Morning.
There’s Arsenal action this evening as we take on Villarreal at the Emirates. After the testing conditions in Singapore and Hong Kong, the forecast for London is a lot more conducive to some higher energy football. It’s gonna be a very pleasant 22C at 6pm when the game kicks off, humidity a mere 35% (described as ‘ideal’ by my weather app when I just looked), so hopefully we see the benefits of all that training, and that it’s also reflected in the performance.
It will be a first look for home fans for a couple of our new summer signings. Viktor Gyokeres is the most obvious one to mention this morning. Surely he’s going to start one of the games this week, whether it’s tonight or on Saturday against Athletic Bilbao, and we’ve heard about how Arsenal understand they need to adapt their style to the Swedish international. So, it will be interesting to see how that manifests itself in terms of how we set up and what we do.
There are only two games before our first Premier League fixture. Not a lot of practice time to implement something new, and it seems clear that some of this adaptation is going to have to take place ‘on the job’, so to speak. They can work on things on the training ground of course, but you can’t really replicate the in-game experience, and the randomness of the opposition and their approach. If Mikel Arteta is keen to experiment, as it were, I wonder too if there’s a point in these two fixtures when we see both Gyokeres and Kai Havertz on the pitch together. It may not necessarily be in tandem with the two of them up front, but if we want more variation and unpredictability in our play for the new season, that’s certainly something we could try.
Meanwhile, we should see Noni Madueke for the first time too. With a lot of chat about whether or not he could provide a different option from the left-hand side, perhaps it was telling that in the training video Arsenal posted yesterday, he was very much coming in from the right and finishing with his left foot. I know you can’t read much into what the club make publicly available on YouTube, so let’s see where he plays later on.
There’s a question about Leandro Trossard after he came off injured in Hong Kong. If he’s not fit, perhaps Madueke time-sharing with Gabriel Martinelli on the left might be the way to go, which would allow the manager to give some more playing time to Max Dowman on the right. He’s impressed so much in pre-season so far, it’d be almost unfair not to give him minutes this week.
As an aside to that, it’s interesting that Jack Wilshere has been mooted as the new coach for Arsenal U21s, filling the gap after Mehmet Ali joined Brentford earlier this summer. As much as Dowman has been eye-catching in pre-season, we have to recognise his age, and that he’s likely to play quite a bit for the U21s this season as he continues to mature and develop. When Jack left to take up the coaching role at Norwich, there was some reporting that the Dowman camp were unhappy at that departure. Your mileage may vary as to whether that should have been newsworthy, but is it coincidence that Wilshere – with whom Dowman has a connection – is coming back as we look to manage the pathway from youth to senior football of one of the most talented players the Academy has produced in years?
His age is an issue when it comes to securing his future. When he turns 16 he can sign a scholarship deal, much like Ethan Nwaneri did when he was at the same age, which generally has a commitment to first professional terms at 17. After which, in the same way we did with Ethan and Myles Lewis-Skelly, improved terms are agreed pretty quickly once they made their first team breakthrough. In the meantime though, other clubs – like sharks with 115 teeth and so on – are circling, so if Arsenal are using this pre-season, and even an appointment like Jack Wilshere to demonstrate their commitment to Dowman, that’s just the reality of what you have to do when there’s so much money in the game these days.
Back to tonight, and we saw Gabriel in full training yesterday. He didn’t play at all during the tour, so it’d be useful for him to have some involvement this week with the new season so close. There was no Riccardo Calafiori in the pictures at least, so ongoing chatter about Jakub Kiwior and his future may well depend pretty heavily on how long the Italian international might be out. No doubt Arteta will be asked about him in his post-game press conference later on. Hopefully it’s not serious, but it looked as if the pre-season plan was to get him up to speed in the centre-half position as Gabriel continued his recovery from surgery, and if he is absent, Kiwior is the obvious replacement.
So, let’s see what the action is like later. We’ll bring you a report and post-game stuff on Arseblog News, and I’ll have more here for you tomorrow, including an Arsecast. Until then, have a great Wednesday.
