Only 1 Arsenal player considered anywhere near good enough for the England squad from a huge squad of 30. There was a time when we had about 7 in one squad once

Everton and Villa have more than us.

Even Dortmund and they aren’t even an English club.

People saying we don’t have a gap in quality are bonkers.

Tottenham have one player. Liverpool have two. Would you swap Ramsdale for Leno?

Not necessarily but united have 6 in the squad and this season we have given a lot of minutes to young English players. It’s hardly a good indicator of strength right ?

Lyon failed to qualify for the Champions League - Arsenal could go back for Aouar with a much reduced fee. Rumours are potentially £20-25m which is roughly half of what was being talked about last year.
All paper talk but there are going to be some real bargains to be had in the transfer window as clubs try to recover from a covid effected season.

**I'm aware there could easily be clubs circling Arsenal's best players as well, and we might not get the fees we want for the players we're trying to sell**

Man U have been very good at bringing through young english talent and spending a lot of money on the best available english talent.
Henderson, Lingard, Rashford, Greenwood is a decent crop but all apart from Greenwood at least 1 age group above our current group of english players.

There are some fashionable picks there as well - if Ben White is suddenly getting his first call up I'm not sure he's been any better than Rob Holding this season for example and Holding has far more experience of big games including 2 cup final wins.
Southgate has stayed loyal to someone like Ward-Prowse which is fair enough but if you pick JWP to sit on the bench all tournament you might as well have picked Willock instead - I know who I'd rather turn to off the bench for the last 10 minutes if you needed a goal.

Saka is the jewel for us but Smith-Rowe could be in the next squad, there is a lot of competition in the position he plays.

It's not an indicator at all. Our Invincibles had two England internationals.

It is also subject to the vagaries of whoever is in charge and you also have the imbalance of strength in depth in certain positions and weaknesses in others. Southgate doesn't like Trent. It's madness but there you go. Holding is a better defender than Mings.

England have a phenomenal group of wide forwards but only one top quality centre forward, quite weak midfielders and a modest set of keepers.

A factor particular to Arsenal is that we sign so few English players. Is it just Chambers and Holding in the last decade?

Actually if you think about it then it’s not just England either. How many of our players generally are nailed on starters for their respective national sides ?

Pépé, Aubameyang, Tierney and Xhaka ?

Doesn’t seem many

There’s a few like Saka and Bellerin who may pick up occasional caps. A lot of our foreign players don’t seem rated by their national coaches either

I listen to TalkSPORT when driving and heard Adrian Durham and Darren Gough discussing the initial squad list. They both agreed that Saka hopefully won’t make the final squad because he’s played nearly fifty games for Arsenal this season and considering his age, he needs a break. I think I agree, for the sake of his future fitness.

Adrian Durham got a little dig in at the club when he said he loves Saka as a player, and said he’s way too good for Arsenal.

Isn’t Partey a regular starter for Ghana, and at the age of 28 Elneny has 79 caps so I assume he must be for Egypt. I’m not certain being a regular international is a reliable guide to a player’s quality. I know you don’t rate Xhaka but he’s Switzerland’s captain and I doubt many of us see Elneny as a must keep player.

Furthermore, Arsenal have a decent number of promising youngsters who will hopefully have significant and successful careers with the club. But none are regular starters for their national teams yet. I wouldn’t expect Saka and Smith Rowe to yet be with England, nor Martinelli for Brazil. Leno can’t be expected to have that many German caps yet (he has 8) as he has had Neuer (98 caps), in my view the greatest keeper I’ve ever seen, and ter Stegen (25 caps) keeping him out the team.

Buendia looks awesome in his you tube video. And I know that means little but take a look.

I know what you mean and your right about Partey and El Nenny but for a while our players were mainstays In the major European countries. Even Bacary sagna got 65 caps for France. The Dutch, French and Spanish sides had a strong arsenal contingent in their 11s.

Now most of our few regular internationals play for lesser national sides. The only other player knocking on England’s door could be Smith Rowe next season but he’s going to have to score a few more goals to get the attention needed to get a call up.

Talk of internationals: The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has confirmed the Africa Cup of Nations will take place in Cameroon from January 9 to February 6 in 2022.

So I would expect Aubameyang, Partey and Elneny plus any new players who represent African teams, to be absent from around Christmas until at best early February (assume they don't make the final) of next season. Take a bit of rest afterwards and close to 7 weeks in a busy time of the season for Arsenal.

He looks the business. He's EPL ready which is a huge plus. Not sure how good our chances are of getting him but hopefully it will work out.

Hi Warrior,

Something very Cazorla about the way he plays.

I still think we should experiment with Saka at center mid and see what happens.

Anyway, we have an extremely important summer ahead of us.

We’re more than capable of making him look distinctly average.

This doesn’t even make sense

https://www.skysports.com/football/news ... fer-window

Xhaka gets into the CIES Football Observatory’s Premier League team of the season. To be honest I can understand why. Despite a few errors like most obviously the Burnley game, as a general rule I always think we look worse in the games he misses. Or to put it another way, better in the ones he does play.

When he eventually leaves the club, whether that’s this summer or not, I think overall he deserves to be considered a good signing. Or even ‘has to be’ instead of ‘deserves’.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/paininthea ... eason/amp/

Breakdown of a few team stats that show where we improved as the season went on, making a case for why there are at least some reason for optimism going into the new season.

Shocker !

Boris, Cummings, Hancock and Patel are all absolute worms and happy to leak the contents of Cobra meetings to the press for personal gain.

I really never saw this coming.

I think it has been Xhaka's best season at the club, certainly for consistency of performance. We do miss him when he's not in the team. That is not to say we shouldn't be signing top class CM to push him for his place.

Xhaka will (rightly or wrongly) be a player where people vividly remember his catastrophic moments but his good games - which far outweigh the bad ones - go under the radar.

The question is can we be a top 4 club with Xhaka starting every week? The simple response is of course we can if we sign 5-6 top class talents in positions around him

Happy St Michael’s Day

Granit Xhakas best ever season.

Only one goal all season and single handedly cost us the home and away fixture v Burnley.

Arsenal fans willingness to embrace very average players with zero personality continues

Boubacary Soumare is very close to joining Leicester for about £20m. Lille were turning down bids worth double that 18 months ago. I think this is another great signing for Leicester and I'm surprised they've had a free run at him for that price.

This does somewhat prove my point above.
I don't think any Arsenal fan thinks Xhaka is the answer to getting us back to challenging for the biggest prizes and I think we all agree that central midfield is the key area we need to strengthen but at the same time we can still acknowledge that he's had a decent season in the context of the entire squad and club.

These CIES Football Observatory lads are either on a wind-up or on drugs.

Must be based on passing statistics for recycling possession aimlessly.

Even Xhakas mum is picking Fernandinho

The context is that he was rubbish for the first half of the season then after a series of humiliating performances picked up his game, stopped making mistakes and achieved the bare minimum of someone expected in his position and seniority

It's based on a performance index using a complation of different stats, not selected by a jury. I think it's an interesting approach as opposed to the selected best elevens we see that are largely based on reputation anyway.

I mean, Fernandinho is basically a backup these days. He started only 12 games in the league this season (scoring 0 goals), surely a minimum requirement for being selected in the best eleven of a season is being a starter for your team?

It’s interesting that in the first half of the season Xhaka started 13 games out of 19. In those 13 we won 20 points, an average of 1.54 points per game. In the other 6 we got only 7 points, an average of 1.17 points per game.

So even with his allegedly humiliating performances in the first half of the season, we still picked up more points per game when he started. Perhaps that strengthens an idea that we’re better with him, or worse without him. Another possibility is that some people simply don’t like Xhaka and won’t accept any usefulness to the team he brings, or moan about him unfairly.

In which case the stats chosen must be a bit odd. How does Salah not make the team with his 22 goals?

Gundogan was excellent this season. No sign of him either. Robertson at left back, given the season Shaw had.

And Lindelof?

I agree that many of these teams of the year are based on past achievements, DeBruyne being a typical example for this season, but that team is bonkers. Looks like click-bait to me.

The Salah omission was strange, but with Gundogan I would guess they're simply looking at other stats than goalscoring for central midfielders. Robertson and Shaw have pretty similiar output this season, with Robertson's being slightly better so that one isn't really that weird. It's not an eleven with the most improved players.

Congratulations to Granit Xhaka who has also been awarded player of the season by blind veterans UK.

https://www.blindveterans.org.uk/what-w ... gK50vD_BwE

Well done Granit !

... only thing this proves is how bad our midfield options actually are.

We can always rely on a balanced view from Top Gun!

Best of luck to you again Daniel Am.

https://www.101greatgoals.com/news/dani ... ownership/