Morning Gooners, how we all doing? Excited for pre season to get underway and see those Arsenal players come out in the new…erm…away….erm…kit?

Yes it is a monstrosity, no I won’t be buying it, but what is done is done and I’m sure I’ll just get used to it. Heck, if we win the league or one of the ‘big’ trophies this season then it’ll matter not what the players have across their torso’s. They’re now rocking it, it was on display yesterday at the ‘all star challenge’ and it feels like the countdown to the season is now well and truly on. We’ll see ourselves play the MLS All Stars at 1.30am UK time, which means I won’t be able to catch the game, but I’ll be interested tomorrow morning to wake up and see just who played, how many minutes some of those players played, as well as how we were looking as a collective. I’d be surprised if Arteta gives too many minutes to some of our bigger players, because this game is one in which Arsenal players are up against MLS players who are halfway through their season, so from a fitness point of view they will be a little more ready than our players (the MLS season starts in February and ends in October) and I think Arteta will be mindful of that when he makes his selection. I suspect it will be a smattering of first teamers to start, with the other half of the team made up of squad players, then a changeover around halftime. That feels like the most sensible option to me.

Will we get to see Rice and Timber though? Not sure. Arteta was non-committal on that one so I suspect he’s still weighing up what to do.

What he will have to be doing in these coming weeks is talking to his team about what they can expect when they come back from the US in terms of expectations. For us as Arsenal fans I think the majority of us are realistic; City are a behemoth who have won the league three times in a row and four times in the last six. They will be just as strong next year and so for us we’ll need to have just as good a season as last season and then some more. So this won’t be easy. Of course as it stands we are stronger; you don’t spend £200million and get to tell anyone otherwise, so there will be an element of expectation that the players will now have to deal with. No longer are we the ‘yeah but’ team; last season nobody expected us to do anything and as a result we flew under the radar for what felt like two-thirds of the season, but this season the pundits will take note of us and they will be talking up that we should be competing given what happened last season and the money we have spent.

Personally, I’d love it if all the pundits wrote us off again and we could be the ‘surprise package’, but you read articles like this and you realise that it just ain’t happening, so we’re going to have to get used to journalists taking aim and poking at Arsenal any time we slip up. They were doing it last season and we’ll get even more now that we’ve made big strides forward. So we need to be ready for it. If we’re lucky then there will be a whole host of them saying it’ll be Liverpool and Man City duking it out for the title again, but I don’t think we’re going to slip past the Scousers so easy next season.

If we’re looking for an upside though, it feels – and sounds – like we have a group of players who are ready for those enhanced expectations and personally I take comfort when I hear things like this from Martin Odegaard. He’s the captain, one of the leaders in the team, a guy who seems very relaxed and ready to drive forward Arsenal this season as well. He did allude to that excellent pre season last summer and how it provided a springboard for the season ahead, so you have to think that the players are all looking at the next three games as a big opportunity to show that this young Arsenal team can handle the extra pressure. It’ll be tough games this summer though; we have Man United, Barcelona and then Man City before the big kick off. There are two ways to look at this – either that this opposition is good because it should get our team attuned to good opponents straight away, or that perhaps it could have an impact if we don’t play as well and aren’t able to get the same rhythm as we had last summer. We tonked Nurnberg 5-3, had a nice easy run beating Everton 2-0, Orlando City were a weaker opponent that we found comfortable and unbeknownst to us at the time played a Chelsea team that were all over the place. This time around we have MLS All Stars, Man United on Saturday, Barca on Thursday, before high-tailing it back to the UK for the Emirates Cup on Wednesday evening before we play Man City on Sunday 6th August. That’s a pretty busy schedule and all very good opponents, so the opportunity for confidence-boosting shellacking’s is probably quite significantly less. But the results are irrelevant; if we absolute batter United but then they end up winning with a last minute goal, I’d rather have that than the other way around. What we need to see is a ball-dominant Arsenal who give us an indication of just how we’re going to set up this season. Are we going to play different tactical approaches per game? Are we going to use more rotation? Who will be preferred in that stocked defence we now have? There are loads of questions we are all asking before Forest at home on 12th August. Let’s just see what happens though.

That’s it from me today. Back tomorrow first thing having not watched anything of the MLS All Star game, yet fully prepared to make comments on the little I do know! Tonight I’ve got Dave Seager and Charles Watts on the Same Old Arsenal pod for the penultimate of our ‘One in, one out, one bangs’ series, which you can check out here.

Catch you all tomorrow!