By Cameron Sheath

The world feels a little more normal this week off the back of some good old-fashioned domestic football. I continue to be perplexed at football’s apparent determination to make necessary changes as unnecessarily complicated as possible.

Want goal-line technology? Let us first experiment with the idea of placing extra officials by the goal, who also don’t have the correct line of sight, due to those pesky white posts being in the way.

Want a video assistant to help get the big decisions correct? We’ll do it; but we’ll need to stop the game for several minutes to determine whether or not the referee was clearly and obviously wrong. Then, having watched countless replays to make sure he was definitely wrong, we’ll make him run half the length of the pitch to watch those exact same replays, so that he too can determine that he was definitely wrong.

He can then pause again to explain to the crowd that he’s giving a penalty, before blowing his whistle and pointing to the penalty spot, because communication is key.

A recent survey I’ve thought about doing determined that roughly 143% of football fans detest international breaks. Yet when the season ends and there’s an international tournament to be played, the entire nation becomes one, and the national team is all anyone cares about. Instead of elongated breaks and nonsense tournaments nobody cares about, why not just save the internationals until the end of the season?

Tournaments on the even years; qualifiers on the odd years. The lack of interruptions means the season finishes earlier, allowing for a tournament-style qualifying schedule, all completed within a month with one squad announced each year. Internationals become “bonus” football at the end of the season and everyone can fully get behind it. International management ceases to be a full-time job and club managers can be selected for national-team duty each year (maybe a step too far, but why not?).

Anyway, that’s quite the rant for an introduction, so here’s the actual blog.

Bruno Guimarães

Arsenal’s signing of Bruno Guimarães this summer was an odd one from a numbers standpoint. The club already had a crowded midfield, and whilst the departure of Christian Nørgaard made it seem like a simple one-in-one-out transaction, the Gunners had essentially already acquired an extra central midfielder in Myles Lewis-Skelly.

MLS looked to be the next Emile Smith-Rowe midway through last season, a player with obvious talent whose growth had simply been outpaced by that of the club’s. A switch back to midfield completely changed the trajectory of his career, though, and he now looks set for a bright future for both Arsenal and England.

The Bruno signing reminds me a lot of Granit Xhaka’s arrival. A player with a reputation for the nastier side of the game, which often tricks us into pigeon-holing them as a tough-tackling holding midfielder. It wasn’t until later in his Arsenal career that Xhaka was used further up the pitch, after years of graft in a defensive role that didn’t really suit him. Guimarães, for all of his bite, is a phenomenally gifted creator, whose flair and eye for a pass makes him a far more attacking signing than many gave him credit for.

Mikel Merino’s natural sense of adventure, coupled with his ingenuity and penalty-box prowess, has seen him shift from an all-purpose super-sub, into Mikel Arteta’s preferred backup for Martin Ødegaard. All things considered, while it may have seemed that Nørgaard was the man to make way for Bruno, it seems to have actually been Eberechi Eze, who sadly continues to look like a loose end.

Bukayo Saka

Bukayo Saka has faced a great deal of criticism lately. While some of that is nonsense, it would also be ignorant to suggest he’s been anywhere close to his best to start the new campaign. Early in his career, I’d barely look up if Saka was put through on goal, as finishing was a huge weakness in his game. That has changed dramatically down the years, as has his ability to threaten with both feet, making him the complete winger and one of the most feared in world football when at his best.

But besides a few scrappy (albeit sometimes important) goals, the England star has left a lot of production on the table already this season. I don’t doubt that his form will return, but it’s been a while since he put a full season together, and the next step for this team is surely to strengthen our depth out wide like we have done in midfield and defence.

However, Saka was also noticeably less effective with Cristhian Mosquera playing behind him last season. For all his effort and defensive ability, the young Spaniard is very much a classic centre half. Jurriën Timber and Ben White are equally effective in attack as they are in defence, and for all his individual ability, Saka is both a key contributor and benefactor of a well-oiled machine down Arsenal’s right.

It’s possible that the lack of a top-level threat on the left inhibits Saka in the same way as the lack of a Timber or White behind him, but we’ll never know unless the club ever suitably addresses that issue.

Arsenal Women

For Arsenal’s women to be out of the title race by early October is incredibly disappointing, especially given some of the points they’ve dropped. Draws against Crystal Palace and Manchester United, coupled with lackluster 1-0 victories over Brighton and Koge, left little hope for anything more than the zero points we picked up on our travels to Chelsea and Manchester City.

The collapse against Paris, and the nature of the French side’s second goal, epitomizes the way things have gone for Arsenal this season. Renée Slegers has banked plenty of good will in North London, and every team has their wobbles, but things can’t go on as they have been.

The double substitutions out wide, coupled with the constant dropping of Alessia Russo into midfield to make room for Stina Blackstenius, has made Arsenal a painfully predictable team to play against. Six minutes before Arsenal’s first substitutions against City, the home side brought on fresh legs at both full-back positions. Maybe I’m reading too much into that, but surely if I feel like I know what Slegers is about to do, opposition managers do too.

For me, Arsenal’s primary four wingers (Olivia Smith, Chloe Kelly, Lisa Baum, and Caitlin Foord) are not of equal standard. Caitlin Foord hasn’t scored for Arsenal since March, and scored just twice all of last season, yet has featured in every game of this campaign. Baum, meanwhile, already has two goals this year and looks like doing something every time she receives the ball.

The 19-year-old German could soon be one of the most feared attacking players in the WSL, and yet she is being brought off in big games when Arsenal need a goal. The influx of new players this summer has certainly played a part in the team’s stuttering start, but the constant rotation is starting to feel like a lack of meritocracy.

Manchester City

Lastly, since it’s already been discussed at nauseum, I wanted to get my thoughts on the City scandal down in writing.

While City’s owners and their oil-rich family members and business connections heap political and financial pressure on the UK government and the Premier League, the team remains top of the table. If City had hoped to starve the story of oxygen then it was lost on their insufferable fans, who instead stoked the fire with a predictably shameless display of ignorant defiance and even pride.

I don’t like the constant mentioning of the appeal process, as though the overwhelming guilty verdicts are now put on hold. They’re not on hold, and City know full well they don’t have any evidence to have them scrapped. While the appeal may take a while, there is no reason the Premier League can’t impose, at the very least, a transfer ban, to prevent them loading up in January like they did this summer.

I also oppose the notion that, since we can only prove that City cheated until 2018, anything after that is fair game. Everything City have attained during their current ownership was done so on the back of financial doping. That includes their treble, the two domestic cups they won last season, down to the three points they just picked up at Anfield and the fancy coaches they subsequently fucked off on.

City have benefitted from over £900 million in tampered accounting, and so any fine should be upward of that, spaced out over nine or 10 years. While many argue that money doesn’t matter to the owners, it does to the club, especially with the strict financial auditing it will no-doubt face over the next decade.

If the panel recommends expulsion from the league, the clubs will still have to vote on it, which I think makes it a suitable recommendation. Failing that, a points deduction that sees them relegated, and a hefty points deduction each year that they are a Premier League club moving forward, for a set period of time. Either way, the outcome has to be that City is playing in a different division next season, and that it can’t get near the top of the game for at least another decade.

That’s it for this one, but there’ll be content throughout the coming days as Arsenal face Lille in the Champions League.