Good morning folks, hope you’re all well.
Let’s start with the fact that summer signing Fabio Vieira got his first minutes in red and white, with a run out for the U21s against Swansea last night. Goals from Joel Ideho and a Cedric free-kick (!!) helped the Gunners to a 2-1 win, but the focus will have been on the former Porto man, as well as Emile Smith Rowe who also got 45 minutes under his belt to get him closer to match fitness after a summer in which he didn’t feature much due to injury.
There is, should you have the desire to sit through it, a YouTube compilation of Vieira who played mostly on the right hand side. Mikel Arteta was in attendance to see the £30m man step up his recovery from an ankle problem, and the question now is whether or not he’s deemed fit enough to be part of the squad for the visit to Bournemouth on Saturday.
Having seen the positive impact of Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko already, there’s plenty of anticipation about Vieira and what he can bring to the team. Last season for Porto, he ended up with 23 goal involvements in 39 appearances (7 goals and 16 assists) – and while those might be ambitious numbers for his first season in English football, there’s no doubt this is a player with end product and somebody who you can look at on the bench as a player who can make an impact. Not to mention push for a starting place when he’s 100%.
We’re still very much in the dark about him though, and how quickly he’ll settle, so I’m really curious to see him in Premier League action. If the reaction of some Porto fans is anything to go by, then we’ve got a good one. As an example, I get a LOT of emails from random advertising companies and marketeers about purchasing all of our ‘advertising inventory’.
The thing is, we’ve basically removed all adverts from the blog, and there’s now only one on Arseblog News. We’ll be removing ads from the app in the near future too, so there isn’t really anything to sell, and to be fair, most of these lads want to put in the kind of ads that would make people running sites that stream football matches weep. A big pop-up that when you click the ‘x’ to close it opens up 100 other pop-ups, 57 pop-unders and an auto-playing video of some gruesome looking bastard with teeth that don’t look real trying to get you to invest in some sort of crypto that looks incredibly dodgy even by the already low standards of crypto.
Anyway, I did receive this quite charming missive during the summer:
Hello!
My name is [REDACTED] and I am from Porto, so I am an FCPorto fan since I was born. I am also a media buyer that wants to buy ad space on ArseBlog.
Given that you got my pearl, Fabio Vieira, I should get a lifetime of free ad space on your website. But no, I’m a good guy, so I am willing to pay you for it 🙂
I want to promote some of the world’s best iGaming brands and help you monetize your traffic and win the most so you can buy your season ticket and support my boy Fabio.
Please hit me back so I can give you further details!
Best regards,
A Fabio Vieira heartbroken fan
I can even slightly forgive the ‘ArseBlog’ thing which always puts me on edge. Of course I had nothing to sell him, but given I normally just delete these emails with extreme prejudice, I took some time to reply to this chap.
As I said though, I am looking forward to seeing him (Vieira, not the ad selling guy) throughout this season.
Now …
NOTE: SLIGHT ALL OR NOTHING SPOILERS FOLLOW
I have finished the series and I have to say by and large I enjoyed it. It won’t come as any surprise to anyone to know that episode 8 is hard going, because we all remember how last season ended. I should also say that if, like me, you had successfully put it away in a locked box in your mind, it will definitely open up some old wounds.
There isn’t much that is surprising or new, although there is some insight into some of the injury issues we ended the season with and which, in my opinion, had an impact on how we ran out of steam.
I’ll leave it to you guys to make up your own minds about Mikel Arteta’s reactions to the roller-coaster period of those defeats against Palace, Brighton and Southampton, then the wins against Chelsea, United and West Ham, and then the derby and Newcastle performances. But, I think he did his very best to keep a very thin squad in the right frame of mind as much as possible.
What I’ll say is this though: I can see very clearly why he brought in Jesus and Zinchenko to this dressing room. First and foremost they are quality players, and that’s obvious, but there’s something more to it, I think. The attitude, the mentality, the experience of winning and dealing with pressure – those are things a relatively young team can develop over time, but these two guys are like an injection of growth hormones or something. Maybe I need a better analogy, but when you watch the doc I’m sure you’ll get what I mean.
Anyway, we’ll chat about it more on our Patreon All Or Nothing pod when people have had a proper chance to see the episodes.
Right, that’s your lot for now, back tomorrow with more here and a brand new Arsecast. Until then, take it easy.
