Good morning, a very quick Friday blog for you.
It’s very quiet from an Arsenal perspective, but there’s an interesting story via David Ornstein in The Athletic (£) about Jack Wilshere holding talks with Colorado Rapids about becoming their new head coach.
The connection between the two clubs is obvious, in the shape of KSE, and it may be that a kind of joined up thinking is being used to fast-track Jack’s coaching career. He has been in charge of Arsenal U18s since last year, but this would obviously be a very significant step-up. He’s still only 31, very young for a head coach role, so maybe this is just testing the waters a bit.
Patrick Vieira, as we know, began his coaching career in MLS with New York Citeeeeeeh, but he was quite a lot older. He was coming up to 40 at that point. Meanwhile, Wayne Rooney has just returned from a stint at DC United, but again, he’s a bit older (37), and did have some time and experience at Derby County under his belt too. So, let’s see – the Rapids are bottom of the western conference of MLS, so there’s plenty of room for improvement. Whether Jack is the man to bring that, and whether he’s ready at this point, remains to be seen.
Interlull update
Gabriel Magalhaes scored for Brazil, putting them 1-0 up in their World Cup qualifier against Venezuela last night. See the goal here. It’s a header that contains an almost perfect mix of ‘glancing’ and ‘thumping’. Unfortunately for Brazil there was a late goal for the opposition which saw the game end 1-1.
Elsewhere Martin Odegaard played 77 minutes of Norway’s 4-0 win over Cyprus, David Raya was on the bench for Spain’s win over Scotland, Jakub Kiwior played the full 90 as Poland beat Faroe Islands 2-0, while Mo Elneny got some useful minutes for Egypt in a 1-0 friendly win against Zambia.
Right, I’m running a bit behind schedule this morning even though it’s very early, so if I could just beg your indulgence for a few minutes and ask if you could give Arseblog a nomination in best club podcast and best fan media for the upcoming FSA Awards, that would be amazing. You can do that here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/fsa-awards-2023-nominations
Finally, I’ll leave you with an Interlull Arsecast, chatting to Clive Palmer about the significance of the win over Man City, a more mature Arsenal this season, William Saliba and defensive depth, and lots more. All the links you need to listen/subscribe are below, enjoy the show.
For now, have a good one folks.
