The boss Mikel Arteta saw his side gain a little more fitness ahead of the upcoming season in a good workout against Monaco in front of 60,000 fans, and the Only One Arsene Wenger.
Eddie Nketiah was named as captain for the night, maybe with Mikel Arteta wanting him to know he was still a valued member of the squad, especially with Gabriel Jesus out with an injury, and he repaid Arteta’s faith by being in the box at the right time to score Arsenal’s equaliser.
Arsenal are not winning all their pre-season games, like we did last summer, but we seem to be introducing more players and more tactics into the mix as we head towards the new season. I don’t think either coach will be reading too much into the Community Shield result next week, but let’s hope that everybody knows what we are doing by the time we play forest in two week’s time.
Arteta was reasonably happy with the day’s work, he said: “There were some improvements. We had minutes for a lot of players that didn’t have many minutes in pre-season, which was a key thing for us today to achieve. We did that and came through the game.
“There are players that haven’t played a lot of football in the last five months and they got some minutes, especially in the last two weeks, so that’s really good to see. I think the new players are fitting in really well – we have to still fix a few things which is normal because they’re coming from different environments, but they’re looking good.”
“It’s true that we struggled, especially in the first half, to control the game better,” he added.”I felt that we were a bit leggy after coming back from the West Coast and we tried to prepare really hard for the last two days before the game, and we were a bit late in everything we were doing.
“We picked it up in the second half, we had better moments but it wasn’t enough to win the game there. But at least we won it on penalties.”
All in all, other than the tame defeat by Man United, it has been an entertaining and informative pre-season schedule,
Now let’s see how we get on against the Treble Winners next week at Wembley….
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