It’s Saturday morning, about thirty minutes before kick off in Australia for the second pre season game of the season, and I’m blogging. Have you ever done something that you know will be redundant the second you’ve finished it? That’s me right about now. It’s like vacuuming your house and steaming the wooden floors before you’re about to have the whole family over. Kinda pointless.

Nevertheless, it’s what I enjoy doing and to be frank I can’t really be arsed to wait until the game has finished and do an analysis, because what on earth would I talk about tomorrow???

That’s the problem with these time zone tours, you see. The club are just so selfish that they take Arsenal away from me in London, so that I don’t get more football in the off season, and give it to those people who hardly ever get a proper time zone game that works for them!!

Please note: for those who have had a sarcasm enema, that was laced with it, before I get abused for being a selfish English fan. Believe me, it happens, folks.

So as I type the teams are out and bizarrely it’s Mohammed Elneny playing at centre half. An odd choice of course, but pre season is for exploration and that’s what Arsene is doing, by giving the Egyptian a chance to see how he performs as a defender. Let’s face it, Arsenal do love an injury crisis, so why not have every member of the squad about to play about four positions each, eh?

Old Lacazette is also shuffled away from the top of the formation, with Giroud playing as the central striker and his French compatriot playing just behind him. It’s a position Lacazette has played in before and again, it’s about experimenting to see his effectiveness, rather than a future role for him, I suspect. If he excels then great but I’d be surprised to see him become a regular feature behind the main striker. You don’t spend north of £45million on a player to play him out of position for his whole career. well, except for Wiltord, of course.

It might also give Ollie G some hope that he has more chance of playing, because maybe he’ll feel like Lacazette is a striker who he could play with, not ‘instead of’. Of course if the recent ‘positive text messages’ story about Alexis turns out to be true then it looks like the Chilean will be back playing for The Arsenal come the end of July, so that would also probably rule out a Lacazette shuffle back in to the position that Alexis currently operates in. I know there was a bit of excitement that the manager has talked positively about Alexis, but if you read all of the exact words he said very carefully, it doesn’t really sound like Alexis is actually signing a new deal to me. Instead it just feels like an accord has been reached to potentially keep him this season. I suspect that is because his suitors across Europe have slowly been whittled away to just Man City and there’s no way Arsenal will want to strengthen them for this upcoming season. Of course I feel like it will almost certainly mean he’s offer next summer to a City or Chelski, so whilst we won’t feel the pain this summer, it’ll be doubly annoying next summer that’s for sure. Imagine the annoyance you felt about Flamini leaving on a free the first time, then multiple it by about 25, which is probably what we’ll have to experience next summer.

But that’s a year away and a lot can happen in that time. Let’s just focus on seeing who performs well today and how much chosen this collective of Arsenal players seem to have. My hope is that it’s a lot. We could really do with it.

There’s probably not a lot more point talking in anything else, with now about 15 minutes before kick off, because all of the other stuff is like the speculative stories around Lemar, etc, etc. So I’ll take my leave and fire up Arsenal player so I can watch the game, before buggering off for a run.

Laters peeps.