It doesn’t seem that long ago, during the dark days of Arsene Wenger, Arsenal had a whole squad full of international players, including a lot of our reserves, and the fans dreaded the inconsequential breaks during the season which invariably ended up with a couple of our players in the treatment room.
Well we don’t need to worry too much about that these days. In fact at the last World Cup, we only had 8 players in the competition, and that included fringe players like Joel Campbell, David Ospina, Danny Welbeck and Elneny. Welbeck was our only player with England and he only managed to get on the pitch for 11 minutes in total!
So, who do we have that are full senior internationals in the current Arsenal squad? Well, Maitland-Niles is our only English senior, and he was only a late call up after Harry Maguire got demoted. England have games in the Uefa Nations League against Iceland and Denmark, so it will be interesting to see if he has impressed Gareth Southgate enough to get a game…
Bernd Leno has joined up with Germany, but he has just returned from injury and is unlikely to play anyway.
Granit Xhaka is Switzerland’s captain and is a certain starter against Ukraine and Germany.
Sead Kolasinac is always in Bosnia’s team, and Kieran Tierney should be a starter for Scotland going on his recent form, and that my friends, is Arsenal’s full complement of senior internationals this week.
We do have Saka, Nelson and Nketiah in the England U21’s, and the interesting one should be seeing how Matteo Guendouzi gets on with the French U21s. Maybe we’ll find out a bit more about what is going on there…
At least we won’t have to worry too much about our players coming back from the internationals with injuries!
OT.. Oooh we have a friendly this afternoon at London Colney against QPR…
Arsenal to play two, possibly three, BCD games before the season opener at Fulham on Saturday week.
Willian, Laca, Pepe, Ozil all back at Colney yesterday as Arteta’s squad starts to come together again. Understand Gabriel was even allowed on site for the squad’s Covid testing.
I like it,it means a lot of our senior players gets to stay back, and like you said we won’t get that much injury worries.
Our past youngsters were such a let down, and it’s the environment they grew up in I blame. The likes of Saka, Smith Rowe, Nelson should count themselves lucky because Arteta wants to fill the squad with quality senior players. So definitely it’ll improve the growth and game of the kids.
Like I used to say, would you imagine how Guendouzi would’ve improved his game after his first season if he was playing alongside Xavi and Iniesta?
Truth is, squad matters a lot, it influences a lot of players.
Aubameyang is a senior player, right now he’s happy, he’s rubbing his vibes off the kids, his relationship with Saka and especially Niles, everything… Compare it to when he was sad and uninterested, perfect example was the way he reacted towards Willock last season after Willock misplaced a pass.
With a lot of quality players coming in, I expect Saka and co, their game to massively improve because they’ll only grow to be better.
Oh now Goal (Aka Online news or newspaper) are reporting Partey is very keen to come to Arsenal, but he won’t force anything to make the deal successful, also repeated he’s top priority.
I knew all of this before, like I said, he has personal agreement with Arsenal, he’s not leaving Atletico if he’s not coming to Arsenal, he has assured Arsenal, it’s why Arsenal want are focused on Aouar for now. For Partey It’s either London or Madrid.
The only thing that could make the deal faster is if we sell the players we want to on time.
Pray our player sales gets through on time
The reason we don’t have many internationals any more is fairly simple…..we aren’t very good. We may have won the FA Cup, but many teams are improving and our team, as it is at present, could still finish around 8th. I’ll believe we have a chance of 4th when we make some REAL signings.
It’s seems to be a while since we signed a current, full English International who may have been Welbeck?In any event, the fact that a player is or has been an International is largely irrelevant.It’s how they perform in the Premier League now that matters.
I wonder how many of our so-called `dross players” were internationals?
Here’s a few to get you thinking… Walcott, Iwobi, Giroud, The Ox…all deemed as useless by some.
Can’t be bothered to delve any further, some fans get what they deserve.
Iwobi was dross Ken ,no getting away for
That one ,on par with the Emery on what he bought to this team 😂
No comment regarding Iwobi Dan, but you get my point about the other dross players?
I take Grandads point, of course, but the article was about internationals within our ranks.
Yea I do Ken ,not a word I would use TBH.
No comment regarding Emery ?😂
Emery? Dross, mentally frail, a thief, lazy, not wanted at the club, filth, loathed?
No, I’m better than that, just the wrong person for our club – should have listened to Arsene Wenger yet again… we would have had MA eighteen months before he came.
At Ken
Brother you’re just awesome! Your squeezing the life out of the “dross ” realists.
Jah son 👍👌
Our players aren’t internationals because they either have t proved anything at club level or there’s better players ahead of them in their respective positions.
We have a stockpile of average talent I. The team that have led us to average league finishing positions.
Some of our players are just unlucky For example lacazette (mbappe, griezmann etc) but for the most part our players are just…..well……bang average at best.
I’m addition to this if the international players we do have were registered as English how many of them would still be internationals? Food for thought
The paucity of top notch internationals among our rank reflects our current standing in the league.
we will be there soon!
Can`t remember the year but it would probably be late 1940`s, Arsenal put out a reserve side because England played Scotland and Wales played Ireland on the same day and all players were out on international duty.
We have many more internationals in our team,some retired,some are still playing:
Sead kolasinac-bosnia
Martinez-argentina
Leno-germany
Tierney-scotland
Amn-england
Soares-portugal
Bellerin-spain
David luiz-brazil
Sokratis-greece
Mustafi- Germany
Xhaka-greece
Ceballos-spain
Torriera-uruguay
Elneny-egypt
Willian-brazil
Pepe-ivory coast
Auba-gabon
*xhaka-switzerland