So the players are back in training at London Colney and we’re starting to get some vids and images of them knocking the ball around, preparing for the new season, which is enough to get your average Arsenal like me quite excited about what’s to come over the next ten months or so.
Gabriel Jesus is looking good and I’m pleased to see that it appears as though he’s decided to Dizzy Rascal-style Fix up, look sharp, over the summer period. He’s a player with whom we all fell in love, he scored a magnificent goal on his debt and for the first few months as an Arsenal player was electric. He had a spring in his step, he was our ‘main man’ and we thought that Arteta had finally unlocked the goalscorer in him, having been a streaky and patchy player at City in the season’s before.
Alas it wasn’t to be though and injury hampered both his World Cup and the remainder of that first season, as well as last season too. He missed a chunk of pre season with a knee injury and didn’t make it back to the match day squad until 26th August when he came on for one minute as a sub. He didn’t even make his first start until we played The Scum towards the end of September and by the time he seemed to be getting up to speed with 90 minutes against Bournemouth, City and then 68 with Chelsea away, he was then gone with a hamstring injury for about three weeks. He also picked up a knee injury in February and then as the season came to the crunch point in which we were hunting down 115 Charges FC, he was reduced to a bit-part player. I think he knew that this summer was going to be vita for his Arsenal career and I suspect that his efforts to be fit for this coming season very much reflect that. We’ve seen him in the gym, we’ve seen him training hard, we’ve seen a guy who clearly wants to come back and show Mikel that he very much has a say in our season and personally I couldn’t be happier about that.
He’s never going to be a 25-goal a season striker, but at a time in which we are all talking about what we’re going to do in the attacking third of the pitch this season, Gabriel Jesus offers the versatility that could save a lot of stresses for us. He was great when Bukayo sat out the City game at home last season. We know he can play wide left from his time at City and he played as our main striker for the start of his Arsenal career. This is a player who could have a very important role for us this season and as the chaps on last night’s Same Old Arsenal pod talked about yesterday, he could very well be the one to ‘bang’ for Arsenal in 2024/25. His versatility – a trait we know that Arteta loves – will be so important and when you think about the extra volume of games we’ll have this season with the extended Champions League format (a competition we know he loves a goal in) he could well become quite the difference-maker this season. I certainly hope so. It’s all very well getting excited about new players, but when you have such talented players in your squad as Jesus, one should not just ignore them, just because they aren’t the shiny new thing. In fact, I look at our whole squad right now and think that it’s pretty good to be fair, which I’ve not had thoughts like that for about 20 year’s I think. Gabriel Jesus and players of his ilk are the reason behind this.
But he has to have a good pre season and I think that remains true for all of these Arsenal players. Getting a good season and getting your body prepped for what is to come is vital if you want to be successful. The pre season we had two year’s ago was catalyst for our first title charge and whilst I’m not looking at the results specifically this summer when the team tours in the US and then has some games at home, I am looking at how we perform as a measure of how the preparation for that game against Wolves mid-August is going to go.
From a transfer perspective it’s all still quiet. I did have a feeling that things might start to hot up this week but that doesn’t seem to have materialised. The Calafiore stuff drags on, there’s some whispers about Nico Williams that I can’t really be bothered to get in to because Barca will find some way of fiddling the system to get him, so if you’re an Arsenal fan getting excited about this rumour, I’m here to tell you to temper your potential glee because I suspect it won’t happen.
And that’s pretty much all there is going on at the moment. It’s a glorious day in London today but I’ll be stuck inside at my desk, hopefully I’ll get out in the sun later but let’s see if anything interesting Arsenal unfolds.
Catch all you wonderful humans tomorrow. Have yourselves a good one.
