Friday bits and pieces | Arseblog … an Arsenal blog

Good morning, and happy Friday to you all. It’s a quiet morning, so this will be a short blog.

Mikel Arteta will meet the press a bit later on ahead of our game against Southampton tomorrow. There might be one or two injury issues we have to think about but he will say ‘We will see in the next 24 hours’ about whoever is in doubt, and then we’ll wait until Saturday to find out the truth. Unlike Tom Cruise, I can handle the truth.

One thing is for sure, there won’t be a surprise return for Martin Odegaard who is not in Norway’s squad for the upcoming internationals. Some comments from their manager have sparked a bit of concern that the skipper might be sidelined for quite a while yet, but I don’t think there’s anything that surprising in what he said. Or anything which suggests it’s worse than we already thought. It was always understood he’d be out of action until after this Interlull at the very earliest, so I don’t think anything has changed.

Elsewhere, Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka are named in the England squad, for games against Greece and Finland, while Gabriel and Gabriel Martinelli will be away with Brazil. I don’t have the full list of Interlull absentees to hand, but we’ll sort that out in a post over on Arseblog News in the next little while.

In a Champions League week, I can say I enjoy some of the clips from the CBS Golazo show in which Thierry Henry sits alongside Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards, brilliantly anchored by Kate Scott (formerly Abdo). But I also thoroughly enjoyed David Squires take on the whole thing in the Guardian.

With the return of Aaron Ramsdale when Southampton visit tomorrow, this Reddit post made me laugh.

Meanwhile, long-awaited – and I do realise they are long-awaited – updates to the Arseblog apps for iOS and Android are nearing completion. This is particularly good news because Google made some arbitrary changes during the week which means the old version of the app isn’t on the Play Store anymore. Apologies to anyone who has changed phone recently, and is looking to download it, it’s not there.

However, new versions will be going out to beta-testers imminently, and will hopefully be on general release in the next week or so. In the meantime, if you’re missing your Arseblog fix on mobile, just visit the site in Safari or Chrome, and make a little desktop shortcut. The sites are fully optimised for mobile, and you can get at them with just a click, or a push or a poke or a finger or however you call what we do with phones. It’s not a click because you don’t click anything, unless you’re some kind of jazz guy clicking your fingers and hitting the screen at the same time. If that’s you, you’re probably all hopped up on goofballs anyway, so you wouldn’t be able to get the home screen widgets sorted in the first place.

Anyway, they’re coming soon, I promise! And when that happens, that will mean the very last bit of advertising on Arseblog and Arseblog News will be gone … forever. There are some legacy ad placements in the old apps, but they’ll be gone in the new ones. It means that your reading experience will be completely clean, and if that’s something you appreciate maybe check us out Patreon.

As well as supporting everything we do on Arseblog, including our continually expanding coverage of Arsenal Women, you get all kinds of extra stuff for just $6 a month. And in a world where prices are rising for everything all the time, ours hasn’t gone up since we launched in 2018. If you’d like to know a bit more about our Patreon, what we do, and what you get – read here.

If you’d like to sign up, it’s patreon.com/arseblog – where you’ll get yourselves a Southampton preview podcast a bit later on this afternoon.

For now, have a great day.