Mesut Ozil has said he’s looking forward to pre-season, and specifically our tour of Australia. We face Sydney and West Sydney Wanderers next month (in Sydney obviously) and Ozil says he can’t wait to get on tour – not concrete of course, but hardly the chat of someone who is desperate to leave the club.

He said: “It is really good to have pre-season with the team, in my career it has always been like that. If you play at a big tournament, especially with Germany, you really miss pre-season. Two years ago we went to Singapore and it was a nice experience to see the city and the fans, and to train how we do in Sydney. So I am excited to do the same in Australia, I can’t wait to go there…”

Meanwhile, despite there being rumours of no change, there has been some behind the scenes at The Emirates. The Sun claim that we have hired top legal expert Huss Fahmy to try to iron out the big new deals for both Ozil and Sanchez along with other stars whose deals are also in doubt, namely Szczesny, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Keiran Gibbs and many other players rumours to be looking to move this summer. Talks are still ongoing with Ozil and Sanchez, Ozil sounds like he’s perhaps more keen to stay than Sanchez, but with the Chilean away on Confederations Cup duty, it doesn’t look like his situation will be resolved any time soon.

Speaking of new hires, we have also hired a new Australian fitness coach, with Darren Burgess, once with Liverpool, coming on board to help out with our usual, annual (monthly) fitness crisis, they claim that he will concentrate on ‘medicine, psychology and performance analysis’. Let’s hope he does a better job than the last guy.

More later, reader(s)…