Welcome to a brand new week folks, and one that kicks off with glorious, prestigious silverware. At long last the Emirates Cup is ours again. Not since 2010 when skipper Manuel Almunia lifted the trophy have we had the pleasure and distinction of holding aloft the cup which looks like a comedy sized paperweight.
A 1-0 win over Wolfsburg sealed the deal for us – not quite as free-scoring and exciting as the win over Lyon but with so many changes that’s not a surprise. Not to mention the fact the opposition had some good players who played well and, of course, The Greatest Striker That Ever Lived up front.
There was an uncompetitive home debut for Petr Cech whose first touch was greeted by a massive cheer, and a further run out for exciting youngster Jeff Reine-Adelaide who, with his performance yesterday on top of a smart cameo yesterday, became the story of the weekend. It was his assist for Theo Walcott to score the only goal of the game, and overall he looked like an exciting prospect.
However, without wanting to put any kind of dampener on things, and not wanting to make like in any way awkward for all the people heading for tattoo parlours this morning to have a gigantic JEFF inked on their shoulder, we should put it all in context. At 17 he’s got plenty to learn still, with Arsene Wenger saying:
He is 17 years old and he looks very promising but he needs to work with us for a year in the first team. To be an adult, to play for the under-21s and to develop. There is fantastic potential there but he will stay with us.
In some situations of course, he has the game of a 17-year-old player but on the other hand he has shown great potential as well and looks very advanced physically for his age, and I’m sure he has learned a lot these last two days.
Wasn’t there a similar kind of buzz over Zelalem last pre-season and he’s still some way from being ready for the first team? What you would say about The Jeff is that he is physically some way ahead of Zelalem, so maybe there’s scope to see him do his stuff in the Capital One Cup as the season goes on (and when you look at the young talent at the club that could be an exciting competition).
As a tournament it didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know, so the fact a youngster was so much fun to watch as well as being efficient and productive really caught the eye. Walcott’s finish was lovely and he was asked post-game about his contract, giving it the old ‘When something happens you’ll know’ line which, I assume, he has to polish, fill with diesel and return to Arsene Wenger forthwith.
For his part the manager said:
Not yet but we’re getting closer and closer. Hopefully we can finalise it very soon.
And then there was this rather lovely moment:
Wilshere's face when @honigstein asks Theo Walcott about his contract… pic.twitter.com/HlQxYi2PFm
— Andrew Allen (@AAllenSport) July 26, 2015
Maybe Jack just remembered he’d left the iron on or something. That must be it. And was I the only one to notice a bit in the BT coverage when Per Mertesacker seemed to do a mime of kneeing somebody up the arse before looking very grumpily at someone? I’m sure it was just some of Merte-japery, but thought I’d check all the same.
Back to Walcott for a moment and the manager was asked, after deploying him up front, what he thought his best position was. He said:
It’s a good question because it’s a complicated answer. I think in all the three positions. If you ask him where he loves to play, I believe that even he will say that it depends a little bit on the period. Sometimes he prefers left.
When I’ve played him on the left he likes it as well because if he makes a good run he can score goals as well. In his ideal world he would like to play with a strong guy next to him, a player who is very strong physically, and he play off him. We have so many offensive players which makes that very difficult to combine all of them together.
So that clears that up then … but what we can gather is that Wenger sees him as an option for all three of the positions up front. That’s quite a development when for much pretty the entirety of his Arsenal career he’s been a right sided player and that’s about it. There has been talk of him as a centre-forward but you can count on one hand the amount of times he’s actually been picked there since joining in 2006, and his forays on the left hand side have been more down to in-game switching than being picked there from the start.
I think when you look at how powerful Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has been this weekend, and how much he might bring to that right hand side, Wenger has to view Walcott as more versatile in order to get him into the team as much as he (and the player himself) might like. The competition between the two for a place on the right is healthy, but there may be particular opposition where the manager feels Walcott is a good option for the central striking position – and there were even moments yesterday against Wolfsburg where his limitations in that role were apparent.
But look, this is a squad which asks Aaron Ramsey and Jack Wilshere to play wide right, that uses Santi Cazorla as deep-ish midfielder, and one that has played Mesut Ozil in a position that isn’t his favourite, so Theo Walcott isn’t so special that he can’t adapt and be used in an area of the pitch that perhaps he isn’t used to.
So, overall a positive weekend from a performance point of view, we seem to have come through it all without injury which is a good thing, and we look physically quite sharp – although there’s still some fitness work to be done. Next up Chelsea in the Community Shield.
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As ever on a Monday we’ll be recording the Arsecast Extra for you. If you have questions or topics for discussion, please send to @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra and we’ll have that for you before lunchtime.
Until then.
