You could be excused in thinking Pedro and bots et al were being copied by whoever is paying the most to offer such opinions.
“Brilliantly aerially” was was term used because he was 6’4″. I mean Drogba was a beast aerially our Havertz hardly gets off the ground, and when he does he mostly ends up crumpled on the floor.
Maybe it’s all about to change and our mighty German is going to morph into a modern day Jurgen Klinsmann this season? It’s what they are trying to lead us to buy into.
I’m not putting down our gangly giraffe – honestly, I’m not, I say this with affection in the hope KH does the business, at the business end adding 20+ non pen, PL goals this season and weighing in with at least 10 assists.
If all the moving parts come together from out 15 potential starters – about the same as LCFC did on their winning season -, and no serious injuries to our main stars, then who knows?
The problem I have is that the puff pieces of news are quoting the amount of goals we scored last season completely disregarding how poor many of the top 8 were last season. Marc, TRVL, KP have all addressed concerns here including myself.
Last season the top 8 were really the top 2: us and City.
This season I see at least a top 6 from the top 8 performing at much higher levels, where our problem is we haven’t added to our tactics to reduce our repeated vulnerabilities of last season, and I’m not taking defense here.
MF & front 3 need added potential with new tactics, but being so unbalanced on the left, this is not possible. TRVL illustrated this well and I’ve been banging the balance drum for 2 seasons now.
Last season we could almost predict the points we’d get each game. Some were bankers because teams wouldn’t turn up past their midfield. Often defense against attack training games we made ridiculously hard for ourselves, as we did against Wolves in our opening game.
This will be the 3rd season where we can’t get the all important next goal to really control the game if the Wolves game is anything to go by.
I’d take Ivan Toney right now, but Saudi awaits for him now by the look at it. He’ll probably be a betting pundit, too.
Nine days to go to the trolly dash of the almost but not quite VO or similar deal. My guess is the Havertz stories are paving the way for his striker break out season.
Actually, I hope he does it as we’ll seriously be in it to win it.
I’m really looking forward to our Emery and El B match up once more this Saturday 2330 my time.
Can El B finally get the better of Emery at Villa? It’s going to be a much more serious test than Wolves were, where after our ‘run out’, but not really an assured performance where we looked to be too easily run through or around causing panic by a poor Wolves.
The Villa game we need to state our credentials and make a statement. A 0:3 dominant game for us, and it will show we mean business and help add uncertainty to our opponents heads.
Anything less will have teams dissecting our frailties with relish and confidence.
City’s opening game did what we should have done, and showed they are still a purring goal machine who can turn it on when they need to, and have Rodri who seemingly there is no end to his effortless elite playing style.
We need to match and improve on that from Pep.
Tony
“The problem I have is that the puff pieces of news are quoting the amount of goals we scored last season completely disregarding how poor many of the top 8 were last season”
It also misses off the 6 matches where we scored 5 or 6 goals – a total of 32 goals for. A decent team will get an odd result like that during the season, a very good team might get a couple but 6? We were very lucky to play some teams on just the right day – that’s not to criticise the result but to set it as a repeatable benchmark is really fucking daft.
If those matches all turned into 2 nil wins this season (a decent result) that’d be 20 less goals scored.
Tony & Marc—today alone I’ve seen numerous hacks refer to Merino as one of the best players on the planet, so I concur with your thoughts regarding “puff pieces”…now this is far from revelatory, as we’ve seen this sort of nonsensical blather being propagated by Arsenal-friendly online “media” outlets since MA’s arrival on the scene, but the lengths in which they’ll distort/stretch the truth has become even more glaring since we vastly overpaid for Havertz…for example, I’ve read no less than 10 articles this week, on the heels of Havertz’s second best outing since arriving, where each respective “author” has heaped plaudits on MA for not pursuing a Striker…of course, they don’t care one iota about context, like the fact it was the very first game of the season against a rather pedestrian opponent, he scuffed two other grade A chances that could have put that match to bed and he has yet to prove that he can lead the line against the best and brightest…furthermore, they’ve conveniently forgotten that MA did actually pursue a Striker, Sesko, right out of the gate, who would be wearing the kit right now if it weren’t for MA’s inablility to properly rotate and/or deploy Striker-friendly tactics…I feel like Kroenke hired several members of Trump’s PR department because we’re a fake news fuckfest nowadays
lots of interesting buzz online this evening…of course, I’m taking it all with a giant-sized grain of salt, but considering how dry it’s been, besides an endless barrage of updates about the “almost signed” Merino, I’m jonesing for anything involving our most pressing needs…all of a sudden there’s rumours circulating about a certain Napoli exec landing in London, which has invariably stirred the Osimhen transfer pot, and speculation regarding our late-window interest in Atalanta’s wantaway star, Lookman
it does seem rather far-fetched to imagine such a monumental end to this particular window, as we seem wholly incapable of conducting business of this import with such a short runway..so unless we get rid of more than just Eddie and/or those on the other side of the table flinch as the clock winds down, I find it difficult to imagine us shelling out an amount well north of the 130M mark in the next 10 days…that said, I’d be fucking elated if this were to happen
The writing is on the wall – somehow El B will persuade AFC to purchase Raheem Sterling. They love each other.
Meanwhile over in NW Spain there is excitement about the possibility of signing a young midfielder – Patino.
Bruno & Miguel, two Spaniards I deal with from just along the coast both support La Coruna and think he will be a good addition.
Hi NORG
Sounds like Chelsea is staging a late fire sale. Not sure if this younger player is on the list but if he is, I’d definitely put a bid in for Carney Chukwemeka. He was terrific at one stage for England youth teams when he was on Villa’s books.
Sterling? Absolutely not.
KP
Agreed, no Sterling please.
Are you looking forward to the Villa game?
TRVL
Great additions to the ‘puff pieces’ post.
Just reading that the ‘Buzz Words’ at the moment: ‘Huge Swapsies’. This apparently is what we are down to so no wonder our powder has been kept dry. That is if we have any powder; could have been all leveraged to the max.
There’s this little gem with Kiwior being the swap+?:
“Arsenal ‘prepare huge swap bid’ for Ademola Lookman after PSG transfer falls flat”
Ademola Lookman showreel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXgCIk9XfF4
Then I noticed that Ilkay G is in Manchester for a cosy chat with Pep to return to City on a free from Barcelona.
“Ilkay Gundogan lands in Manchester and meets Pep Guardiola at the City boss’s restaurant as veteran club legend gets set to rejoin in a shock free transfer from Barcelona”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-13766593/Ilkay-Gundogan-arrives-England-midfielder-gets-set-rejoin-Manchester-City-free-transfer-year-Barcelona.html
No surprise there then.
Lookman has similar style to Jesus, but far better.
So what what happens to Jesus if Lookman comes to us?
Surely the purchase of Sterling which will also incur a huge salary (£250k per week?) and the inevitable “why the fuck did we buy this guys he’s a busted flush” in 6 or 12 months time will be enough for fans to start turning on Arteta?
KP
Perhaps the new Chelsea manager is reaping the benefit of Boeley receiving mentoring from Menon. Boeley still wants to buy the world but has agreed he needs to shed a few. I seem to remember Chukwemeka being mentioned a couple of years ago – probably at LG.
Sterling was a busted flush years ago but I remember a statement he made when at City – El B had helped him improve his game. Perhaps it is payback time – soon to be heard at the offices of the Emirates – please Stan, I really want RH, I will not ask for anything else (fingers crossed behind his back).
Marc
Even El B’s staunchest supporters will question the sense of taking on Sterling. If Sterling has any sense he should nip into Foyles, buy a copy of the Quran and take the next flight to Riyadh.
Norg
I have a horrible feeling that Sterling’s going to be another William / Auba type signing.
Put on huge wages, then issues, then paid off to leave. We should not be positioning ourselves as a highly paid retirement home for ex Chelsea and City players.
Marc
Where is Almunia is no more when you need a quick sketch. You can imagine a petulant El B standing in the corner of the office stamping his feet and screaming I want, I want, I want RS.
Lookman was touted as a promising player years ago when he was at Charlton. He then joined Everton and couldn’t secure a first team place. Everton! I don’t think he’s for us. Nothing special in my view