Didn’t bother blogging over the weekend because a) There wasn’t really much Arsenal stuff to speak of, b) I spent a lot of the weekend mornings pretty hungover, and c) it was the Euro’s so all the attention would be on that and I wanted to hold off talking about international football for as long as possible.

But sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet and get stuck in.

But before I do that, let’s cling on to some kind of news, which is that Jakub Kiwior stories about him wanting more football aren’t going away. There’s a fair few messages on social this weekend that I saw and a fair few of the speculative sites that appear to be running the story that the likes of Milan and Juve are vying for his signature this summer and that he wants that move. I can understand it from his perspective; he struggled to break in to the team, he was behind Gabriel in his favoured position as a left centre back as the Brazilian was fit all season, plus when he did get in and play well, he had that one game against Bayern at left back and then as soon as Tomiyasu was declared fit he was out of the team and didn’t see any minutes at the end of the season. So I get it; he wants to play more football. When you look at it on paper he made 20 appearances in the Premier League, seven in the Champions League, he played 88 minutes in the FA Cup against Liverpool and a couple of 90 minute sessions in the EFL Cup. But he only played just over 1,600 minutes in total and apart from that stint in February and March in which he managed to string together four 90 minute sessions in a row and then a couple just over the hour mark, his season felt a a little ‘bit-party’. He didn’t even get off the bench between the beginning of September and the end of October and even then it was on 90 minutes against Sheffield United for injury time. So if he’s been given the shout out from Juve and Milan that they want him to play and play as a regular in their team, of course he’s going to want that.

The challenge will be the fee though. Apparently he signed for up to £20million (TransferMarkt has it at €19.8million so it must have been around £18million plus bonuses) and now his value is estimated to be €30million (£25million+), so I think Arsenal would probably want to see a bit of a profit to part with him this summer. The talk is that we are rumoured to want €20 – €25million but I’d be surprised if we were happy to just let him walk for the lower end of that. We’d have to sign a replacement, he’s still got three years left on his deal and we are under no pressure to sell. So getting low-balled by Italian teams doesn’t feel like something we’d be happy to do. Juve have already seemingly got their crafty way with Villa by doing a ludicrous swap in a deal involving Douglas Luiz for Weston McKennie, so I don’t think Arsenal are going to let them get away with getting away with a silly low fee because, frankly, we don’t have to. And this nonsense about being offered Arthur Melo seems laughable to me. I’m sure Juventus would LOVE to offer a player who spent most of his time at Liverpool injured or not playing, who turns 28 in August, is on a reported £88k-per-week and who last season they sent out on loan to Fiorentina, but I can’t see Arsenal ever entertaining that. He’s also had his fair share of injuries too and last season missed six games through injury, the season before was out for 26 games whilst on loan at Liverpool and who has had loads of ankle injury problems. Just don’t see it as a sensible move. Feels very Denis Suarez to me. No thank you.

So I don’t see that going anywhere and unless somebody coughs up decent cash (can those Italian clubs mentioned even do that?) then I suspect we’ll be telling them to ‘do one’ if offered.

As for the Euro’s, I watched my first game yesterday with the England match and I have to say I wasn’t completely unimpressed with their first half. They popped the ball around well enough, Saka had the beating of his man time and time again, they got an early goal and ultimately that was enough to see it over the line. But man, was that second half a struggle, as Gareth Southgate remembered the type of manager he is and the team reverted to what is a usual; boring, disjointed, nervous football, with little structure and some big name players being virtually anonymous; Harry Kane, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Phil Foden in particular. But it is what it is, they ultimately got the job done, they will probably get out of the group and then they’ll come up against a France, Germany or Spain and get knocked out as always happens. C’est la vie as the saying goes.

My plan is to try to watch more of the other games in the competition that aren’t England and it’ll be interesting to see who wins out of Ukraine and Romania this evening I think. My gut feel is that Group E is potentially a tight one; I think Belgium will probably win it, but Romnia, Ukraine and Slovakia feels like it could be a tight one. You’d expect it to be Slovakia and Ukraine who duke it out for second place, but Romania have an okayish pedigree over the years in this competition, so they won’t go without a fight. The evening game between France and Austria should be a pretty one-sided affair, but let’s see.

Then tomorrow the first set of matches get played out and we’ll have seen every team in action. I got Turkey in the company sweepstake so I’m not holding out much hope to be honest with you; but they’re up against Georgia and the way that this tournament is set up is that if you pick up a big win then you always stand a chance of qualifying for the next round. Let’s see how that goes tomorrow though.

That’s me done for today. You have yourselves a good one and I’ll catch you all tomorrow.