Sunday round-up: Saka returns from England duty

Howdy.

A very quick Sunday round-up for you. First, Bukayo Saka has returned from England duty to Arsenal after picking up that injury the other night. He’ll have a scan and be assessed by our medical team, and then we’ll wait and see what the prognosis is. Assuming we get any information about it (see yesterday’s blog!).

What we can say for certain is that it’s obviously enough to keep him out of England’s game against Finland this afternoon, but fingers crossed it is a case that common sense is being applied and no risks are being taken. We might find out a bit from Mikel Arteta when he meets the press on Friday, and it’ll be interesting to see if anything leaks during the week about the seriousness (or not) of the injury. I suspect this is one they’ll want to keep as under wraps as much as possible though.

Declan Rice will surely be in action for England, and I think that’s it in terms of Arsenal involvement for today. Yesterday, Jakub Kiwior was a half-time sub for Poland in their 3-1 defeat to Portugal, while David Raya played the full 90 minutes of Spain’s 1-0 win over Denmark. Mikel Merino got a half an hour of that game too, hopefully useful minutes for him as he makes his way back from an injury having had a disrupted pre-season too.

Meanwhile, the pressure on Jonas Eidevall intensifies after Arsenal lost 2-1 at home to Chelsea in the WSL yesterday. It’s rounds out a bad week after a draw with Everton and a hammering by Bayern Munich in the Champions League, and there are now two games before an international break which are, if they weren’t already, must win.

For more on yesterday’s action, you can see the report and reaction over on Arseblog News, and Tim’s match day vlog is below.

I’m gonna leave it there, but we will have an Arsecast Extra for you today. We’ve put out the call for questions on Threads @gunnerblog and @arseblog with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.

Pod should be out mid-morning. For now, have a good one.