Hello and welcome to a brand new arse blog arscast right here on arseblog.com.

Thank you very much indeed as always for being here.

I hope you're all well.

We are in Lisbon and I'm in a hotel room with Andrew Allen. Good morning to you, Andrew.

Good morning. What a privilege it is to be here with you. Thank you. It's slightly odd as well at the same time, I must say.

Yeah, yeah. The whole face-to-face recording thing is like... Yeah, it's different. Yeah, it is a bit different. But we're here because Arsenal were in town last night and came away from the stadium

with a 1-0 win over sporting, which is, I think, a moment that this team absolutely needed.

We might get into the nuts and bolts of that in a minute now, but

let's start with the team, I guess. No big surprise about the starting lineup we had,

Declan Rice, Martin Zubimendi, Victor Yocquez, Nani Madueque, all back in the team. Gabrielle

Fitt, Leandro Trussar, back after the game against Southampton,

obviously quite a number of changes.

Yeah, and I think much needed as well.

I think almost people forgot that we had all of these players after the two defeats and were panicking,

and there was a certain level of calm restored, especially seeing Raya back in goal, I have to say. And yeah, I mean, I don't, as you say, I don't think there was really any surprises there. I mean, there might have been some people asking for Max Dalman to start again off the back of the weekend, but I think as you mentioned in the blog the other day, like, I mean, he's so young. He might need to protect his legs a little bit,

and he does get kicked around.

But yeah, I mean, you know,

I imagine he was hoping Victor Yocrys would be particularly pumped

about being back at sporting as well,

and no bad thing to give Havats a little breather as well.

So in terms of how it all began, there was obviously a fairly good chance for sporting early on.

In the opening six, seven minutes, I can't remember.

...