Howdy all and welcome to a mid season Saturday with absolutely no prospect of Arsenal on the horizon and actually, having said yesterday that I’m kind of ok with it given we’re going to Wembley, I’d still rather it was us away to Hull and not Forest. That kind of sucks.

But what’s done is done and I’ll be filling my weekend with things outside of The Arsenal. The same won’t be said of the players though, as Arsene confirmed yesterday they will be training together over the weekend in his pre Swansea match conference, which I found a little weird taking place on a Friday when the game is next Tuesday. He could have done it on Monday but I guess they’ll be travelling on Monday, or Tuesday, so perhaps this works better with his schedule. To be fair he’ll most likely be doing another press conference next Friday too pre-Everton, so I guess two in a week is more than he can stomach.

What will be beneficial is the integration of Mkhitaryan and Arsene mentioned that yesterday. He talked about him as a wide player, as a number ten and also, oddly I thought, as a box-to-box midfielder. I understand that a player like that is very versatile and can play a number of positions but it’s not as if we don’t have any box-to-box midfielders or deeper-lying playmakers in the team already. Perhaps it was just a throw away statement towards the end of the press conference and perhaps it was designed more to show that we’ve got a player who can be shuffled around if needs be.

One person who be shuffled around is Olivier Giroud – well, not unless we sign somebody first, says Arsene – and i’ll be honest that his comments and the way he said it worries me. As I said yesterday I don’t want to lose Ollie G because he offers something nobody else in the team does. He is a fine footballer and a great ‘Plan B’ but if we lose him we just have variations of ‘Plan A’. That can’t be right and I just hope the arrival of Auba (assuming Ivan doesn’t completely bugger this up, Dick Law style) means that Arsene ships him out almost immediately after signing him or anyone else.

Arsene was also asked about fitness of players before Swansea and he confirmed Olivier Giroud will be available for Swansea. So with him back in the team that should mean we’re almost back to full fitness as a squad but also, given that Swansea managed to shut out Liverpool last weekend, having that other option if Lacazette endures another tough afternoon, may just be vital for us.

By then though we’ll have an Armenian who has had a full week of training with his new team mates and I’m quite excited to see if he sees this move as his opportunity to get back to his Dortmund ways. United have ruined a Dortmund player before in Kagawa and he went straight back to Germany and picked up where he left off before he was at United so that has to be our hope. The man himself will be relishing the prospect of linking up with Ozil but I think the player who might be the most excited will be Lacazette. I get the feeling that Ozil and Mkhitaryan are exactly the types of players that he will relish being in front of and I just hope that a partnership can blossom and soon. Lacazette is a decent passer of the ball, Mkhitaryan is one that can keep the ball in confined spaces, find balls in behind, but also link play well. I think the movement of him, Ozil and Lacazette could be a real benefit to the Frenchman. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself before we’ve seen him play but it feels like Mkhitaryan could bring more balance to the team overall, rather than the individualism of a certain other individual.

The pressure is on our diminutive forward with all of the Aubameyang talk so I just hope he takes his good performance against palace and then second half against Chelski in midweek and gives us another decent showing next Tuesday.

That’s it from me. Bit off a shorter one this Saturday because quite frankly there is little else going on – i have no interest in talking about Alexis Sanchez and his missed drugs test – he is of little interest to me any more.

So you have a good one, yeh hear?