Rice scores, doesn’t celebrate | Arseblog … an Arsenal blog

Morning. A very quick Sunday round-up for you.

Regular readers will know I don’t really pay a lot of attention to international football, certainly not the Nations League – a competition I still don’t know the point of, or what it actually means in the grand scheme of things. However, I did watch Ireland take on England at Lansdowne Road yesterday because of all the Declan Rice, Jack Grealish, Lee Carsley stuff.

Let’s not forget Ireland have a new manager too, Heimir Hallgrimsson, a man who was part of the Icelandic set-up when they beat England 2-1 at Euro 2016 – giving the world this amazing moment of TV. Rice and Grealish got booed a lot, as you would expect, so it’s the way of football that Rice and Grealish got the goals for England.

Our boy Declan opened the scoring, then did that thing players do when they make it clear they’re not going to celebrate against their former club. You rarely see it applied to former countries though, and you have to say it was really quite funny. Grealish made it 2-0 after some iffy defending and a Rice assist, and he definitely did a celebration, but you’d expect that from him. The script-writers didn’t put a lot of work into this one it’s fair to say!

Rice said afterwards:

To have celebrated, it would have been really disrespectful of me. My nan and grandad, my dad’s side of the family are all Irish and they’ve obviously passed away. They’re not here anymore. I didn’t want to do that, to be honest with you.

While Grealish said:

We both enjoyed our time playing here, I have a lot of Irish in my family. There’s no bad blood whatsoever from my side.

England were just so much better than Ireland though. Man for man the gulf in quality was kinda ridiculous, and if it weren’t for Caoimhin Kelleher in goal the scoreline would have been a lot worse. Ireland just could never keep the ball, even under the most cursory England ‘press’ (if you could even call it that), and I lost count of the times it was booted to nobody up front. Or just leathered down the pitch. There’s a lot of work for Hallgrimsson to do with this team. 139 accurate passes to England’s 634 tells a story, for sure.

Having watched a lot of England this summer, the balance seemed a lot better with Anthony Gordon on the left hand side, and my only complaint is that Rice and Bukayo Saka both played 90 minutes. I don’t think it was the most taxing game ever, but Rice seemed to take a heavy kick with about 15 minutes to go and still stayed on which was a bit annoying. Hopefully that’s nothing serious.

Elsewhere, Kai Havertz scored a penalty for Germany as they beat Hungary 5-0, while Jurrien Timber came on as a sub for the Netherlands in their 5-2 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are more games to come this week, so we’ll keep you up to date with Arsenal involvement over the coming days.

For now, have a great Sunday, and join us tomorrow for an Arsecast Extra too.