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July means action must happen now for The Arsenal

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo I know, I know, kind of an obvious headline for today’s return to blogging from me, as I get back into the swing of it from Portugal. I boldly made the assumption based on previous years that when I come back from Portugal there’d be a shiny new signing confirmed, but sadly my good luck vibes appear to have run out this season.

I think a lot of fans, despite seeing some of our rivals do some initial deals, have been somewhat serene on the signings situation. But for me today is the point where my nerves start to kick in. I get that today is when contracts expire, it’ll be when Arsenal announce Zubimendi (or tomorrow if they’re really teasing us), so in essence the business will start to kick in. But what we’ve had in June is plenty of “make strides towards” stuff from the ITKs, with not a lot of actual ACTION happening.

My hope is that Arsenal have everything lined up to go on a number of fronts and those dominoes will fall one after the other. So Zubimendi, then Kepa, then Norgaard, all coming in relatively swiftly. These are all the easy deals to do and I even saw one of the head people over at Brentford admitting that it’s a great opportunity to join Arsenal that Norgaard has, so that one feels like it’s pretty much sewn up. So these ‘low hanging fruit’ signings need to happen asap really. Not because we are all transfer-starved fiends who demand shiny new things to look at, but because we have genuine need for these signings to replace departed players.

With Neto returning to Bournemouth, Kepa’s arrival is the replacement.

With Jorginho having been released early to join Flamengo we have Norgaard as the replacement.

With Partey’s contract expiring today we have Zubimendi announced as his replacement.

We also have Sterling returning to Chelsea to sit in the barren wasteland that is their reserves, stocked full of expensive talent on big contracts that they aren’t using because they chase EVERY shiny new thing, so there is a replacement there that needs to be filled.

We all know about the need for a striker, needed because we had to do it last summer and in January, but also because Gabriel Jesus is probably cooked as a top flight footballer when he returns towards the end of the year.

So action is the name of the game, because as it stands, as I write this, technically speaking we are weaker with the current team than the one that ended the season. We all expect that to change, but every day that deals aren’t official, are days in which players can’t be getting more embedded with their new teammates. And as we’ve seen with the disruption of the World Cup and Euro’s years, not having a proper pre season under your belt can make a big difference to the start of the season and building up that momentum.

Of course the longer term deals – like this current striker hunt – might not be done too quickly, but I suspect Arteta will be pretty peeved if he hasn’t got the bulk of his team in for when they go on pre season tour towards the latter part of this month. That, again, is a great opportunity for embedding players and so having this situation where we still don’t know who might be leading the line next season (wink wink, we all know it’ll be Havertz to start off with, at least) will not be the kind of preparation Arteta will want. We all know that this is a man of intense and precise detail; having a striker rocking up on 1st August is not going to be something he will be happy about.

It’s a little different with the wide forward, with Eze the current name linked in the press over the last 48 hours or so, as we already have Martinelli and Trossard who occupy those positions. Both are well-versed in our style of play, I’d be happy with seeing either start the season, but Eze isn’t always a left winger as it is. So I’m not 100% sure how somebody like that fits in. Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be a good addition and certainly adds something, but are you spending £65million for somebody to be a rotation and ‘x-factor’ player who can come off the bench? Doesn’t feel like it to me. Let’s also not discount Nwaneri either. He played in Saka’s role on the right when he was injured, but this kid is good enough to play wide left, as well as centrally, so I do think we need to be mindful of that when thinking about players like Eze. Nwaneri will be even better than he was last season and if that means he goes north of ten goals next season, then we’ve got a perfectly good understudy who will get game time and give us more of the end product we’ve been craving.

Perhaps it’s just Arsenal and Berta exploring as many options and different ways of playing as possible. Either way, I don’t see it as an immediate priority, because first we replace the players who have exited, then we address most pressing concerns (striker), then we look for that wide forward.

That’s all from me today. Hopefully tomorrow we’re talking about at least one confirmation of an arrival at the club.

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Gooner born in 1982 from Harlow, Essex, now living in Uxbridge. I say what I see - frequently wrong, but hey, it's just an opinion piece, right? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.