Sunday round-up: Smith, Rice, Saliba

Morning.

A quick Sunday blog for you, starting with Arsenal Women who kicked off the new WSL season with a 4-1 win over London City Lionesses. The opening Arsenal goal, from £1m summer signing Olivia Smith, was really quite something – hopefully a marker for the kind of quality the team can produce over the course of the season.

As ever Tim and Co have you covered over on Arseblog News, including a Match Day Vlog. Check it all out here.

Back to Interlull stuff, and Declan Rice was on the scoresheet for England in a 2-0 win over Andorra. He produced a decent back-post header, but that’s as much as I’ve seen. England’s other goal was apparently an OG, and I’m guessing that a 2-0 win over Andorra was about as exciting as it sounds. Rice was joined by Arsenal teammates Myles Lewis-Skelly, Eberechi Eze and Noni Madueke in the starting line-up.

I think that’s as much Arsenal action as we got last night, but the Spanish lads are in action later when they take on Turkey, while Leandro Trossard could feature for Belgium against Kazakhstan. They might be useful minutes for a player who has been out with a niggling injury this season. The Netherlands are in Lithuania too, so Jurrien Timber might play after no minutes in their previous game.

Meanwhile, via r/gunners I see L’Equipe are reporting that William Saliba’s ankle injury could keep him out for 3-4 weeks, and that he’ll probably miss the next batch of international games in October. We know Arsenal are unlikely to confirm or deny that in any way, but if his return takes that long, he’ll miss the league games against Nottingham Forest, Man City, Newcastle, and West Ham, as well as the Champions League fixtures against Athletic Club and Olympiacos – as well as the EFL Cup tie with Port Vale.

It means playing time for Cristhian Mosquera, which is an opportunity for him, but I don’t know if we can play him for 90 minutes in all of those games. A return for Ben White after this Interlull would be very useful to help share some of that burden. Both he and Timber can play at centre-half, and I suspect we’ll see one, or both, of them slot in there at some point during this run. It feels a bit mad how one injury can make it feel like you’re short on numbers, especially with the deep squad we’ve assembled, but it speaks to the importance and presence of Saliba. And maybe we’ll get some good news on him in the meantime.

Right, there’s nothing else going on this Sunday, so I’ll leave it there for now. Have a good one, back tomorrow with more nothing and an afternoon Arsecast Extra.

Until then.