Our Rolls Royce Needs Servicing

🎭 The Phantom Menace: Gyokeres Starts, Arsenal Sleepwalk in Villarreal Defeat

By The Loose Cannon

Arsenal's pre-season wobbled into gear with a 3-2 defeat to Villarreal on Wednesday night— followed by a penalty shootout loss just to drive the point home. If you squint, you could call it "entertainment." If you're honest, it looked more like déjà vu from the Wenger twilight years: possession, passing, and pain.

Christian Nørgaard (yep, that Christian Nørgaard, who arrived on the sly from the Premier League's parallel universe) and Martin Ødegaard grabbed the goals, but neither could paper over the cracks in a match where Arsenal looked more like a squad lost in translation than a team ready to challenge.

Still, it wasn't all doom and Gloomy Gus. We finally got our first glimpse of Viktor Gyokeres in Arsenal red. Or, more accurately, we saw a red-shirted Swede making a series of clever runs while his teammates stared into the middle distance.

Gyokeres: The Invisible Man

Signed for a cool £64m after tearing it up in Portugal like a viking on espresso, Gyokeres was supposed to be our thunderbolt striker. Instead, he looked more like a glitch in the system. Four completed passes. One tame shot. Fourteen touches in 63 minutes. You'd get more involvement from a mascot.

But here's the rub — it wasn't all his fault.

Every paper from The Standard to The Sun to Arsenal Insider pointed out the same thing: Gyokeres was making intelligent runs, peeling off defenders, dragging centre-backs like a shopping trolley with a dodgy wheel — and nobody passed him the ball. Nobody. It was like they didn't read the memo: This Is Not Kai Havertz.

Media Verdict: "Quiet", "Frustrated", "Bodied"

The ratings are in, and the critics are notfeeling generous:

Publication	Rating	Comments
The Standard	6	"Quiet." Cheers for that.
The Express	5	"Plenty of runs ignored. Bodied off ball. Frustrated."
The Sun	5	"Looked slow — maybe because he didn't get the ball."
Football London	6	"Cutting inside looked promising. Needed service."
Arsenal Insider	6.5	"Team needs to adapt to him." No kidding.

To summarise: our new striker has the movement of Haaland, but is being treated like Sanogo.

No Service, No Strike Force

Look — pre-season is pre-season. Fitness, rhythm, and chemistry all need time. But if Gyokeres is going to bang them in like he did for Sporting, then this Arsenal side needs to wake up and realise they've got a different kind of No.9 on their hands.

He isn't going to drop into midfield like Jesus. He isn't going to win 60 aerial duels like Giroud. He's a channel runner. A shoulder-sniffer. He wants to kill you on the turn. But if nobody plays him in, he may as well be running sprints at London Colney with a blindfold on.

Verdict: Adapt or Waste £64m

Arteta's project now has a new variable: a proper centre-forward who plays like one. The ball's in the team's court — literally. If they don't start finding Gyokeres with early passes, through balls, and some good old-fashioned trust, we'll be looking at another shiny signing scuffed into obscurity.

Next up: Athletic Club - Bilbao by name, but let's hope it's not Arsenal Basque-ing in the sun defensively like the Deckchair Denilson days of old, when he was supposed to help the defence. Expect more running from Gyokeres, but let's hope the Arsenal midfield actually notice him next time!

Until then, keep it cannon.