One week into the transfer window, I wish there were more concrete transfer new items to share. But instead, it's just the same rumors we've been reading for the last few weeks, for the most part. I'll start with players making exits, or rumored to be making exits.

Vito Mannone is now on loan with Hull, and he played today against Ipswich in an FA Cup win.

For those of you who haven't been around longer than six months, this treat might well be lost on you. But Martin is still the man, the myth, the legend around here. He pretty much built this website into something really cool and active, and we've merely been trying to keep the momentum going since his departure.

Other than the games played in preseason, this certainly shapes up to be the least important outing of the season. We're heading to Greece to take on Olympiakos in the final match of the group stages of the Champions League. But fortunately for us, we already have first place wrapped up, so there's no need to wear out our main players in this one.

OK, so I'll admit I'm not in my most cheerful of moods. I've been absent for the better part of this week, trying to see some justice done here in Hood County, Texas. But alas, what I got instead was a heavy dose of injustice in the courtroom, if I may say so myself. I won't bore you all with the painful details, but what I really needed was 12 jurors from this soccer game in Portugal a few years ago:
Hopefully I can relax and blog a bit, and find my happy place again.

Well I enjoyed a nice little layoff over the last week and a half, or however long it's been since I wrote something. I wasn't out of town, but did have more real work to do than normal. Kudos to Darren for doing the heavy lifting over the last week.

Anyway, we've been treated to another round of mostly meaningless internationals in the last few days.

I'm really not an expert on Arsenal trivia. Some fans seem to be. In fact, I could pose the following question: "What happened when we hosted Birmingham in league play two seasons ago?" And some fans could answer, "Oh yes, that's the game that we won 3-1, on goals by RvP, Diaby (remember him), and Arshavin.

Yes, I know it's still a few months away. But since the interlull is upon us, this might be a good time to sort through some of the possibilities for January. There's no way to touch on every rumor that's been written over the last month, but I'll try to recap the things that are most important and most likely.

My interest in the topic of this blog began as I was scrolling through the usual baseless rumors about various transfer targets. I found a rumor about a young player in the Barca youth system named Gerard Deulofeu. Naturally, since I'm a donkey at all of this, I'd never heard of him, despite the fact that he's the "next Messi" and all that.

I'm planning on running a larger blog sometime during the interlull, where I discuss all the various transfers in and out that could happen in January. Or at least all the ones that are remotely possible. And as I started thinking about Eden Hazard, I found quite a bit to write about. So I decided it should be a separate blog by itself, even if the chances of it happening may still be fairly low.

This will be just a short one to hold everyone over until we post our preview. Darren will be by later to do the formal preview, and I think Señor Fluffer's owner is going to do the recap this time around. Hopefully Brenton can do his usual live bloggery, and I can just relax and watch.

Anyway, during the buildup to the match on Saturday, there has been quite a bit of talk about Gary Cahill, and his possible transfer to Arsenal in January.

Well I'm back as the designated D&G (doom and gloom) blogger of the group, to keep anyone from getting too excited about how the transfer window ended. But there are quite a few positives to take from the last few days, and I want to be fair and balanced. And to be even more magnanimous than usual, I'll present 10 pieces of good news, coupled with only 5 pieces of bad news.

Final transfer deadline frenzy mania. Or in other words, something Arsenal hadn't seen in years.

The transfer window has finally closed in England, and Arsenal fans got a taste of something they hadn't eaten in a very long time: to the wire, last minute deals for first-team transfers. In the very end, we got a plethora of deals that could just be enough to improve our season, most notably the loan signing of Yossi Benayoun and the £10m signing of Everton's Mikel Arteta.

Hi everyone.

Welcome to a radical, busy transfer deadline day. We've got tons on the go (see previous post), so expect tons of shit to go down, including transfer confirmations, wild rumour-mongering, Sasquatch sightings, etc.

STRONG DISCLAIMER: I (and JG) will be on hand to admin this liveblog intermittently today (and tomorrow, for those of us in the later time zones), so comments may take a while (read: a few hours, perhaps) to be published.

Did you read that title in the voice of a Southern Belle high on speed? If so, then congratulations, dear reader!

After our soul-crushing defeat to Manchester United last Sunday, it was only natural- and expected- that Arsene Wenger and the Club finally realize that intensive investment in our first-team squad beyond just Park Chu-Young was necessary, and we really needed more reinforcements in our defense.

On August 14, I wrote a blog in the wake of Cesc's departure to Barca. In that blog, I argued that we desperately needed to get a high quality replacement at such an important position on the field. I then proceeded to suggest Sneijder, since he's been in the news a lot lately as a potential transfer for someone.

Most of us have been expecting this announcement for a while, and it finally came through today on the club's official website. In recent days, however, there was talk that Nasri might play against Udinese, which would leave him ineligible to play in the Champions League for Man City at a later date.

It's always a special treat around here when I can bring you information from someone more enlightened than I am. Which isn't always too hard to do. But anyway, since we're about to play Liverpool this weekend, I decided to ask their excellent blogger, Ed, a few questions. He's been doing a fine job for the Liverpool Offside for quite some time.

While we're all basking in the glow of taking one big step toward entry in the Champions League group stage, there are also a few news items to sort through, so let's get started.

First, a few folks were discussing the terms of Wenger's suspension from the touchline during yesterday's match.

One of the longest-running transfer sagas in recent memory has finally ended, with the official website declaring the sale of Fabregas to Barca. It's still too early to get firm reports about the price, but one site said it was £30 million, rising to £35 million with various bonuses for performance.

Well folks, it's about that time again. Time for some real action that actually counts. I'm not sure if the team is completely settled and ready, but hopefully we'll do enough to get past Newcastle and Udinese while things are getting sorted out. Anyway, here are some questions I posed to the blogging team, with answers from three of us.

...And thus, that shall be the first and only time you will see me mention Oxtail-Chamberpot by his full and proper name.

In all seriousness, today both Arsenal and Southampton announced the signing of the young forward to Arsenal, where he will immediately come into the first-team and start training with them.

For those of you who only stumbled upon this blog in the last couple of months, you probably don't really know who Martin is. But for everyone else, you probably started reading this blog due to his outstanding work for the last couple of years. This summer, he decided to start his own blog. You know, because there aren't enough Arsenal blogs out there.

Today I will continue my summer-long airing of grievances, even though it's not Festivus season. I was hoping there would be some concrete transfer news in the early part of this week. But since it appears that we'll be waiting at least another couple days, I'll go off on another topic. I think JG will be along either later today or tomorrow to post something as well, so hopefully there won't be any more gaps in our blogging up through the start of the season.

Whenever you follow multiple different professional sports, you inevitably start to notice the unique aspects of each of them. For instance, I remember Martin writing a while back about how odd it would be for an NBA basketball fan to endure various different international breaks during the middle of the regular season.

Sorry for the little delay there in blogging. I've been busier than a one-eyed cat watching two mouse holes lately. Sometimes that work thing gets in the way of blogging. Anyway, Brenton is handling the Emirates Cup stuff for the moment, while I talk about the silly season.

I guess we need to start off at the top, with some Cesc news.

At last, I'm able to present to you the "really super cool blog" I've been promoting for over a week. Today, we can read the insights of Tim Payton, who is a board member and the spokesperson for the Arsenal Supporters' Trust. You can read more about Tim on the board page of the AST website.

Starting off at the top of today's news, Barca officially completed the signing of Alexis Sanchez from Udinese. The fee was about £33 million if you include all the variables, but only about £23 million if you're only counting the up front money. This was quite a bit lower than the figures we were hearing a while back, but it still represents the majority of the £40 million budget that Barca were supposedly constrained to this summer.

As many of you have already read, club executive Ivan Gazidis recently made quite a few statements about our financial position and transfer activity. In particular, he made some statements that most Gunner fans would like to see as a great sign of hope. While he had a lot to say, let me quote the most important stuff right here:

"We still will be active in this window.

We're entering a two week period, leading up to the Emirates Cup, where I believe we'll pretty much know who will be wearing an Arsenal shirt this season. The team is back from Asia, and this would be the time to get things settled before August comes. I'll start my report by focusing on players who are leaving, or might be leaving.

Well I guess your esteemed bloggers should all get the slacker of the week award this time, since none of us were able to watch today's friendly. Actually, JG may have watched, but he's currently unable to really blog or comment while he's visiting in Peru for about three weeks. Hopefully he'll be back and blogging in less than two weeks.

For those of you who were anxiously awaiting the "really super cool blog" I recently promised... well, this isn't it. I'm hoping to roll that out sometime this weekend. So until then, you're stuck with the typical drivel you've gotten used to since mommy and daddy left this blog just over a month ago.

Well a few more (mostly) useless tidbits have come in since the last time I wrote, which I'll attempt to address today. Also, this blog will serve as our match thread for the first preseason match, where we take on the Malaysia XI. I might update this blog with some lineups and such, but I'll probably just leave it all for the comments section.

There are a dizzying number of rumors and reports out there to sort through at the moment, as well as some semi-news from the preseason tour in Asia. And while it's somewhat tiresome to keep up with all the rumors, I'll do my best to sort through some of the bigger news items of the last couple of days.

Many of us had hopes that we were going to do some significant house cleaning this summer, with a number of players leaving, as well as many coming in. I think it's safe to say at this point, we're not headed for a very big turnover. The fact that we're likely to hang on to a lot of the so-called "dead weight" on the team has been driven home to me in a number of ways this week.

Well, the first meaningful transfer news of the season and to be frank, it's not exactly a positive piece of news. Our very own Gael Clichy, the last of the Invincibles, has left Arsenal today to join Manchester City on a 4 year contract.

Bye.

Although Clichy had a pretty mediocre last couple of seasons at Arsenal, he was nevertheless a pretty good left back for us who mitigated the pain of seeing Cashley stab us in the back and join Chelsea, performing quite well after Cole left and helping us avoid the need of buying another left-back.

Yesterday, I made my predictions for the summer in terms of who might be leaving. Today I'll focus on what should (in theory) be happier thoughts players coming in. I'll take this up in three parts. First, I'll discuss what the team looks like right now. Second, I'll give my commentary on what the club should be doing.

Well, we're halfway through the summer, and everything is just as uncertain as it was when the season ended just over a month ago. I keep checking the transfer news and rumors every day, but nothing is official just endless speculation.

We've repeatedly been told from various sources that July 1 is the official start to the transfer season, or at least it's the start in some countries.

A couple of days have passed, and while there has been no official news on departures or signings yet, the intensity of our transfer season has sped up, and we are now getting some quite tasty rumors regarding some players- and some quite scary news for others. All of this and more after the jump.

In case you haven't noticed, there isn't always a whole lot for us to blog about on a regular basis. The preseason tour doesn't begin for a few more weeks, nothing of substance has officially happened in the transfer window yet, and the regular season is still over a month and a half away. But since we're new and still trying to make a go of it, we're doing the best we can to deliver fresh content.

Every summer, there seem to be more and more quality players offloaded from the big spending clubs. As these big money clubs are constantly trying to make a splash in the transfer market, some really good players are often pushed out the door. I think this is happening more often now than ever, due to clubs like Man City, Chelsea, and the Spanish giants.