Hello and welcome to a brand new R-Splug R-Skast, right here on R-Splug.com.

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Hope all is good with you and yours wherever you are in the world.

Now it's been World Cup World Cup World Cup all the way for the last couple of weeks because the World Cup has been on.

And there hasn't been any arsenal.

But today, Thursday at the time of recording, there has been some arsenal.

The players and the manager and the staff and all the other important people who help keep things ticking are in Dubai for the Dubai Super Dupercop.

And we played Leon, beat them 3-0, some nice football in the first half.

One of the worst penalty shootouts you will ever see at the end, even though we won 3-0 as a penalty shootout at the end of every game.

So teams can get a bonus point and the team that gets the most points will lift the prestigious Dubai Super Dupercop.

And as much as I might scoff, these games are actually kind of important because never before has there been a break in the middle of a season for a World Cup.

We don't know how players are going to react, we need them to be match fit.

And basically, this is pre-season 2, the re-seasoning, getting minutes into legs again, perhaps building up the confidence of some players who, depending on what happens in the rest of this World Cup, might be needed when the Premier League kicks off again on December 26th.

So in the grand scheme of things, not hugely important, but they do play a big part in what we've got to come.

And what we've got to come in the next five, six months is a hell of a lot of football. And there are some implications, of course, after the injury to Gabriel, Jesus.

He had knee surgery this week. What does that mean for Arsenal in the January market? What will we do? What should we do? What could we do?

Lots of questions. Do we have the answers? I don't quite know. But with me to thrash it all out is Lewis Ambrose. Hello, Lewis.

Hello, Andrew. It's been a while. It has been a while. It has been a while. Normally we talk very frequently because we do all the preview podcasts for Patreon, for the Premier League games. And of course, it haven't been any Premier League games.

We did have some Arsenal football today, though. So that was something a game against Leon in the Dubai Super Cup, a 3-0 win for Arsenal.

We're recording not long after that. I don't know how much we need to really go into the nuts and bolts of this because, you know, I thought we were quite good in the first half.

I thought Leon were pretty bad in the first half. And then also pretty bad in the second half. I don't want to take anything away from our valiant youngsters who came on and did pretty well.

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