Morning all.
It’s a quick one and an early start this morning because I’m travelling to London ahead of the Aston Villa game tomorrow. Yesterday was a funny kind of day, with so much focus (understandably) on Myles Lewis-Skelly after his performance in the derby, and then a transfer rumour playing out in less than an entire afternoon.
Let’s start with that. A story emerged that Arsenal were negotiating for Benjamin Sesko, but within a few hours the information from the Leipzig side of things was that they were not interested in letting him go in January. Which makes sense, most teams who are active in a couple of competitions prefer not to lose their best players mid-season – and whether we like to hear it or not, that is the reality of the market Arsenal are trying to operate in this month.
It’s made more difficult by the fact everyone knows we’re verging on desperate to get someone in – with Bukayo Saka sidelined for the foreseeable future, and Gabriel Jesus out of action for 9 months at least. There isn’t a club with half a brain out there that isn’t going to play hard-ball with us based on that alone, and when you add the fact it’s usually more challenging to do good business in January, we have our work cut out for us after Mikel Arteta went on record after the derby win to say we’re actively looking for a signing.
Even Declan Rice, speaking on TNT Sports afterwards, gave his tuppence worth on the squad as it stands and what we had to do on Wednesday night with our substitutions:
I’m sure that the manager is probably going to look for something because tonight we’ve had to bring Tierney on left wing, we’ve had to bring Zinny on the left, so we’re a bit short up there. So I’m not surprised if we are going to probably do something.
Anyway, the key words here are ‘challenging’ and ‘difficult’, not ‘impossible’, but I suspect we might have to get a bit creative – or really go all-in financially on someone – to get what we need during this transfer window. Doing so without an official Sporting Director may or may not be a factor. Jason Ayto has stepped into Edu’s shoes and is carrying out that role in full, according to the manager at least, and if he’s got ambitions to take that job on permanently, he has the benefit of January as a kind of audition. Find us that player, and he has a nice hand to play during any potential interview.
Meanwhile, the love for Lewis-Skelly is great to see. As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, the fact nobody was even vaguely worried about an 18 year old starting in a game of that importance speaks volumes. Perhaps another thing to mention is that the manager has often been criticised for seemingly prioritising experience over youth, but in this case he eschewed three senior options at left-back to start Lewis-Skelly and I think that’s worth mentioning too.
His presence in the team, as a Hale End graduate, is important as well. The win over Sp*rs was necessary in the context of the title race, and in order to bounce back from two cup defeats, but beneficial in other ways too. When you have ‘one of your own’ doing what he did, and you win the game, it helps remind people that the enemy (in football terms) is out there, not within.
Right, not a lot else going on at this point. I would heartily recommend Tim’s column this week if you haven’t had a chance to read it already (solid Bjork reference in there too). Over on Patreon we’ll have a preview podcast for you later this afternoon, but in the the meantime there’s an episode of The 30 there for you now, there’s a North London derby Arsecast available in all the usual places, and there’ll be an Arsenal Women Arsecast a bit later which should follow an interesting announcement due at some point this morning.
We’ll bring you all the press conference stories ahead of Villa over on Arseblog News too. For now, have a good one folks!
