Morning folks, happy Friday and all that jazz. How are we all doing?

I know this isn’t a Liverpool blog, but I’m going to start off with the Caicedo news that  Ornstein dropped in the early hours of this morning. I mean, honestly, doesn’t that guy sleep? What does he do, spend a few hours in cryogenic freezing to recharge his cells before going again? The man is relentless.

And it seems so are the Scousers, because dropping £110million on Caicedo is a big ol’ chunk of change, which also brings their spending to £207million when that goes through. That is, of course, if we’re going via what TransferMarkt say they have spent so far. They also say that we’ve spent (when you do the conversion from Euro’s to pounds) £199.8million and even if you add the Raya deal for £3million loan fee, we’ve still spent less than them so far this summer.

So, with that in mind, do you think they’ll get the same level of scrutiny that we have had this summer? Will we see the pundits come out and say that anything other than the title will be a failure for Liverpool?

I doubt it.

I also wonder if every time the media mention Caicedo they will prefix it with “£110million man, Moises Caicedo”, like they have done with Rice?

But we need to focus on ourselves because it is how we get on from tomorrow that we should all focus on, rather than the others, so I am hoping that we can kick off tomorrow with a resounding win.

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We’ll get some team updates from Mikel at some stage this season and that will inform what he is thinking tomorrow, but in the meantime I’ve been consuming all the content on the official site, including the stats on our opening game of the season. I’m not sure how much you can read in to the fact that we’ve never won the title when we’ve lost our opening game, given that there is 119 times we’ve played and we’ve won 13 titles in that time. But I guess there are some of us superstitious fans that are looking for good or bad omens and if you’re that way inclined, a stat like that can be used to give you even more worry ahead of tomorrow, or potential confidence given the opposition and the expectation that we should win that game.

Should being the operative word though. I remember the season we signed Dennis Bergkamp and we played Middlesbrough at home, who had just been promoted. I was in Cambridge with my parents visiting one of their friends, so I listened to it on the radio and I recall as the game kicked off thinking “Dennis Bergkamp is going to have a field day”. It never happened like that and we drew 1-1 and that day taught me a valuable lesson: things don’t always work out how you are expecting in football.

And I suspect that will be Arteta’s mantra today and then pre match with the team too. He’ll want his players to have laser focused because if we really do want to compete again for the title this season, it is games like tomorrow that we are going to need to make sure we deliver three points with little worry. This is Arsenal though, we rarely do things with ‘little worry’.

If you want a nice stat to make you feel better though, I like the one on that page I listed above which says that we’ve won the seven home games in a row when it has been the first of the season. That can hopefully be eight come tomorrow late afternoon.

And if you REALLY want to over analyse everything ahead of the new season, there’s nothing like watching the players knock the ball around in training,  doing slow more drills and piggy in the middle. I was listening to a podcast on my run this morning and they talked about Zinchenko being a player who it wouldn’t surprise them if he started tomorrow. Well, with that in mind, perhaps it is not as unheard of as you might have thought. With most players you would think that they need a few weeks of training and game time before they are ready, but I seem to recall a couple of times last season (like Man United away, for example) in which Arteta has no intention of bedding Zinchenko in; he just chucks him in and you tend to get the level of output straight away from the first minute.

It might be one to ask the manager about today and hopefully somebody does, because I think Timber’s pre season performances have 100% left the door ajar for him to start at left back. Zinchenko has even said that Timber could be the guy to take his place this season. High praise indeed. I still think the Ukrainian has more than enough credit in the bank though and I suspect that we’ll see him take the starting position for most of the season regardless of how good Timber has been. For as long as he remains fit for, anyway.

I think that’s probably all we need to go over today. Until we hear from Arteta there’s little else to go on. I would mention that the Scum from the Lane could be losing their biggest goal threat to Bayern, but I don’t really want to focus on them. Hopefully it is impossible for them to replace and we see them struggle. That’s all I’ll say about that.

Catch you wonderful people tomorrow.