This week saw the Arsenal players Granit Xhaka and Takehiro Tomiyasu exit the World Cup and should now be immediately flying straight to Dubai to join up with their team-mates for the Dubai Super Cup and resume training ahead of the season restart in a few weeks time.
Maybe Tomiyasu was feeling a little tired and emotional after Japan lost on penalties to Croatia, as after the game he was asked if he would now fly to Dubai. He replied: ‘I don’t know.
‘Hopefully I can get a bit of rest. I need time to forget about football. I need a bit of time.’
Then the next day we saw Xhaka’s Switzerland get massacred by Portugal, but our tough midfielder showed the right attitude when asked the same question by the media. His reply was: ‘Of course, emotionally it is not easy. But this is part of our business, part of football.
‘You have to recover well. The Premier League is waiting and, of course, I wanted to be here longer than this. But we lost the game today and I am happy to go back now with the team.”
That’s the spirit we want to see! It’s hardly like Tomi has been overplayed. He only had about 190 minutes in Qatar and has been in and out of our EPL and Europa League teams, whereas Xhaka has started nearly every single game for Arsenal and Switzerland.
Well it is now being reported that Tomi has flown to Dubai after all, and I would have liked to hear what Arteta said to him. I imagine it was something like – “Man up son, we’ve got a title race to concentrate on!”
Let’s hope he now puts his head down and gets on with it, for his sake and ours…
Darren N
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