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Photo from BBC – Noni Madueke scored his first international goal in England’s World Cup qualifier in Serbia
Morning all.
September’s international fixtures are over thank goodness, hopefully all our players will return in as good a shape as they left.
England actually won a game convincingly last night. I didn’t watch it but Noni Madueke scored one in a 5-0 thrashing of the mighty Serbia. Not wishing to sound doom and gloom but I’d rather wait to see how Tuchel’s side perform against one of the top countries like Spain, France etc before I start believing England are on the rise under this manager.
Anyway, back to Arsenal and by the end of today, all our players should be exactly that. Back at Arsenal.
Nottingham Forest, who sacked Nuno Espírito Santo on Monday evening before swiftly replacing him with Ange Postecoglou, are Arsenal’s next opponents. The fixture kicks off at 12-30 on Saturday lunchtime. The game kicks off what is a busy Monday for Mikel Arteta’s players as five fixtures are crammed into just fifteen days.
13th Nottingham Forest – H
16th Athletic Club – A
21st Man City – H
24th Port Vale – A
28th Newcastle United- A
Both October and November see Arsenal play six matches each month, with an international break lumped into both months. It’s a ridiculous schedule in my opinion but one which is unlikely to change anytime soon. Thankfully though, this time around we have a strong and deep squad which should help us cope much better.
Frustratingly though, we’ve already suffered a number of injuries with Bukayo Saka, William Saliba, Ben White and Christian Norgaard doubts for this weekend’s match, with Saliba rumoured to be out until after the next international break. Not ideal but it’s not like we don’t have an excellent replacement in Cristhian Mosquera. We’re yet to see Piero Hincapie make his Arsenal debut but here he is playing for Ecuador at left back during his country’s 1-0 defeat of Argentina which took place during the early hours of this morning. (Uk time)
Talking of left backs, both Myles Lewis-Skelly and Riccardo Calafiori didn’t play in yesterday’s internationals which is good news for Mikel Arteta and Arsenal. Eberechi Eze didn’t play last night either, nor did either of our Brazilian Gabriel’s. I know we have three but one is injured. Ethan Nwaneri put in a man of the match performance for England’s under 21’s, scoring the first goal in a 2-0 victory over Kazakhstan. Max Dowman has featured for the under 19’s during this break too. He was on the receiving end of a few bad challenges during their game against Spain, with former PGMOL chief and ex-FIFA official Keith Hackett going as far to suggest that Spain’s David Cordon deserved to be sent off on Saturday for his challenge on our 15 year old.
That’s my fear with Dowman, he’s going to be targeted by opponents because he is playing well above his age group and he’s going to embarrass experienced players as he glides past them. At I think he will. It’s happened before with young talented players and not just at Arsenal. “If you can’t get the ball, get the man” came from somewhere, and long before the Neville’s hacked Reyes down each time we played Utd. I’m pretty sure that will be in Mikel Arteta’s mind when he makes his changes on a match day. Especially if we’re playing a team like Newcastle as we are at the end of this month. A pre-season friendly and a league game are two different things in my opinion.
I’ve waffled on for too long…
Catch up in the comments.