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!