Morning Gooners and welcome to Thursday, in which we now know that the Klopp and PGMOL farewell tour appears to be underway, as Paul Tierney decided to settle his differences with the German manager and basically give them immunity to dodgy refereeing decisions by booking a Chelsea player early on for diving when there was contact, then deciding that two Chelsea penalties – which the general consensus appears to be that they were penalties amongst most pundits and other fans – were not going to be given. Thank goodness we have VAR to back up terrible on field decisions, eh?

A quick look at Sunday’s officials tells us it’s Antony Taylor who is refereeing and David Coote on VAR. A little Google tells us he’s the guy who didn’t rule against the on field decision to award a penalty to Odegaard which I think we have to contest felt like it could have been a penalty, although there appeared to be mitigating circumstances, but I’m just expecting more of the same for this weekend, which will be Liverpool probably getting 60 – 65% of decisions go their way on Sunday. Klopp maybe be sad he’s leaving but I bet he’ll be delighted with the send off he’s getting from the officials after Sunday. They’ll all be very happy to see the Scousers continue to get soft decisions whilst in reverse offering them nothing.

What we’ll need to do is to ensure that any differences in the way we are refereed versus how they are refereed are counter-balanced by us just being really really good on Sunday and my hope is that the extra day we have had to prepare for them we use wisely, as Liverpool decided to rotate their full backs Robertson and Trent last night; it’s the same as what happened last season when we played Liverpool after they’d played Chelsea and we therefore know that Klopp was already planning for us at the weekend by rotating his players in time for their visit to us. He said last night that his players were ‘knackered’ but I don’t buy it just yet – let’s see how they play when they are fired up against us. I suspect we’ll see no difference.

Elsewhere in the league Maddison showed the irony of talking up the fact that Maupay had scored less goals than him after he copied his darts celebration, completely forgetting that Maupay has a bunch more than him over his career. Maupay is a little sh*t as we all know, but on this instance  as it’s a player from the Scum, I’m happy to laugh at Maddison’s lack of awareness when making comments like that.

As for Arsenal related news, well, there isn’t really any right now. It may be transfer deadline day with the window closing at 6pm, but for the entirety of this month it has been deathly quiet and I don’t think many of us are expecting some kind of left of field transfer to crop up any time soon. Arteta is a man that plays those cards close to his chest but in this instance I think he’s been pretty consistent in playing a straight bat. He has known for a while that the chances are quite slim and I think the club have clearly made a decision ‘hold’ on any playing of those proverbial cards in favour of a summer spree. And I think deep down I’ve kind of known that too. Normally by now if we haven’t done any business I might be a bit like “hmm…it’s a bit of a missed opportunity” but what we’ve seen this window is very little movement and I don’t expect they’ll be any mega deals in the next 10 hours or so in the run up to 6pm.

And I’m kind of fine with that. In fact if you could just scrap January and force clubs to buy players in the summer only I’d be fine with it. Then if you get to January you’re only allowed to do emergency loans based on injuries to a number of players then that can be entertained. I get that the argument is that clubs might stockpile players, or that we might have clubs just doing those ‘loan to buy’ type deals anyway in January, but if there was a way of making it so that you could only make those loan moves if you can prove you have players injured, then I think it’s a slightly different mindset that some of the clubs would adopt.

Let’s see what shakes out today but I’m expecting a ‘we have what we have’ from tomorrow when Mikel does his press conference. As long as we haven’t picked up any new knocks and if we can have some good news on Partey, that would be grand and hopefully sets us up nicely for the weekend.

I think I’ll leave it there for today. I aimed to get this out first thing in the morning but got side-tracked by work, so am only just coming up for air now! Honestly, why can’t we all just get paid to watch, talk, chat, WhatsApp, Tweet, Threads or other stuff related to Arsenal, so we don’t have to trifle ourselves by such annoying things as ‘work’, eh?

Catch you lovely humans tomorrow.