While Arsenal fans were trying to digest the devastating news that Gabriel Jesus will miss the next two or three months after an operation on his knee, we found out in Arsenal’s Dubai Cup game against Lyon that Oleks Zinchenko was not even in the squad for the Dubai Super Cup match, prompting worries that he was back on the treatment table again, which is becoming to be a very regular thing for the Ukranian.

Oleksandr Zinchenko not in today’s squad against Lyon is absolutely concerning for Arsenal. Already without Gabriel Jesus and potentially Benjamin White, Mikel Arteta could be missing several key players when the season restarts against West Ham on Boxing Day. #afc pic.twitter.com/bqY4ATNC2T

— Logan Caswell (@Loggy_caswell) December 8, 2022

Obviously we have reasons to worry about which players will be available for Arsenal’s game against West Ham on Boxing Day, but we now know that Gabriel Martnelli is on his way to join Mikel’s squad for training in Dubai, but Bukayo Saka is still in with a chance of going all the way to the World Cup Final and missing the game, and no-one knows what is really going on with Ben White at the moment.

But this afternoon it has been revealed that Zinchenko is still on track to face West Ham….

We have had a lot of opinions about Eddie Nketiah since Arsenal fans first heard about the devastating injury to Gabriel Jesus, and the consensus tells us that he is simply not good enough to start every game for the Gunners.

So I decided to do a little fact checking on his Arsenal statistics. So he started playing for the youth sides at 16 years old, and scored 24 goals in his first two seasons at the Academy.

His full record in the PL2 side (our reserves) he has started 28 times and scored 27 goals.

At 18 years old he made his seniour debut for Arsenal as a sub in the League Cup against Norwich. He scored twice to help us come back to win the game.

In that competition last season (2021/22), Eddie made 5 appearances and scored 5 goals. in fact he has scored 9 goals in 10 games in the League Cup in his career.

The Arsenal striker Bukayo Saka exploded into view at the World Cup with two super goals in England’s opening game against Iran.
He followed that up with the third England goal against Wales.

This has put him in the running for the Golden Boot, although to do that he would have to stop Mbappe from adding to his numbers today and put his France team out of the competition.

The fact is that before the competition even started there were many pundits saying that Phil Foden should be ahead of him in the starting line-up, but Southgate kept his faith in Saka and has been amply rewarded for his faith.

Saka believes that it is Southgate that has instilled the confidence in him to go out and perform. “When I have the trust of the manager to pick me in the starting team, despite all the attacking quality that we have, it gives me huge confidence.

Listen to him talking in this video….

Arsenal & England Women star Leah Williamson video interview with Rachel Yankey by Michelle

25 year old Leah notched up her 200th club appearance for Arsenal on Saturday, when our Gunners beat Everton 1-0 at Meadow Park. Leah signed for Arsenal at the tender age of just 9, back in 2006, having progressed through Arsenal’s Centre of Excellence.  She really is an Arsenal thoroughbred, through and through!

This video is a wonderful chance to look back through old photo’s of Leah with funny videos when she was a youngster – well, she still is at 25 lol!  It’s a brilliant chance to look at Leah’s career and she chats very openly with Arsenal and England legend Rachel Yankey.

Leah reminisces about her development as a player and a lifetime as a Gooner.  From her first tour with Arsenal’s under-10s to her senior debut and Women’s Super League wins, Leah’s seen it all in the red and white of Arsenal.

Eidevall talked about Leah’s return to the squad, after injury, in his Aston Villa Presser saying:

WILL EDU AND ARTETA LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES?

By  Ibiniyi Victor

The hugely productive and cohesive relationship between the Arsenal bosses Mikel Arteta and Edu Gasper has been fundamental to the progress recorded thus far by the club, both on and off the football pitch.

The management also deserve credit – firstly, for recruiting the now flourishing duo and secondly, for reassuring the gaffer of their faith and trust in him by offering him a new contract right in the middle of a losing run last season. I believe many will agree with me that this was an anomaly given the level of cruelty these football managers suffer when things start going wrong. There is no better way to show faith in a manager than this, and as a result, the manager has been able to focus even more on growing his team without bothering himself about the security of his job.

And yes, the work done thus far has been impressive but definitely not without some blips and mistakes along the line. Actions, either good or bad, have consequences and while some management/managers’ actions have resulted in the success or failure of their teams, it is not entirely difficult to admit that the failure to sign adequate cover during the last winter transfer window somehow cost the club a champions league spot at the end of the last campaign.

Dotun and Andy are joined by Nicky Bandini to look over a pair of cracking quarter-finals, as Croatia's gnarly persistence got the better of Neymar n co - the favourites are out! 

Elsewhere last night, Louis van Gaal bows out with typical good grace after their loss via judges' decision to Lionel Messi’s security team. We also look ahead to Morocco vs Portugal and pay our respects to the legendary Grant Wahl.

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Arsenal are back in action in the Women’s Super League action on Sunday 11th December, when head to Villa Park to take on 5th place Aston Villa.  Kick-off is at 16:15 UK.  Arsenal’s Away Allocation of tickets have already sold out but you can watch the match live on Sky Sports.

Ahead of this weekend’s match, Jonas Eidevall spoke to the media. Here’s what he said on Aston Villa in his Arsenal pre-match press conference:

Eidevall confirmed that there was no new team news after the recent return of Leah Williamson and Rafaelle Souza and no likely return of Kim Little and Lina Hurtig for the Villa game.

Eidevall noted his frustration at Arsenal’s performance in the last two games, where our Gunners won both games but only with the narrowest of margins at 1-0 against both Everton and Juventus, saying  I think going forward we need to do that better. Now we sit here with two 1-0 victories, and we’re all happy about that, but in both of these games, in the final minutes, both [opposition] teams have had free-kicks on the side that they haven’t been successful with. But we all know that the more times you let that happen, they will also be successful with that.

Rachel Daly is recognised as one of Villa’s star players and currently joint top goalscorer in the WSL this season.  Eidevall talks about Rachel and the Villa threat saying She’s been tremendous. Coming back, it felt like she was scoring everything for a time. Villa are a good team – they have a lot of different threats. Rachel Daly has been phenomenal so far this season, but it’s not only her. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to only [focus] on her. We need to focus on Villa as a whole team in order to deal with them and get the result we want.

On the evening of October 24, 2020, a guy who goes by the name Wenyang tweeted a picture of Hunter Biden. Hunter was facing a mirror in what looked like a hotel room, with his penis exposed.

Within an hour, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign asked Twitter to take down the post. We know this because journalist Matt Taibbi—using documents that Twitter owner Elon Musk provided to him—has been tweeting out internal communications between Twitter executives who, at the time, were discussing how to deal with material from Hunter’s laptop. Wenyang’s tweet is the third of five listed in a screenshot of an email from one Twitter staffer to another. “More to review from the the Biden team,” the email said. “Handled these,” a Twitter employee responded a few hours later.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

Taibbi did not explain what those five deleted tweets contained. But using the Internet Archive, you can see that three of them featured explicit images of Hunter Biden. One doesn’t work. Another is a video, which won’t play now, but probably showed sexual activity. All of those I was able to access violated Twitter’s rules.

Our newest Hale End superstar Bukayo Saka gave a very frank interview last week, where Arsenal’s young striker admitted that his biggest regret was never getting to meet Arsene Wenger, our legendary manager.

Well this week they are both in Qatar, and in an interview with L’Equipe Wenger was flattered by Saka saying that, and replied: “That’s very nice of him. We’ll end up meeting each other one day, of course,” he said.

“I’m happy about his development and the fact he’s still playing at Arsenal. I was told about him when I was still at the club, he was one of two or three guys who were coming through. I heard some very good things about him, I’m told he has a very good mentality.

“That’s reassuring because these days, players are glorified so quickly that it’s important for them to have good foundations.”

Of course, as FIFA’s Director of Development, Arsène Wenger will be helping at the Al-Bayt Stadium this evening as Bukayo Saka’s England take on the holders France in the Quarter Final of the World Cup, and despite Gareth Southgate having Saka and Ramsdale in the squad, Le Prof still believes that France are the better side, and has even predicted them to win the trophy.

How grief, fear and addiction helped shape the 30-year-old film