As soon as it was announced before the match that Gyokeres would be arriving in Singapore, the pre-season friendly was not going to be the most important topic of the day.<\/p>\n
Supporters in the stadium were mimicking the trademark celebration of the Swedish striker and, when he was welcomed to the pitch from the tunnel surrounded by flames, the noise levels went up a notch.<\/p>\n
The 27-year-old forward has not trained with his new team-mates and came straight from the airport to the stadium to greet the crowd.<\/p>\n
Germany forward Havertz has done an excellent job leading the line for Arsenal over the past couple of seasons but Gyokeres is the type of traditional centre-forward Gunners fans have been crying out for.<\/p>\n
“We are super happy to have Victor with us, it’s been a long journey to get him over here.” Mikel Arteta said about his new signing. <\/p>\n
“He’s been incredible, he was very clear from the beginning where he wanted to play and how passionate I felt from him from day one when we first spoke. <\/p>\n
“You can see the boys, you can see the environment as well, very excited with his arrival.” <\/p>\n
Gyokeres could make first appearance for Arsenal against rivals Tottenham Hotspur in Hong Kong on Thursday but the Swede has not trained with a team since the end of May.<\/p>\n
“We will assess him tomorrow, he’s done all the medicals, everything is looking good,” said Arteta.<\/p>\n
“But to get him up to speed with the right levels of fitness I think is very important.<\/p>\n
“So we’re not going to stop him, we want him with us as quick as possible but we’ll have to assess and the medical team will do that.” Arteta said. <\/p>\n
Dowman was a handful when he came on and Arteta was full of praise for the promising youngster. <\/p>\n
“Yeah, it is special.” he said. “Obviously what he’s done today against this team in the time that he had on the pitch is something certainly not common to witness for a 15-year-old. <\/p>\n
“We are extremely happy to have him. I think again the environment that he’s around in, his family, the people at the club and around the academy as well [is] super helpful because they put him into this position so early in his journey.”<\/p>\n
The only real worry from the match for Arteta was that Riccardo Calafiori limped off just two minutes into the second half and was replaced by Jakub Kiwior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As soon as it was announced before the match that Gyokeres would be arriving in Singapore, the pre-season…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":97027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-97026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114925917378901064","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}