The squad and other stuff

Morning.

A quick Wednesday blog for you. I see the Howard Webb TV show was on. The one where they justify all the mistakes referees make. The one that is basically PGMOL propaganda dressed up as transparency. The one where the lad from ESPN invites all his no friends around to watch together.

They released the audio of the Declan Rice second yellow from the Brighton game. I had a quick look. I closed my eyes and, just for a second, became this emoji:

Then I realised I didn’t need to inflict this whole thing on myself again. It was talked about, it was complained about, and then we went and won the North London derby in spite of it. So I don’t need to re-open that can of worms. Well, not until the next time there is an absurd, contentious decision that you only ever see given to Arsenal, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Elsewhere, the club have released the official first team squad photo for the new season:

The Arsenal.

Our 2024/25 squad. pic.twitter.com/Npoj7ZJdVH

— Arsenal (@Arsenal) September 17, 2024

It’s interesting to note that Ethan Nwaneri, Myles Lewis-Skelly, Ayden Heaven and Tommy Setford are all included. They might be considered peripheral when everyone is fit, but let’s not pretend that everyone being fit is a thing that happens regularly. As it is, Nwaneri has made the match-day squad for every game so far this season, and after some minutes in the derby he’ll fancy his chances of some game-time this week when we travel to Italy in the Champions League.

Let’s hope he gets that opportunity because we’re in a great position and can afford to do it, but who knows? He might be required if we need to change something in midfield, so let’s see what the week brings. I’ve also seen some people chat about the position of the ball in front of Martin Odegaard’s foot. Is it there to hide the true extent of his injury? Technology being what it is these days, I used AI to remove the ball, and fed all the information about the ankle sprain into another AI, then asked it to generate a true image of his foot based on all that data.

It produced a video of a mutant Will Smith trying to eat spaghetti, while using enough energy from the power grid to light up a small town for a thousand years. Gotta love that AI.

Anyway, the team will be travelling today for the game against Atlanta tomorrow. Mikel Arteta will meet the press later on this evening, and we’ll have a bit of a preview podcast for you over on Patreon at some point this afternoon. I don’t expect there’ll be much difference to the squad, perhaps a couple more youngsters will be included to round-up the numbers as we’re still likely to be without Oleksandr Zinchenko, Riccardo Calafiori, Takehiro Tomiyasu, Mikel Merino, and Martin Odegaard. I think there are some decisions for the manager to make with his team, because the game on Sunday against Man City is a difficult one and will probably play some part in his thinking, but we can discuss that in more depth tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Arsenal Women are in action this evening as they take on Hacken in the first leg of their final Champions League qualifier. Let’s hope it’s a good night for Arsenal, and don’t forget you’ll find all the coverage you need over on Arseblog News.

I’ll leave it there for today. Have a good one.