Why not both? | Arseblog … an Arsenal blog

Morning all, and happy Friday to you.

It’s a quiet one, with preparations building for Sunday’s big game against Man City. We had a tough run out on Tuesday, but have a couple of extra days to recover. I was hoping they’d have a very difficult game against Napoli but an early red card made it more of a stroll than I would have liked. Ah well. At least we have a nice friendly bunch of officials for Sunday … oh.

Here’s something we touched on in the Arsecast yesterday, and I realise it’s a small thing, but it does make me laugh/despair in something close to equal measure. Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve been really impressed with Cristhian Mosquera over the last couple of weeks. His performances have been so assured and so promising. He looks like the real deal, and he’s a player who has a very bright future ahead of him.

But, it’s been three games. A very small sample size. For me, and I know this might sound crazy, but that’s not enough for me to – again this might sound like I’m a lunatic who has lost his tiny little mind – consider selling William Saliba to Real Madrid. It’s absolutely brilliant that the absence of the French international hasn’t felt as damaging as it has in the past, but I find it mad/amusing that I see people online talk about that scenario in a matter of fact way.

Let’s be as straightforward as we can here: Mosquera is an amazing prospect, I’m delighted we signed him at a bargain price, and I’m looking forward to watching him develop and get even better at Arsenal. But Saliba is one of the best central defenders in the world, his partnership with Gabriel is as good as it gets, and the prospect of losing him to Real Madrid, or anywhere else, is not something I really want to consider as we continue our struggle to turn our overall quality into tangible success.

I get it, people are worried about the contract situation, and see Mosquera as a kind of safety-net/comfort-blanket, but my ridiculous idea – if you’ll indulge me once more – is to keep them both. I’m am imbecile, I know! Take it to its illogical conclusion. You suffer more than once because an injury to Saliba is destabilising to your team, so you bring in a player who prevents that but then you sell Saliba: then what happens when Mosquera is absent? Please people, apply the Rob Holding Protocol to this.

I’ve seen similar observations regarding Noni Madueke and Bukayo Saka. I mean, come on. I’ve been encouraged by the new signing, and he brings different qualities to the right hand side, but he’s had 5 appearances without a goal or an assist. Which isn’t to say a player can only be judged on those metrics, but even last season when he was impacted so heavily by injury, there was no period when Saka went more than 5 games without scoring or making an assist. The same was true of the season before that, and the last time it happened was a run of games between April 26th and May 20th 2023.

So, enjoy the fact we have Madueke who is doing well, and will hopefully add that end product to his game, but don’t let football-goldfish-memory make you forget that Saka is a top level player who scores and assists with a regularity that few others do. Again, I know it’s a small thing, but don’t overlook what we already have because some new players have done all right in the opening weeks of the season.

Finally for today, I saw the Arsenal team photo the other day and as Andrew Allen pointed out on the Arsecast a couple of weeks ago, we are Goatee FC. So much chin fluff. I did wonder what it might be like if our players had proper beards, like Captain Haddock. So I made our captain a beard out of the hair of our manager. I think it works really well, and would almost certainly return Martin Odegaard to his most scintillating form. Surely the addition of an in-house barber/grooming facility in the next thing to give us that tiny percentage of marginal gain.

Right, I’ll leave it there for now. We’ll have updates from Mikel Arteta’s press conference a bit later on over on Arseblog News, and the Arsecast discussing the 2-0 win over Athletic Club is below.