Evening all. A very quick one today and I’ll begin with reports from Turkey that a fee of just £1.75 million has been agreed with Galatasaray for the sale of Lukas Podolski.

Lukas Podolski

That figure seems scandalously low to me, what with Podolski being a very good player and a World Cup winner and a social media expert – he’ll do wonders for their online image – but then what do I know.

Perhaps the loan fee we received from Inter Milan in January helped us to accept such a low sum or maybe just getting his substantial salary off our wage bill swung things. Whatever the reason though – and if the reports are accurate of course – it still grates when you remember Rickety Lambert cost Liverpool more than double that amount just a year ago. Rickie Lambert.

Moving on and Carl Jenkinson’s future is still unresolved despite strong reports of a £2 million loan having been agreed between Arsenal and Sunderland earlier this summer. Carl clearly didn’t fancy a move to Wearside though and today West Ham co-Chairman David Gold took to the airwaves to tell talkSPORT that the Hammers ‘are working very hard to try and get Carl back here’.

We’ll wait and see how that pans out but an agreement between the two clubs can’t be far off. There is of course the possibility that Arsene decides to keep Jenkinson this season, as he suggested in a press conference towards the end of last season. Yet with our depth in that particular department, I doubt that will be the case.

And speaking of right-backs, The Daily Telegraphs’s Jeremy Wilson dropped a clanger in a piece put online last night, mistakenly reporting that Mathieu Debuchy had been deemed surplus to requirements at Arsenal.

At the end of a report about Arsenal granting Abou Diaby permission to continue to use their training facilities despite his release, he listed several players who were allegedly up for sale. He named David Ospina, Podolski, Joel Campbell and then Debuchy. He soon corrected his error by tweeting that he had got the wrong Mathieu and actually meant Flamini. Yet that didn’t stop about a billion ‘Debuchy for sale’ articles from being written today.

Sticking with the right-sided full back theme and Hector Bellerin has been telling Arsenal Player how much he loves hearing his ‘song’ and why the club should be lauded for affording young players a platform to perform.

He said:

I remember the first time I heard it – we were playing QPR away. I started hearing something like Bellerin and I thought, ‘Is that really a song for me?’. And then they sang it. I couldn’t believe it. To play away at QPR and hear my song was amazing.

The away support is really strong at Arsenal and to hear that they’re cheering for you, singing your name, you can’t really ask for more. That was one of the highlights of my season. In the beginning when you start playing you hope that one day you will have your own song. Once that happened for the first time, it felt like everything had fallen into place and it was a great experience.

The fans rate that Arsenal don’t just buy players, they make them the players they are. Arsenal fans are really proud of that and I think that’s a great thing. When players like Francis, Jack or myself come up, the fans should be proud that their team is doing what they’re doing. That’s a great thing Arsenal do.

Finally for today,  Ainsley Maitland-Niles, our young Academy midfielder, has joined Ipswich Town on a season-long loan deal for the upcoming campaign. Good luck to him.

Till Friday.