It’s Friday, it’s approaching the weekend, and it’s awfully quiet out there in Arsenal land. 

Too quiet.

The kind of quiet that starts it all off. The worry. The fear. “What happens if we go the whole summer having only picked up a left back on a free transfer?” Kind of quiet. True, it’s still only mid June, there’s still weeks and weeks for Arsenal to do what is needed both on transfers and contract negotiations, so in reality there should be no need to panic, but we’ve seen all this before and we have dealt with summers where Arsenal sit idly by and watch the rest of the world strengthen, as Arsène tells us there’s no value or availability in the market. 

I think it’s that recent history that we have that has damaged some of us when it comes to transfer windows. Because we’ve been knocked back before. Even signings like yesterday with Everton, dropping nigh-on £50million on two players we don’t really want or need, cause a ripple of fear in my mind that we’ll be doing the last minute trolley dash at the end of August.

What we need is a little bit of hope injected in to our weekend. It doesn’t even have to be a full on announcement, but simply a snapshot of Arsène looking serious and on his way to some kind of meeting might be enough to put my mind at ease, that he’s actually on the verge of doing something with Ivan. That pic a couple of weeks back or him arriving in Nice was just the tonic. It gave us hope that there were a number of irons in the fire and discussions were taking place about something big about to go down. Yeah, that’s the sort of shizzle we need to see permeating through the Twittersphere on a quiet Friday such as this. We’ve had the fixture lists come out, the FA Cup is starting to feel like a long time ago, so now we need something big to get us all excited again.

What need need is to actually see some kind of, I don’t know, catalyst for change or something.

Any time now Arsenal…any time…just say the words…any time…

I saw some rumours yesterday about Olivier Giroud and how he’d be used as a makeweight for Mbappe and Lacazette, but I don’t really believe that if I’m honest, because I don’t think it’s the best move for Arsenal and I can’t see why we’d want to him off a guy who has established himself as a goal scorer at Arsenal for two -admittedly exciting, but ultimately – players who haven’t done it in the Premier League yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’d definitely prefer one of them, but personally I think it’s putting a bit of a gamble in two players of similar styles. Think about how Giroud has managed to be an impact player when we’ve needed to change our style. Why would we want to ditch that for two rapid players? To me it just doesn’t really seem to make sense. Signing one certainly does. Or if we were offloading Perez and Walcott – both quick players who are not aerial target men – then I’d understand it. But if Arsenal are actually going to both competing next season, they need to have proper plan B players available, and that’s what Giroud needs to be.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t come off.

There’s also the odd rumbling of Lemar from Monaco and I wonder if his potential transfer is linked to Alexis. Lemar can operate behind the front man as part of a two or a three and if Alexis is offski, perhaps he would be a replacement. I put it out there on Twitter yesterday, because I don’t really know that much about him, and got a mixture of joy and disappointment if it were the case that he’d be an Alexis replacement. 

But I just have a feeling, you know? You know how like when we signed Poldi, Santi and Giroud, nice and early, then thought it was to potentially complement the Dutchman? And it turned out that they were his replacement. I wonder if Alexis’ replacement is a good player like Lemar, another big name striker, so that Alexis’ impact, goals and assists can be spread across the team again like Poldi and Giroud did the season after that Dutch prick left us. 

Just a musing. I have no intel whatsoever. But I guess we just have to watch and wait…and wait…and wait…and…well…you get the picture. 

Catch you all in the morrow.