Sitting down typing this blog from the Cathay Pacific Business Lounge at Frankfurt Airport is hardly a tough assignment but it does need to be done. Luckily I have around 2 hours until boarding time for my flight to Singapore.

So the good news yesterday, apart from the result, was that I managed to catch the goals whilst my wife and I were searching a restaurant in the Sachsenhaus area of Frankfurt. I managed to surprise them with a quick dart into a Sports bar as we were still waiting for two others to arrive and I caught the last 20 minutes. So although I didn't see the goals live I saw them in the quick round up after the game finished. It looked and, from what I've read today, seemed a relatively impressive performance (though how good a team Newcastle are is hard to say but they did draw 1-1 at Old Trafford) and the only worry know is the effect on Van Persie's foot. With a two week break for International friendlies it leaves us at the right end of the table and having played two confidence boosting games. Let's keep our fingers crossed for no injuries in these 2 weeks to come.

Of course, prior to the International games we will have the saga of the end of the transfer window (tomorrow night) to look forward too. Whether these two impressive performances will allay Arsenal fans' fears should we not buy is probably unlikely but it will help.

Aside from the usual English press stories (that you can read about anywhere) there is very little new in L'Equipe or from Switzerland, though long time rumoured transfer target Gokhan Inler did score for Udinese today. In Switzerland, Basel continued their impressive recent form with a 2-0 away win at Aarau, extending their lead to 6 points in the league.

Yesterday in the Guardian there was a story regarding Arsenal being about to sign a Swiss midfielder, Gokhan Inler, from Udinese. Now there is nothing new in a paper writing some sort of "so and so is going to join this club or another" but it's interesting when looking at the story from living here in Switzerland. The same story was in the local Swiss press on Monday and it seems that all the English paper has done is scoured around the European websites and after a while found it because it's a straight lift really. There is no real evidence but merely talk from the player's agent who apparently "spoke" with Arsene - do we believe it?

Arseblog talks about Arsenal's final pre-season game (against Sevilla) last night - not something I've seen much of and I'm trying desperately to find out if I can get to see our first competitive game against Twente Enschede on Wednesday.

I'm glad the real Olympic sports have started now so we don't have to worry about watching the football and concentrate on strange stuff like Archery, Judo and, this morning, the second of the road races - if you watched this you would have seen the absolutely foul weather conditions they all had to endure.

Not much going on around here in the middle of Europe today. I did, for a moment, cheer up when I saw a headline in L'Equipe saying that the lovely old French player, Diarra, was injured. However, it turned out that he was only lightly injured and will be fit for the Charity Shield this weekend and won't be out for 2-3 years as I had previously hoped. L'Equipe's transfer round up suggests that good old Jose Antonio Reyes may end up in Benfica for a rather small fee considering his fee to Arsenal and Berbatov is still wanted by Barcelona (having been turned down by Benzema, Adebayor & Drogba) - but no real actual facts here, of course.

According to Swiss media, Ronaldo may not be travelling back to Manchester today as he is expected to do, for checking up on his ankle injury. However, according to the same paper the agent of Swiss player, Gokhan Inler, is in London to day to meet with Arsene Wenger - so that must a deal done then :-)

Just about a month after the end of Euro 2008 and we discover today that UEFA managed to make a cool €250M from the whole affair. This will justify (in their eyes anyway) the complete bastardisation of the tournament, like so many others (as we'll see in Bejing soon), by the corporate sponsors. If selling out to Carlsberg only gets you that amount I would say it's not really worth it and we can all have drunk some decent beer. It's also interesting that they claim to betrying everything to deal with the black market but yet refuse to see the evidence that many of these tickets get there via sponsors & football associations.

Just finalising plans for the trip to Stuttgart tomorrow and I feel that the game may be a tad tougher than the U16 XI Arsenal played yesterday. I'm hoping Jens Lehmann will be there to greet us and to allow us to say farewell once more. No idea how many Arsenal fans will be there as it's a long way for a friendly but there are many who "never miss a game", so we'll see.

Most of the rumours running in L'Equipe seem , much like the English press, to be concerned with how Tottenham are going to spend the money gathered from the sale of Keane to Liverpool. The paper also reports that the FFF are not going to allow the appeal of PSG against their removal from the League Cup.

Here in Switzerland there is some reporting of Arsenal's possible interest in Gökhan Inler though it all seems rather tenuous with supposed interest from a host of other clubs too. I also noticed a photo of a sending off in the Young Boys game and saw that the ref was female, still a remarkably unusual occurrence these days. It turns out that she also officiated the first leg UEFA Cup game with Manchester City, so now you know who Nicole Petignat is!