Hello everyone, here is a little summary of Saturday for you.

Team news, etc. Before Chelsea can wait until we preview the match in tomorrow’s blog, but there was a brief update on some players present during Mikel Arteta’s press conference yesterday. There was also a bit in the press that Martin Odegaard might join Norway for Interlull.

At first I interpreted this as the captain of his country accompanying his teammates, but the reports seem based on the idea that he might play. Arteta said yesterday:

Let’s see how he is, how he trains tomorrow. He is available, he is fit, if he plays, it all depends on how he feels afterwards, and then we will make the decision between the three parties.

On the one hand, you could see how this could be useful to us in getting him back into some physical shape. On the other hand, I can’t help but think it’s a little crazy that after such a long time away, he’s allowed to leave. Perhaps, as we have done with Thomas Partey in the past, we send one of our physiotherapists with him to make sure he is properly looked after (no disrespect to the Norwegian medical staff by the way).

My intuition tells me this is a really bad idea. Maybe it’s entirely fear-based on my part. He might as well get hit in practice, but unless there’s a very strict agreement on how many minutes he can play, I’d be very wary of letting that happen. But ultimately, if it takes an edict from a player’s club to restrict his involvement in his country, then he’s probably not ready.

After a poor run of form last season, the team headed to warm weather training in Dubai, after which we won 16 out of 18 in the Premier League, losing just once in what was extraordinary form. There is of course no possibility of doing that now, but the manager was asked if he could do anything to change the atmosphere. His response:

Yeah, we don’t know where it clicked. Because if instead of going to Dubai, we give ourselves a week off and you see the team in Las Vegas for a week, killing it all night, we come back the next week and we lose two games ‘in a row, I’m in. my house. I’m fired.

If they go to Las Vegas, they do this and we win three times in a row, you tell me now, send the boys to Las Vegas because they’re going to kill it afterwards. I don’t know!

But, more seriously, he continues:

We will do something different. Every day I think it’s about trying to do something that improves the mood, the energy, the confidence in this team, in these players to be the best version of ourselves. This is what we try every day without exception.

Let’s hope that whatever antics he gets up to this weekend on the training ground, whether it’s pickpockets, lemons, music blaring from the speakers, three young children standing uns on the shoulders and wearing an overcoat to disguise himself as a very tall and oddly shaped man, it helps the team get a result at Stamford Bridge on Sunday.

Elsewhere, there are interesting stuff from Opta on the number of yellow cards handed out in the Premier League this season:

We see on average 5.1 yellow cards distributed per match. Again, that might not seem like much more on a single game basis, but it’s a 21.1% increase over the previous all-time high. Extrapolate that over a full season and last season’s total of 1,602 yellow cards becomes 1,940.

A total of 1,940 yellow cards would also represent a 41.2% increase from the 2022-23 season, and yet it still only requires a player to receive five yellow cards in the first 19 matchdays.

There is so much discussion about referees, and much of it revolves around the quality and consistency of the decisions they make. As Arsenal fans our senses are particularly keen, because without going down the conspiracy route or anything like that, I think we can genuinely point to decisions made against us that have never been reviewed . The two red cards this season, for example; Takehiro Tomiyasu’s red card against Crystal Palace; Double yellow for Gabriel Martinelli in 7 seconds; Granit Xhaka is sent off for a deliberate trip, but nothing more.

We were marked, there is no doubt about it. The most important point for me is that I cannot escape the feeling that Howard Webb made a conscious decision to make officials stars of the Premier League soap opera. Not a single weekend goes by without one of its referees being at the forefront, and if that doesn’t happen on the pitch, you can be sure that VAR will intervene, for often spurious reasons, to ensure that we are all talking about PGMOL.

He now has his own TV show; he appears on The Overlap on Sky Sports described as “legendary”; broadcast cameras film him in the stands when a controversial call occurs during a game he is attending. It’s very deliberate. The man charged with responsibility for a fundamental part of football sees this as an opportunity to make himself more visible. I can’t say for sure if he’s hungry, or even hungry, for fame, but it looks like it.

As for the yellow card stat, if it made the game better you’d have no complaints. Instead, we see players continue to get away with acts of dangerous and violent driving, while red cards are issued for trivialities – and all the while, they try to bore us with nonsense according to whose decisions are “the letter of the law”. On a weekend where it’s once again Michael Oliver in charge, I suggest Arsenal fans buckle in for what seems like the inevitable, but hopefully we can play well enough to that the nonsense he invents becomes a secondary problem tomorrow.

Finally, Arsenal Women beat Brighton 5-0 last night, and you can catch up on all the action, goal clips, post-match reactions and more. Arseblog News. You can also register for Tim’s weekly newsletter here.

We have our Preview of the Chelsea Podcast on Patreon now if you’re looking for something to listen to. You can sign up for just $6 per month, and there’s also an annual subscription option that gives you instant access to everything with a 10% discount. Have a great Saturday, friends.