Arsenal News: Is Shay Given a Realistic Target for the Gunners?

The new season is drawing ever closer and with five days to go before the Premier league kick-off, I'm sure every single manager is ruing the round of international friendlies this Wednesday night.

At this stage, the managers should be making their final preparations and getting the fitness levels up to the required level with some intensive training, but instead they will be losing almost all of their international players until Thursday or possibly even Friday in some cases.

After Arsenal's rather inept defensive display against Legia Warsaw on Saturday, I'm sure the boss would have hoped for some time to iron out the obvious defensive problems in the team. Instead, he will be faced with training with the few players who aren't picked by their countries and hoping for good news from all the others when they do return.

The only positive aspect of it is that Arsenal don't play until Sunday afternoon, which gives the players an extra 24 hours to recover and prepare for the game.

If we're lucky, the boss will have a little free time on his hands to tie up a couple of new signings and give all of us fans the boost we are looking for ahead of the new season.

With that in mind, we are being linked with Given of Man City, as it looks like he might possibly have to warm the bench for them this season with Hart looking to get the nod. He's not a goalkeeper I'm overly fond of, but he would certainly be better than any of our current options. However, I can't see City lending him to us as the rumours are suggesting whether he wants to sit on the bench with them or not.

The boss said he will decide after the preseason games who will be our first choice keeper and judging from what we have seen so far, I will be surprised if he doesn't pick Almunia. Fabianski has surely ruled himself out of contention and Mannone has played so few minutes that I don't think he will be considered either.

That leaves only Almunia and Szczesny as the possible candidates and while I don't doubt that Szczesny will one day be our first choice, I severely doubt that he will get chosen ahead of Almunia just yet. It's not that he's not good enough but I just can't see the boss going for such a young player to play in goals.

As it stands, Cesc, RVP, Song, Diaby, and Denilson have not kicked a ball in any of our six preseason friendlies and we would hope that they will all be available next Sunday. Arshavin was not involved on Saturday either and Djourou was nowhere to be seen. Bendtner is out until October and it all means that the injury jinx we hoped had disappeared from last season looks to be alive and kicking. 

On the club site's report of Saturday's game, it says that Cesc and RVP didn't travel to Poland for the game and they won't be travelling to Anfield next Sunday either. It's something I didn't notice yesterday and it's more than a little annoying considering they will both probably play for their countries on Wednesday night.

It also says that Song and Diaby were rested, which is a little odd for players who haven't actually played yet but I suppose that they must have being putting a lot of work in during training.

Finally for today, there's the small matter of my fantasy league and the fact that it now has over 300 teams in it, which means that there will be trophies for the first three teams. If you want to sign up, the link is here and the code to join my league is 33954-12064 after you have set up a team. 

I'm running the league this season with a little help from 11Gunners and I'd like to thank them for their help in promoting my blog and the fantasy league too.

If you do sign up, please take the time to join a friend's head-to-head league in which he needs only 20 teams. With only a few days left to go, I said I'd give him a hand and the code for his league is 576173-163660.

I'm also running a results prediction league on "I know the score," which is a part of the Fantasy Premier league site. Here's the link to sign up and make your predictions and the code to join my league is  FBE3B-ZGP if anybody would like to try their hand at it.

Here's a little bit of what Nasri can do.

See You Tomorrow.