As  somebody who didn’t stay up until 3.30am this morning to watch the Arsenal versus Bournemouth friendly game that went on in the early hours of the morning (UK time), it’s very difficult for me to make a proper assessment. I’ll level with you; I haven’t even seen the two goals scored in the 1-1 draw (that we eventually won on penalties, so, y’know, ‘yay’ n’all that jazz). I am not paying for a ‘match pass’ on the official site either; it feels a little wrong that I spend over a grand for a season ticket and that at least giving me post match access to have a re-watch as part of my membership isn’t included, but there you go, somebodies got to make money somehow, I guess.

But from a footballing point of view it looked like it was a decent enough outing. Apparently Fabio Vieira played well, Karl Hein did a decent job with some fine saves (I’ve literally only just read about) and when you look at the timings of the subs there was a good outing for a decent chunk of the first teamers, with White, Timber, Partey, Vieira, Nkwtiah and Nelson all getting a run out for an hour. Then for 30 minutes there was 30+ minutes for Kiwior, Trossard, Gabriel Jesus, Zinchenko and Jorginho. So we’re underway with this pre season in earnest and the next game or two will be about finding that team rhythm and dynamic and getting back in the swing of things, building those ‘automatisms’ in prep of the start of the proper stuff in three week’s time against Wolves at home.

One notable absence from the field, which would have had a few of us a little bemused had an Ornbomb not landed at around 12.30am last night before the game started, was Emile Smith Rowe. Apparently Fulham are close to a deal that will see him join for £35million, plus add-ons, plus a release clause and having shafted us a little on the Bernd Leno transfer a few season’s ago (£4million was peanuts for a guy with his experience and ability), Fulham have decided against trying to lowball us this time and are paying what seems to be more ESR’s market value.

£35million plus £5million in add on’s (you’d expect it maybe is a mixture of staying in the league, getting in to Europe, etc) seems like a very fair deal to me. I don’t know many Arsenal fans who are desperate for him to leave given how important he was at a time in which Mikel Arteta needed a saviour in his second season at the club. We all have a lot of love for Emile and as Arsenal fans we’re all conditioned to being amateur accountants these days, so getting a good deal for a good player softens the blow, but he’s still one of ours and he’s still a talented player. But he needs to play, he needs to be given the opportunity to be the ‘main man’ and he needs to stay fit. That will be one of his biggest challenges, because every time it’s felt like he’s getting back in to form, he’s suddenly picked up a knock that has halted his progression in the team as a regular.

Fulham are getting a good player. He could be a great player. Hopefully their fans will love him as much as we do, but that will come if he can get a run of games together and show why he was that saviour from that Chelsea game all those years ago, which then helped get us out of the doldrums and on our way upwards.

So yeah, good money for Arsenal, good player for Fulham, player gets the game time he has been craving for a while now.

As for us, we move on and that will be with Calafiori, expected to do his medical in the US this week, but there will also need to be a hole filled in the middle of the park. Fabio Vieira scored last night and I’ve seen a clip of him and Mikel in deep conversation at some stage in the game that happened this morning, so perhaps now Mikel is going to be asking Vieira to show his stuff. There is a player in there, I’ve always thought that, but now he has to step up and prove it. And perhaps like Emile, he needs to do that by having a good pre season and avoiding injury for the whole season. If that happens, with ESR out of the picture, Mikel will I’ve got no doubt be looking at Vieira to show more and deliver more on the pitch than we got last season. Think the Fulham home game from last season, but that happening at least half a dozen times during course of the season coming up. In that Fulham game he game on and turned the momentum of the match around, winning a penalty and also getting an assist. We need more of that, please, Fabio.

If Fabio Vieira is the attacking and creative replacement for Smith Rowe, then you’d expect Arsenal to pull the trigger on Mikel Merino from Sociedad as soon as the ESR Fulham deal goes through. That is rumoured to be around £20million and if that happens then the question is where will he play. Is he a six or an eight? He wins a lot of fuels, which makes you think he’ll be a defensive midfielder if you don’t look further beyond surface metrics like that, but if you look at his heatmap here, that looks like he’ll be operating in the left eight role, so that’s interesting. Interesting because I think we’re going to see Rice there more often than not so it would appear that Merino would be an understudy. That’s fine, but it still leaves the question in the six role. If we’re going with Partey and Jorginho I have my reservations. Two older players, one of which doesn’t seem like he can stay fit at all any more, the other of which is getting in to his mid-30s. Is that enough?

I’m not sure. You can of course argue that should we need to, Rice can drop in to the six and Merino as the left eight, so perhaps that makes more sense. Perhaps I’m just overly worrying where I really shouldn’t. We’ll just have to see what shakes out as the transfer dominos for ins and outs at The Arsenal start to fall down.

Right, that’s yer lot for today. Enjoy your Thursday and I’ll be back tomorrow with some more musings on all things The Arsenal.

Have a good’un.