Morning. Let’s start today with the Champions League draw that took place yesterday evening. I didn’t watch it live, because I find these things interminable. Andrew Allen is a braver man than I, and I enjoyed his report on the nonsense that preceded the actual draw itself: UEFA forced everyone to sit through 30 minutes of self-indulgent twaddle, which mostly involved Zlatan Ibrahimovic trying to pull president Aleksander Ceferin from his ringpiece while that weird Thunderbird-lookalike Pedro Pinto stood nodding with his tongue hanging out. Sounds like a fun time for all concerned! Anyway, the main thing was finding out who we’re going to play football matches against, and there are some familiar names in our draw. Here’s what we’ve got, with the head to head record in previous European encounters (thanks again to Andrew for digging up the stats: Bayern Munich (H) – W3 D3 L8 Inter Milan (A) – W1 D0 L2 Atletico Madrid (H) – W0 D1 L1 Club Brugge (A) – Olympiacos (H) – W6 D0 L6 Slavia Prague (A) – W2 D2 L0 Kairat Almaty (H) – Athletic Bilbao (A) – I suspect Mikel Arteta will be happy our game against Kairat Almaty, a team from southern Kazakhstan, is taking place at home. Were it the other way around, we’d be facing a round trip of almost 7,000 miles. The distance between Almaty and London is 3477.84 miles. As a city, it’s closer to Beijing (2033.20 miles) or Seoul (2623.81 miles) than it is to London. These lads – even if they appear to be very excited about the prospect of playing us – will be absolutely knackered by the time they arrive, so we should give them a good spanking. Aside from that, Arteta v Diego Simeone should be an interesting and intense touchline encounter. Arsenal fans will be In Bruges for the first time (YOU’RE AN INANIMATE F*CKING OBJECT!), and there’s a nice looking trip to Bilbao as well, which offsets the tedium of yet another game against Bayern Munich. You know when a song has been number 1 for ages and it still gets played on the radio, and every time it comes on you want to both throw yourself out a window and turn the radio off? That’s Bayern Munich – the Bryan Adams ‘Everything I do, I do it for you’ of football. Dates/times will be announced no later than August 30th, which is tomorrow, so get those flight booking fingers ready. Back at home, and Arsenal confirmed that Kai Havertz has undergone surgery on the knee injury that has troubled him of late. They said: Today, Kai underwent a successful minor surgical procedure. He will shortly begin his recovery and rehabilitation programme, with everyone fully focused on supporting Kai to ensure he is back to full fitness as soon as possible. His absence isn’t going to be long-term, but it doesn’t seem like it’s particularly short-term either. If only there was a word that described something between those two points. Oh well. Anyway, it means there’s a big onus on Viktor Gyokeres to step up and score the goals, and also for Mikel Arteta to consider the load on the Swedish international too. When you look at this squad, you see redundancy in every position, but without Havertz, we’re left with one recognised striker. There are options. Leandro Trossard has played there; Mikel Merino can fill in, and he might well be an option if we’re in a game-state that allows the manager to make that kind of change; and I wonder a bit about Gabriel Martinelli too. There’s been discussion of whether or not he might depart before the end of the window, with his place on the left-hand side under some threat after the arrival of Eberechi Eze. Unless the money on offer was too good to turn down – and I don’t know where that offer is coming from between now and Monday evening, btw – I think he’s a player we need to keep. He gives us depth in wide areas, and I think he can play games up front too. There’s an EFL Cup game in mid-September, for example, where you’d like see serious rotation, not least because that fixture is sandwiched between Man City at home and a trip to Newcastle the following weekend. We also wait and see what’s going to happen with Gabriel Jesus, a forgotten man after so long out with injury, but who is at the point where his recovery from an ACL injury means he’ll be ready to play again. Again, there have been whispers of him leaving on loan before the window closes, but I’d be inclined to see what we can get from a talented player whose time at the club has been so badly impacted by injury. Let’s see. Right, I’m gonna leave it there for this morning. We’ll have the stories from Mikel Arteta’s press conference later on Arseblog News. For now, there’s an Arsecast with former Gunner Adrian Clarke below if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet. Enjoy! Download – iTunes – Spotify – Acast – RSS The post Champions League draw reaction : Havertz has knee surgery appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.