Morning folks, hope you’re well, and that you’ve got a myriad of super exciting things you’re going to do with your Saturday.

I will probably make some pizza dough and go for a walk but that’s probably about it for me. I tapped into my five litre keg on Friday and by 8pm yesterday it was gone, so I should probably hold fire from any more boozing today I reckon.

I’ll probably still help myself to some rum at some stage I bet though.

On the Arsenal front we’re now rapidly approaching the start on Wednesday and as has been the case over the last few days and week or so, I’m finding myself drawn to The Arsenal website more and more each day. I even came across Gael Clichy’s article which was taken from the clubs ‘lockdown’ podcast that they’ve been running. He talks about why he left Arsenal, saying that it was because the club wanted to promote the young English lads coming through, so he didn’t feel as though the club wanted him enough.

I get that. He was an established first teamer, Kieran Gibbs was breaking through in the first team, plus City had plenty of cash so he could get himself a bit of a bumper pay deal. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

He was a funny player, was Clichy, because he wasn’t bad but wasn’t particularly amazing I seem to recall. I loved the way he would press his man and often tried to win the ball back early if he could, but he also had lapses of judgement that occasional cost us. It was he that gave away the penalty for Birmingham to equalise in the game in which Eduardo broke his leg and alright, the Birmingham player went down far too softly and you could argue it was a dive, but Clichy still stuck his leg out when he probably didn’t need to.

So him leaving for City didn’t feel like it was as much of a blow as players like Cesc or van Persie leaving. A lot of that is down to the importance those two players had on the team, whereas Clichy wasn’t as integral, but a big part of it was also that we had another player ready and waiting to step up. When you’ve got that situation the pain of losing a player is always minimised and so I remember thinking that is moving him on for £7million was a good deal for all parties.

Ahh, the good old days where we got decent money for players and didn’t run down their contracts, eh? Remember those days?

These days we’re wondering just where the heck we’re going to find the pennies to be able to offer Bukayo Saka a new deal!

There’s some transfer gossip doing the rounds but I can’t be arsed to go into detail because it’s all the same players: Justin Kluivert, Dayot Upamecano, Thomas Partey, blah blah blah. I don’t know why some people believe this nonsense because unless RB Leipzig get hot on one of our players and a swap deal can be done, for example, then we’re not going to be able to bring in the young defender. Also, we already have a billion centre halves, so I fail to believe that we’re going to bring in another one when we know there are other parts of the squad that need strengthening.

And that’s it from me today. I’m going to go and see what mess I made in the kitchen yesterday evening.

Catch you peeps tomorrow.