It’s difficult to start with football this morning, given that more people have now lost their lives in a supposed religious related attack that quite frankly, should have no place in modern society. I don’t think anybodies god will welcome them with open arms after they have murdered innocents.

It seems a little callous to then move so swiftly on to football, but victory is through harmony and the coming together as one, moving on with life to show these idiots that they achieve nothing but their own reservation in hell, if such a place exists. So we move on to football and Gabriel was arriving in Spain yesterday to finalise his move to Valencia. That’ll go through today and I kind of dealt with my thoughts on what it means in my blog yesterday, so I’ll leave any further pondering for now and simply wish the Brazilian every success in Valencia. He’s spent two years in England and won more than the Tiny Totts. 

There’s not much else going on ahead of tomorrow’s game at Stoke. Given that Arsène had his press conference on Wednesday it means that we’ve kind of seen all of the outrage and counter-outrage at whatever he said, so the dust has settled a bit and on my social media timelines it just feels like everyone is waiting in anticipation for the trip to Mordor. It’s a weird one because I’m not sure which sort of Stoke side we’ll face tomorrow. They’ve always been up for games against us and we’ve tended to – last season aside – always come-a-cropper, but supposedly Stoke never start the season well and from what pundits are saying they could struggle this season. If that’s the case it might be a good time to play them before the season really gets started and they realise that beating Arsenal has kind of been their ‘thing’ since they got in to the Premier League. More thoughts on the game tomorrow.

For now though, the other name on everyone’s lips is Julian Draxler, who is apparently already not not in favour at PSG any more having only just signed for them in January. As we all know he’s been the modern day Sebastian Frey, or the German Karim Benzema, so one matchday out of the squad and already people are speculating an exit. Which inevitably means…

…A TENUOUS ARSENAL LINK! 

Yay.

Where would a summer be without an interest in The Drax, eh? I suspect the reality is that he’ll feature for PSG this season, but given that they have a new toy in the shape of Neymar to focus on, he won’t be one of the stars by any stretch of the imagination. But I’d be surprised to see him go this summer. If he fails to establish himself in the team come next summer I’d imagine he’d be on his way, but I don’t see anything happening now. Besides, next summer we’ll have half the team out of contract, so we’ll be in the market for practically every position anyway it seems!

I hope William Carvalho, Yann M’Villa and Karin Benzema are all keeping their transfer powders dry this summer, because 2018 could be a big one!!

Lucas Perez is still here. But not for long, it seems. It’ll be a sad tale to see a talented footballer who performed well at the club leave, but there really is nothing for him at Arsenal any more so hopefully he gets the move back to his home club that he dreams of. I just hope it isn’t true that Arsenal are asking too much. If Depor come back with something closer to the £17millipn we paid though, it will be best for everyone, and we can carry on trimming a bit more of the fat from the squad.

Catch you tomorrow with a match preview. Laters peeps.