Friday round-up: Cannes Pics/Fonte/Bischoff/Gibbs/

A news round-up for you this Friday evening.

We’ll start off with these pictures showing Arsenal U16’s celebrating their win at the recent Zinedine Zidane Tournament in Cannes. The Gunners saw off P.S.G., Nice and Bordeaux en route to the final, where a Benik Afobe goal was enough to secure the trophy for the Gunners.

In other news, Rui Fonte has been added to the revised Arsenal squad for the Champions League group stage. As expected, the Portuguese forward has been given the no.39 shirt for this season, whilst Mikael Silvestre has also been added. Justin Hoyte, Nacer Barazite, Armand Traore and Vincent van den Berg have all been removed although there is still no place for summer recruit Amaury Bischoff.

Speaking of Bischoff, he hopes to return to full training soon and has been doing some light ball work this week.

Kieran Gibbs spoke to Arsenal TV after the defeat to Chelsea Reserves on Monday about his new role at left-back. To be honest, I’m not sure if I like him there. Against Chelsea, he got caught out a few times and tended to drift inside a lot. Against stronger sides, he also finds it more difficult to go forward than when he plays on the wing and that is disappointing. He’ll also find it hard to dislodge Gael Clichy in that position although Cedric Evina has been used more as a winger recently so that could be one less player to compete with.

Two friendlies have been added to the Reserves calendar, against Birmingham and Norwich.

Finally, I don’t know if you’ve seen the weather in North London recently but it’s been raining heavily and is expected to continue tomorrow. There is a slight chance that tomorrow’s clashes with Bristol City at Under-18 and Under-16 level could be called off but at the moment they’re both expected to go ahead. Fulham’s game with Birmingham and Leicester’s clash with Charlton have already been called off and more could follow suit, but we’ll wait and see what happens.

More tomorrow.