It's often a 'Club before country' sort of thing, especially when you're an England fan. As a Gooner, how do you manage to get hot and bothered about a team full of Liverpool players? Walcott never had a chance of making it due to injury, Chamberlain had the bad luck of getting kicked in a warm up game, and Wilshere lost out to some bloke with three L's in his name? Having been born and bred in England, I found myself more interested in what Germany and France were doing...
From a selfish point of view, having England out so early will most likely see Jack and The Ox play a few minutes in New Jersey at the end of the month - a game which I will be in attendance, and am quite looking forward to, friendly or not. We might even get to see a couple of new signings show up against Thierry Henry and his Red Bulls.
As far as transfers, there's nothing confirmed and little to talk about other than the suspiciously strong rumours regarding a certain Chilean young whipper snapper and a white Bacary Sagna. The French dude's name is actually Mathieu Debuchy, but he seems to beat Sagna to the French team's starting eleven every time. Sure, he's 28 years old but perhaps that's a good thing, what with an eager Carl Jenkinson waiting in the wings.
There's been a lot of rumours around us signing the 21 year old Ivory Coast right-back, Serge Aurier this summer. First of all, we already have a Serge in the squad. Second of all, from what I saw of the lad he doesn't seem to have much defensive awareness at all. Lastly, he's around the same age as Jenkinson, and personally I would lean towards having someone with some more experience alongside the young Englishman.
And that's where Debuchy comes in. The fella is 28 years old, has 233 games for Lille and 24 for the French national team (along with a couple of goals). Why sign a player so close to the end of his career? If we do manage to sign him from Newcastle, he's got a solid 3 to 4 years to offer us and by that time perhaps our boy Jenkinson will have learned how to head the ball a bit. Plus he's had a few months to adapt to the English game a bit, albeit under the head butting leadership of Alan Pardew, but we can't all be perfect.
What seems to be emerging as the most likely rumor (this is Arsenal remember, so we'll probably fall £1million short and lose out to Chelsea), is a certain Chilean superstar of sorts - Alexis Sanchez. Although we are dangerously low on defenders in our squad right now, a striker was always high on our priority list, and although he plays out wide for Barcelona he's been lethal for Chile the last couple of weeks. Oh, and he scored 19 goals for Barcelona this past season... ahead of some Brazilian bloke names Neymar, and right behind some South American kid names Messi or something? Not bad.
With just a couple of weeks until we travel to the mighty Boreham Wood, I can feel the excitement begin to creep in again. We've had the pleasure of ending last season with a trophy, spent most of the summer watching the World Cup, all of which seems like the perfect build up to the approaching Arsenal season.
It's been 47 days since Arsenal last won a trophy.
