Meanwhile, over in Blighty…even Mother Nature is sad at the fact it’s an international break. She’s been up since about 5am crying and has soaked me through on my two minute walk to the tube station.

You know how sugar is really bad for you and how you shouldn’t eat anything other than natural sugars? Or too much salt is really bad for your body? Or how harmful CFC gases – or something like that – are killing the ozone layer? Well all of that pales into insignificance in comparison to the international break, which is killing Mother Nature’s soul.

Well done FIFA, if summer is sh*t because of you, I’m going to write a letter of complaint and mail it straight to Geneva. You see if I don’t. I don’t even care about paying the extra cash for international postage. Just as long as I get through to Sepp that he’s ruining everything. Even the weather.

All of this hum-drum because there isn’t any Arsenal related stuff to talk about in great detail. We could try and talk about the international Arsenal players that have played, but given that it’s just Mesut Özil and (technically still an Arsenal player) Lukas Podolski, there isn’t really much to go on. Poldi came on and scored and Özil spent thirty minutes as captain, but overseas I believe the captains armband is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, the players that get it probably just see it as an annoying bit of elastic that restricts the blood flow to their arm. Who knows though, perhaps it will give him more confidence as he heads back to Arsenal after the weekend?

Kieren Gibbs has given a somewhat interesting interview to the official site, in which he talks about the ‘hidden battles’ that the players have in training, when they do matches against each other. I found it interesting because I actually only found the time to sit down and watch the Invincible’s programme a couple of days ago (the scheduling of the original showing didn’t work out as well as Sky had hoped – after the Monaco game, so I thought I’d just Sky+ it so I could watch without exploding into a ball of anger, despair and sadness meshed together), and I think it was Ray Parlour who said something similar about that group of players.

Parlour said that everybody (except Vieira) worked exceptionally hard in training and although they all got on, you could tell that there was the drive to win, even when it was just versus matches in training. Now we have a similar scenario on the training ground with so many players coming back to full fitness. Players are coming up against those who would take their own place in the Matchday XI, so they are fighting that little harder to impress the manager. This, in turn, creates more desire, more hunger and psychologically more will to be better in every match. It’s what we as fans have longed for. It’s all dry well having a squad, but unless the manager gives the players – all of them – belief that they will play and can win their place back, they will try their darnest to do so. 

Rotation, rotation, rotation people. It’s what is a necessity in the modern game. I just hope that when Arsène has a full compliment to choose from next season, he rotates right from the start, to keep people happy, fresh and competing hard to retain or win back a place in the starting XI on matchdays.

Anyway, not really a lot more to talk about, so let us depart for the day, reconvening tomorrow for Le Boss’ press conf….err…..more silence with which to miss Arsenal all the more for.

Cheerie-bye!