Arsenal: Is Too Much Expected of the Gunners' Young England Players?

The international break is over and all we have to do now is wait for the players to come back to the club and declare themselves fit and raring to go for Sunday's trip to Liverpool. We all know that it was a ridiculous decision to schedule this round of friendlies three days before the start of the season but as mere fans our opinion counts for nothing with FIFA or UEFA.

As it stands there are no reports of any injuries to our players and I'm hoping that won't change as the day progresses. It would seem that Cesc started for Spain away to Mexico despite the fact that he hasn't played a game for us yet after coming back so late from his World Cup glory. If he was fit enough to start for his country surely we can at least have him on the bench on Sunday.

I watched a bit of the England game last night just to see Wilshere and Gibbs make their debuts and I thought Gibbs did very well going forward when he came on at half time although he didn't get the opportunity to defend too much and that's a defender's most important job. Wilshere only got eight minutes at the end of the game so it was hard to tell how he did although he again showed that he has spent some time at Bolton in his tackling. If he continues to tackle like that he will have a nice collection of cards by the end of the season.

Walcott played the first half and I thought he performed well enough as well. I said before the game that I thought that Wilshere and Gibbs should have been established in the Arsenal team before they were picked for England but at least things didn't go wrong for them and they can concentrate on trying to win a place in the Arsenal team now.

The boss spoke again about the homegrown rule a couple of days ago and he said that while it doesn't affect Arsenal he doesn't think it is a good idea for the Premier league. He said that if the Premier league wants to be the best league in the world then restriction is bad and it's hard to argue with that.

The best way to improve the game in England is to improve the level of coaching and that can be done by getting more managers and coaches at all levels to get their coaching badges. As it stands the country with by far the largest amount of qualified coaches is Spain and I wonder if it's a coincidence that they are the current World and European champions. The technical ability of your average Spanish player is at a much higher level than that of your average English player in my opinion.

The boss said that if you're good enough then you should be able to play where you want and if the Premier league wants to be the best league in the world then it must respect that. There's always been the argument that the English game is being ruined by the amount of foreign players in it despite the fact that they must surely be able to teach something to the English players.

Personally I think that the FA should have been looking to get the clubs finances in order as a priority rather than focusing on foreign player quotas. If the clubs are required to spend within their means it will be a greater incentive to nurture young talent and some of that will of course be English. However, far be it from me to tell the experts at the FA what to do. 

The boss also spoke of how competitive he thinks the Premier league will be this season and he said he can see six or seven teams challenging at the top of the table. He said that all the teams dropped points last season and he can see it happening again with the same top seven clubs as last season all performing well again. It will be interesting to see if all of those teams can continue on from where they left off last season. As it stands the only team that has really strengthened is Man City as there is very little action in the transfer market. 

I have said it before and I will say it again: if Arsenal can get the players that our team/squad is missing then we will have a genuine chance of winning the league. Our attacking options are very varied and I have no doubt that we will score plenty of goals but the boss said himself that we conceded too many goals to win the league last season and that must change.

I'm sure he is doing all he can in the transfer market to add some quality players as well as working with the ones he has in training to try to get them to defend as a unit and cut out the stupid mistakes that have cost us so dearly in recent seasons.  If we can't field a strong enough team on Sunday it won't be the greatest marker for the rest of our season unless of course we somehow manage a win with a team thrown together and devoid of some of it's stars. 

With the league starting on Saturday and me running a fantasy league with approaching 500 teams in it I suppose I had better remind everybody to make their  final pick for their team before the game closes for the week. You have until 75 minutes before the early kick off on Saturday afternoon but I think Friday night is probably the best time to finalise your team. I'll try my best to preview all the games tomorrow in the absence of the Football Guy who carried out that task so admirably last season. If you have entered a team in my predictions league don't forget to make your predictions, use your bonuses and save all of it.

Finally for today with time running out it's still not too late to join my Fantasy league and 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.

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 Bergkamp's top 10 goals for Arsenal. After showing Wilshere's Bergkamp style goal yesterday I just had to show these.

See You Tomorrow.