The Guardian - 30.07.2019

Section:GDN 1N PaGe:39 Edition Date:190730 Edition:03 Zone: Sent at 29/7/2019 23:59 cYanmaGentaYellowb

Tuesday 30 July 2019 The Guardian •••

Sport^39

Football Premier League preview

Football

In brief

Bournemouth

Billing moves from

Huddersfi eld for £15m

Philip Billing has joined
Bournemouth from Huddersfi eld
for an undisclosed fee believed
to be around £15m. The Denmark
Under-21 midfi elder said: “I’m
delighted to become a Bournemouth
player .” The 23-year-old, who made
91 appearances in all competitions
for Huddersfi eld after joining from
Esbjerg in 2013, added: “As soon as I
heard of the club’s interest there was
never any doubt in my mind. It was
an easy decision to make to come
into a squad which is full of talented,
international players and working
with a manager of Eddie Howe’s
quality.” Guardian sport

Manchester United

Inter unlikely to

increase Lukaku off er

Internazionale’s chief executive,
Beppe Marotta, has suggested the
club will not be increasing their
reported £54m off er for Manchester
United’s striker Romelu Lukaku,
who has been left out of his team’s
squad for today’s friendly against
Kristiansund in Norway. Marotta
believes their off er is one that fi ts the
value of Lukaku. “We made a strong
off er, one that is valid and suited to
the transfer value of the player and
we were unable to conclude a deal,”
he told Sky Sport Italia. PA

Newcastle

Chelsea’s Scott and

Turner of Bolton join

Newcastle have signed the former
Chelsea midfi elder Kyle Scott and
the former Bolton goalkeeper Jake
Turner. Scott, 21, made his sole
fi rst-team appearance for Chelsea in
the FA Cup against Hull in February

2018. He spent last season on
      loan at the Dutch second-tier side
      Telstar, scoring twice in 14 league
      appearances. PA

Wo lve s

Cutrone expected

to sign from Milan

Wolves are expected to complete the
signing of the Milan forward Patrick
Cutrone today. The 21-year-old
Italian will sign a fi ve-year contract
at Molineux. Guardian sport

The midfi elder Philip

Billing is ‘delighted’ to

be joining Bournemouth

No 1: Arsenal

Late signings look key to

quelling fan unrest while

captain Koscielny looks to

move on and the club faces

growing threats from below

Nick Ames

I

t was still possible to

believe Laurent Koscielny

when, among the standard

new-signing platitudes,

he described Arsenal as “a

reference for football”. It was

July 2010 and they had just fi nished

third in the Premier League, 11 points

shy of the champions Chelsea, but

the afterglow of Arsène Wenger’s

best days had not quite faded and

the most fi scally painful moments

of the heave into the Emirates

Stadium appeared to have passed.

Two months later Ivan Gazidis,

never shy to expound a grand vision

during his time as chief executive,

struck a similar note with regard to

their off -fi eld planning. “The game

is increasingly looking towards

Arsenal as a model of what a football

club should be,” he said. “However,

we have to keep moving forwards –

standing still is never an option.”

Presumably “lurching backwards”

was not on his checklist either but

Arsenal go into this season with

their place among the division’s

elite looking no more secure than a

year ago. A measure of how

expectations have gradually slipped

since those optimistic days at the

decade’s turn is off ered by the fact

that, while they can rightly aim to

overhaul at least one of Tottenham

and Chelsea en route to a fi rst top-

four fi nish in four years, there is as

much to concern them in the forms

of Leicester, Wolves and Everton

narrowing the gap below.

Excuses have become a staple

in their part of north London but,

in one sense, those will run out

this year. Unai Emery deserved

a more or less free hit in 2018-19

and those spying an end to the

retrograde trend will point out

they fi nished one place and seven

points better off  than in Wenger’s

farewell campaign. There were some

punchier home performances and

a run to the Europa League fi nal,

much as that ended ignominiously.

But for a club that had been so

rooted in his predecessor’s ideals it

was hard, for much of the season, to

defi ne what Emery’s style was; a fact

not helped by his reluctance, either

in Spanish or his stoic attempts at

English, to off er inquisitors many

morsels of explanation.

The bottom line is that Emery

must return Arsenal to the

Champions League and, should he

not manage it , the break clause in

his contract will look tempting for

all parties next summer. Received

wisdom has been that he must do it

with a hand tied behind his back so it

was to some surprise when, over the

weekend, news emerged that Lille

had accepted their club record £72m

off er for Nicolas Pépé. The Ivorian is

an outstanding wide forward who

scored 22 Ligue 1 goals last season;

if Napoli’s interest is dismissed then

Arsenal will possess three prolifi c

front men and again look like a club

that can master the French market.

It would be a bold, timely statement.

There may not be much left in the

budget after that although a move for

Kieran Tierney, the impressive Celtic

left-back, may eventually succeed.

Getting Pépé over the line would

boost morale but further changes

are required. While bigger deals

bubble away Emery has gone with

the market he knows best in loaning

the 22-year-old Dani Ceballos

from Real Madrid. It looks a smart

move: Ceballos is a confi dent, spiky

technician who could liven up a

turgid midfi eld immeasurably.

Two new 18-year-olds off er

distinct promise and should, in time,

help freshen up an ageing squad.

Those who have watched Gabriel

Martinelli, signed from the Brazilian

club Ituano, suggest the forward is

good enough to be spared the endless

cycle of career-stalling loan moves

commonly bestowed upon punts

from South America. The arrival

of William Saliba, an exceptionally

promising defender from Saint-

Étienne who will be loaned back to

the Ligue 1 club, counts as a minor

coup after he rejected interest from

Tottenham. The slightest evidence

of local supremacy is richly welcome

these days. The striker Eddie Nketiah

and midfi elder Joe Willock, both

academy products, impressed during

a productive pre-season tour of the

US and it would be no surprise if at

least one of the pair were involved at

Newcastle on the opening weekend.

So the future could be in good

hands, but Arsenal supporters

have long been promised enough

jam to decimate the country’s fruit

farms. They hope a reconnection

with the past will restore some

balance. Freddie Ljungberg has been

promoted to assistant fi rst-team

coach while Edu’s arrival as technical

director is a canny move, and not

only because the club would have

benefi ted from such an appointment

at any point in the last decade. He

was a well-liked member of the

Invincibles squad and has honed a

reputation as a shrewd executive

with Brazil. According to the head

of football, Raúl Sanllehí, he is the

“fi nal and most important part of the

jigsaw” in their football infrastructure

and perhaps Arsenal fi nally have a

bootroom in place that would survive

comings and goings in the dugout.

A

n early item in Edu’s

intray will be to help

Emery deal with

Koscielny, who wants

a return to France. The

captain is one of few

at Arsenal to come out of the past

nine years virtually unblemished

so it was a surprise, and perhaps a

refl ection on the club’s management

in recent years, that he felt moved to

skip the trip across the Atlantic.

Something has gone badly wrong

somewhere and it presents an

immediate headache for Emery,

whose other centre-back options

provoke grimaces and fl ashbacks to 21

April, when a disastrous performance

from Shkodran Mustafi against Palace

eff ectively relinquished Arsenal’s

hold on a Champions League spot.

He has two top-class strikers in

Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-

Emerick Aubameyang and will have

another go at energising Mesut Özil.

Arsenal can still blow moderate

opponents away with that fi repower

but new defenders are required to

give Emery a fi ghting chance.

Most of Arsenal’s followers agree

the now-departed Gazidis’s vision

from 2010 has been compromised

at a thousand cuts since Stan

Kroenke took a controlling stake

the following year. A group of 14

leading supporters’ groups and

outlets wrote to express dismay at

the club’s decline this month. Unrest

in the stands, which has fl ared up

occasionally over the past two years

but never on a sustained level, could

become harder to ignore if the squad

looks critically under-resourced in

key areas early on.

“It feels as though Arsenal is

at a crossroads,” that statement

read. Nobody would argue. If last

season was accepted to be one of

change, the coming nine months

will be a battle to show that their

longer-term transition into also-rans

can fi nally be arrested.

▲ The 19-year-old midfi elder Joe Willock (left) has impressed in pre-season

STUART MACFARLANE/ARSENAL FC VIA GETTY IMAGES

▼ Unai Emery’s Arsenal

fi nished fi fth – 28 points

behind Manchester City

MARC ATKINS/GETTY IMAGES

Emery faces

Champions

League or

bust season

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