If Sunday was Shkodran Mustafi day, then Monday most definitely belonged to Lucas Perez.
The frontman was set to hold a press conference at midday which caused much excitement only for Arsenal to (we assume) get wind of it and shut it down. Expected for training at the club tomorrow, we believe that the presser will take place later in the week to give Lucas the chance to say his goodbyes to Deportivo and their fans.
He was then snapped at Heathrow which caused a big internet hoo-ha.
The other big bit of transfer gossip was that Arsenal were said to be close to signing Miguel Almiron for €9.4m. A 22-year Paraguay winger who plays in Argentina, the player himself then heard about the rumours and said it that it would be ‘nice’ to play for Arsenal, but he hasn’t heard from them. That doesn’t mean there’s no truth to the rumour, of course, we thought, only to then get more quotes coming out of Chile, where he is on international duty with Paraguay. Those seemed to imply a deal could well be close, but I guess it depends on how you read the translation.
Actual news was light on the ground given that we’ve entered the first interlull of the season. Granit Xhaka will not be switching from Switzerland to Kosovo according to his father. Takuma Asano explained his stupid goal celebration, while Calum Chambers took a leap closer to a loan with Middlesbrough. Is that news? Or gossip? A bit of both, I guess. It looks like it’s just a formality before the deal is announced anyway, so let’s call it nessip.
Aaron Ramsey took his hair and dodgy hamstrings to the Reading festival. Nwakali Kelechi confirmed that the Twitter handles pretending to be him are fake, Arsenal ladies kept their slim hopes of qualifying for next season’s Champions League alive, Wojciech Szczesny threw away a two-goal lead with Roma and Joel Campbell enjoyed a winning debut as Sporting beat Porto in a game both sides love to win.
We also pulled up some stats that showed Theo Walcott is better at tackling (this season) than Granit Xhaka (I know!!), asked what we should do with the Ox, compiled a scouting report on Shkodran Mustafi to help you get a feel for the defender and also had a look at the vast difference in how the press have treated Paul Pogba since his mega move to United and Mesut Ozil when he first arrived to show a very clear anti-Ozil narrative in play. Well, we didn’t. We found it on Twitter and then tried to spread the word to as many people as possible.