Morning folks and welcome to another Monday of the summer off season. At least the weather has finally decided to show up and here I am finding myself very happy with the prospect of a few 25 degree plus days in London, that’s for sure. Off to Glastonbury towards the end of the week so there’s probably zero chance I’ll be able to do much blogging, but I’ll probably catch some football somewhere over the weekend, particularly if the German’s line up against England if England don’t win their group tomorrow.

That will be an intriguing match up, because England have been pants and I’ve even leant in to my German roots by buying that delightful-looking Germany away kit that is pink and purple. Love it. Although weather I’ll get away with wearing it over the weekend if England play Germany is probably not something I want to test to be honest with you.

The reality is that I probably just edge the fact I’d rather see England win it given it’s the country of birth, etc, but being able to call on my Oma had her side of the family as a wonderful fall back has been useful over the years.

They played Switzerland last night and I watched the second half having come back from a family meal. It was a bit of a slog of a game as Switzerland just tucked in with a low block and said to Germany “come on then, see if you can break us down”, whilst then trying to play on the counter. And were it not for a tight – but correct (semi-automated VAR doing the business again, thank you very much) – call through the correct application of the technology, they might have done a bit of the ol’ “rope-a-dope” football on Der Mannschaft but Germany decided to lean in to a trusted old formula in Fullkrug and the ‘stick it in the mixer on the big lads head’ to deliver the last minute goods and ensure they secured a draw and top spot.

If England mess up tomorrow and don’t finish top then it’ll be Germany on Saturday they’ll have to play. If they can top the group by beating Slovenia on Tuesday then it’ll most likely be Austria or Romania I reckon. Which would of course be a lot more palatable for the England team than a match up against Germany.

From an Arsenal perspective there was a man-of-the-match performance from our former midfielder maestro Xhaka last night, but Kai had a quiet one I thought. Tierney is obviously out of the tournament but I suspect regardless of his injury or not he’d have been packing his bags today anyway, because Scotland’s defeat to Hungary means they picked up just one point and head home this morning. There was plenty of noise, plenty of good fun from the Scots during this tournament, but they were never in reality likely to progress far in this competition, especially after seeing how they struggled to get goals and definitely struggled to keep them out.

I can’t revel in a Scottish defeat and exit though; I can’t say I’ve ever ‘hated’ the Scots in any competition. I know they hate the English and that’s their privilege to do so, but I’ve never really been that bothered with that kind of international rivalry, so I’m a bit ‘meh’ about it all. It’s funny when you get some bantery chants and all that jazz, but that’s about the limit of my interest of that particular ‘rivalry’.

From an Arsenal transfer perspective…well…there isn’t really any. It’s all still deathly quiet other than a few of the gutter-press red tops talking up a potential Kimmich transfer this summer. He’s got a year left on his contract, apparently there’s not much noise about him signing a new one and he had a couple of pretty good games against us last season. He’s been unhappy being used as a right back but I guess any Arsenal pitch would involve him being used in midfield (where he prefers to play) as well as a flexible option for other positions. It’s interesting because when I hopped on to the Arsenal Opinion podcast last week I said I wondered if Arsenal might go for an ‘experienced’ older head this summer, as well as other signings, so this kind of link makes sense to me. He’s been there, seen it, done it and given we’ve just released Elneny, Cedric, plus there’s rumours that Partey could be available this summer, it’s a fair few older players who have departed and I’m sure Arteta will be mindful of getting the balance right between youth and experience. Kimmich comes in as a 29-year-old at the peak of his powers, as a guy who doesn’t seem to pick up a ton of injuries (last season he missed four games across two stints in December and January – a total of 20 days, then the season before it was one game and five days out with COVID), who might be looking for a new challenge and who I’m sure Arteta would be happy to drop in to his team. The price would have to be right though and if Bayern are looking at close to the value that TransferMarkt puts on him at around €50million (£42million) that might be on the upper end of what Arsenal would be willing to pay. His value is only going to decline at that age but if you could do a deal around the £30million mark then it might be worth considering. If you want to make a comparison, we sold Xhaka to Leverkusen (who also only had a year left on his contract) for around £21million and he was a year older and an integral member of our midfield the season before last. With Kimmich a year younger you’d expect to pay a little more and so hitting £30million for a player of his quality is probably fair for all parties.

So all-in-all I can see the logic to this. But until it gets reported by any proper outlets and not the spurious click-baiters, I think there’s probably a degree of ‘don’t get too invested’ at this stage.

Right, I’m going to leave it there for today. Although it’s a lovely day I have work to be done to pay the bills, so I’ll catch you all tomorrow.