If a friendly against Bournemouth in front of a rather modest crowd didn’t get the juices flowing, maybe Manchester United at the SoFi Stadium will do the trick tonight? There are obviously wildly different stances on pre-season — how much it matters and how much attention people give it — I just think it’s nice to see Arsenal playing football again.
Clearly it isn’t quite the same and sleep won’t be lost if we don’t win this one but I have just really missed watching Martin Odegaard and co. in action. The team against Bournemouth earlier this week was a real mix of first team and academy players but I think we’ll see the scales tip more and more towards getting the first team ready for the new season as this tour goes on. Gabriel, Gabriel Martinelli and Kai Havertz have all joined up with their team-mates now and I’m sure they’ll play some part on Saturday (or Sunday, depending on where you are) after training on Friday.
I’m interested to see what this season holds for all three players. Gabriel could see his playing time reduced with the return of Jurrien Timber and the possible signing of an Italian defender. Havertz seemed to have the number nine role nailed towards the end of last season but a return to form for a fit-again Gabriel Jesus (or some fresh competition) and things could change quickly. And Gabriel Martinelli had a slightly disappointing season and seemed to lose his place to Leandro Trossard by the end of it. If we’re going to succeed this season, you’d imagine we’ll need all three of the returnees for tonight to have good campaigns.
Of course, transfer talk continues to teeter on in the background. Mikel Arteta doesn’t tend to give much away but there was a little smirk from him, and another from Odegaard, when Kaya Kaynak asked about the Riccardo Calafiori deal in the pre-match press conference.
The club will stay quiet until the ink is dry but it would be nice if we could get this one done and over the line in time for him to join up with the team and play some sort of part against Liverpool on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. We’ll see about that. Links with Mikel Merino are getting ever so slightly louder too but he will still be on holiday right now having gone all the way in the Euros with Spain.
It’s clear Arsenal’s business won’t be done there in an ideal world, but it feels like the market is still very slowly getting moving after the Euros and Copa America. It was great that we got our business done so early in previous summers but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some very late ins and outs this time around as things shift, with Arteta nodding to the fact these things aren’t entirely in our hands.
We know that we have certain parts in the squad that we would like to improve, but that is dictated by the market.
Also at the press conference, Arteta talked about targeting 115 114 points to beat Manchester City to the title (obviously we’d technically only need 112, if we beat them once, but that’s nitpicking!) and the challenge of making improvements when we’ve already been so close and so good over the past two seasons.
It’s realising the things that we need to do better, and improve.
We know the margins we need to do that because at the level we are at the moment, there is a very tiny margin to improve and we are trying to have clarity on which margins those are and how we’re going to improve them.
The margins really are fine. We had the best defensive record in the league last season and only City scored more than our 91 goals, the most we’ve scored in a league season since 1953. I wouldn’t say no to a few more but it’s not so easy figuring out where to find them, and then actually doing it.
A few against United tonight would be a nice start. But remember, we lost to them 2-0 this time last year and the two sides were worlds apart when it really mattered. Still, another one over them and another round of Erik ten Hag’s excuse bingo would go down well midway through the weekend.
As for the rest of the weekend, it’s Pride in Berlin today so I’m planning to take the streets for that. Other than that, the Olympics will be dominating my television for the next couple of weeks. Whatever you’re up to, have a great one! I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about whatever happens in tonight’s game.