Arsenal 2-1 Chelsea win changes the transfer-window conversation

Arsenal’s win over Chelsea put the transfer debate into perspective, with the champions showing why their existing squad may already be strong enough.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a bit of a head-spinner of a week.

I think the clearest example of this is that what you’re reading now is my third attempt to get something down since you last heard from me. I guess a lot’s happened in that time. Obviously, we went to Aston Villa and beat them with an ultra-controlled, professional performance, despite their best efforts to rough us up.

Then Arsenal confirmed the previously trailed departure of Gabriel Martinelli. I am very much one of those people who thought it was time, past time in fact, for him to go. But you’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel incredibly sad at the departure of one of the symbols of Arsenal’s 2020s rebirth.

I don’t have a heart of stone.

And then, a real early-season tester, the visit of the South West London arrivistes. I don’t know if I’ve ever explicitly said the following here, I guess it’s not something that needs saying. Nonetheless, I am going to state it here: it’s not just that I dislike Chelsea, I despise them.

I despise the racism. I despise the way they bought their way to the top table, waving £50 notes at us from the Clock End. I despise the way that, even with their huge financial advantages, they still cheated, cooking their books to protect their interests. I despise them for the trophies they won that they had no business winning and how they rubbed it in our faces.

I guess I can say all that now we’ve got the Premier League trophy back in the cabinet.

Anyway, I just wanted to clarify for you, dear reader, the fact that I find games against Chelsea incredibly stressful. Perhaps more so than the ones against Spurs as, aside from all the historical stuff, Chelsea seem relatively capable of getting a result against us and Spurs are, well, Spurs.

So, conceding a goal to, who else, Morgan Rogers after 77 seconds yesterday was not the start to the game that I needed. I suppose that goes without saying too.

However, suffering the absolute indignity of going a goal down early seemed to awaken something in our players. There have been flashes of it since the domestic season opened in Cardiff, but always with the caveat that it’s only the Community Shield, it’s only Coventry… Well, yesterday afternoon, it was “only” Chelsea. And we slapped them around the Emirates, shaking off the disappointment of a Riccardo Calafiori equaliser being correctly ruled out for offside.

We absolutely brutalised them until we got back into the game and then went on to win it with that wonderful Martin Odegaard goal in the second half.

It was something to see, wasn’t it?

And I think, for me, it threw much of the angst around the last week of the window into sharp relief.

Part of this is that I’m never that emotionally invested in transfers. I never liked talking about them on our old podcast and I generally only start to think about new players once they’ve signed for us. The obvious exception to this rule is when it looked like Ebere Eze was going to Spurs and I was reckoning with possibly having to dislike a player that I really wanted to come here.

Obviously, that worked out pretty well, so what was the point in worrying to begin with?

Anyway, my point being, I don’t worry about signings Arsenal don’t make. And I look at our squad, the Champions of England no less, and I think they’re pretty good, right?

The idea that we haven’t strengthened doesn’t track for me.

We’ve signed one of the best midfielders in the Premier League in Bruno Guimaraes and a defender in Ezri Konsa who has seriously reduced our risk whilst William Saliba gets his back, er, back. That’s not the kind of business Arsenal have historically done when defending a Premier League title.

I completely accept that we have lost two players from the left side of our attack and only procured one, Christos Tzolis. I also accept that we’ve lost Gabriel Jesus who, though he looked a pale shadow of himself for most of the minutes he did play, also scored some important goals for us last season.

But I look at the absolute chaos that Martin Odegaard, Kai Havertz and Bukayo Saka have caused in the opening four games of this season and I think that keeping these three players fit this season, as well as ensuring they remain so at the business end, is far more important than any signing Arsenal could have made.

More than that, who was out there for Arsenal of that quality? Okay, yes, the guy who scored Chelsea’s 77-second opener on Sunday was available, and perhaps we should have just gone in on him before he became £117m worth of footballer.

If a frog had wings and all that…

Daniel Sturridge talked after the game about how Cole Palmer would get into this Arsenal team, but aside from the shot he skied into the Clock End, you only had two yellow-card-worthy fouls to know he was on the pitch.

I mentioned Eze up above and one of the questions I’ve had in my mind throughout the transfer chat this summer is what was going to happen to him if we signed, for example, a Vini Jr, or even a Morgan Rogers?

The signing of Bruno G. has added another top-quality player in central areas and, with MLS currently bossing central midfield, there’s another space taken. The club captain is evidently on a one-man mission to feed as much humble pie as possible to anyone who doubted him, yes, me included, and that’s before we get to Declan Rice, or Martin Zubimendi, or Mikel Merino.

Simply put, the make-up of the squad now demands that Eze is one of the two main options on the left wing, because that’s where the space is for him. It’s not like he’s not capable of playing there either, as he showed on Monday night.

He’s never going to be the all-action option we’re used to seeing there in Martinelli, or indeed with Tzolis, but he can still do enough to influence a game.

Such is the strength of this squad, Ebs has been restricted to 15 minutes against Coventry and that second half against Aston Villa.

Gyokeres has just seen his first minutes since the Community Shield, it showed, and the World Cup winners in midfield have been incidental.

As the games begin to ramp up with the commencement of this year’s Champions League, surely that is going to change very soon.

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