Arsenal and Liverpool Ready To Rule English Football?

Morning all.

Where would we be without the internet eh? Lost, absolutely lost I suspect and when the internet crashes, darn, Highbury House suffers with a later than usual post. I’m sure we’ll cope though….

Anyway, not a lot of news around about Arsenal and I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m still pretty cheesed off about last Saturday’s result and of course our injury situation. What a pickle we are in! Some good news though relating to Theo Walcott and Serge Gnabry who are both nearing a return. Fingers crossed Aaron Ramsey isn’t too far behind them.

Mesut Ozil as we know has joined the extensive injury list and in his absence, there has been many calls for Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to take his place. To be honest, I’d rather he stays out wide as he gives us pace and directness but if Walcott really is ready to start, perhaps moving Oxlade-Chamberlain central makes sense. Right now it’s about getting the best from who we have fit and that number seems to decrease as the days go by and with one more international fixture to take place before we face Hull, goodness only knows who we’ll have fit next weekend.

Talking of the internationals, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has been talking about how good it is to have so many club team-mates together when playing for England and he believes they can ‘do a Spain’:

Spain have a big influence from Real Madrid and Barcelona. When you go and watch Spain play it’s almost like watching Barca or Real at times, with the number of players they have on the pitch.

It is a nice thing to have that with Arsenal at the moment. You do notice a lot more of an English presence around the club, it’s hard not to. It’s a nice thing as an English lad myself.

You know all the foreign boys in our team are really good, but it’s really nice to see a lot of great English players in our team and then coming away for the internationals.

Just knowing each other, off the pitch and on it, does really help in gelling the team together.

The Germans and the Spanish have been able to do that. Liverpool have got a good number of players as well.

It’s not just those two clubs, everyone who comes away really does integrate well with the team and helps us to ­hopefully be successful.

Talking of Liverpool, having had such a great season last term, it’s a surprise to see them have just a slow start to this season and because of that, their odds to win the league have dropped dramatically.

Both club and country will benefit of course as the more players play and train together, the better the understanding will be.

Arsenal was able to brag that five players represented England on Thursday night, a far cry from those years when Arsene Wenger fielded an all foreign starting eleven.

The other big positive is it means there is a growing ­understanding between the players who are team-mates for both club and country and that showed when Danny Welbeck scored his goal:

When you train day in, day out with these lads, you get to know the way they play. You can’t help but take that into the international break when you come away.

When they’re all on the pitch with you, you do know their characteristics and where they’re going to pass the ball and where they like the ball to be passed. It definitely helps.

When I got that ball down the line I knew Calum was going to be able to find me first and foremost, and I knew Danny likes to make that run to the front post.

It’s the same for the ­Liverpool lads. They’ve been a strong force in this England squad for a while.

The training we’ve been doing. It’s not just the lads that train together for clubs, we’ve been working hard all week to get patterns of play together, we’re going to work on and try and implement them in the games and I think we did that.

Both Liverpool and ourselves might be having a frustrating start to the season, it’s quite clear that players from both clubs are going to be the backbone of the England team for a long time to come….

Have a good Saturday, what’s left of it……