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Arsenal's new signing Bruno Guimaraes has teammate Mikel Merino claiming they now have the best midfield in football.
Mikel Merino has broken his silence on Arsenal's reported £75m move for Bruno Guimaraes.
World Cup champions and eager teammates are back early, signaling full strength for Arsenal.
The Arsenal midfielder talks about how Luis de la Fuente has created a team built on respect and how they plan to beat Argentina in the World Cup finalThe night before the biggest day of their lives, the Spain players who were about to win the 2010 World Cup gathered in the Da Vinci Hotel in Sandton, just north of Johannesburg, drank hot chocolate, ate chocolate croissants and talked. The night before the biggest day of their lives, the Spain players seeking to emulate them 16 years later will gather in the MC Montclair in New Jersey and talk too, but there won’t be any chocolate this time. Some rituals are not to be repeated.“I think the nutritionists killed that one for us!” Mikel Merino says, hopping off the bus, freshly tuned up for the final, and heading into a tactics room at the Melanie Lane training ground, where Spain’s penultimate day of preparation is about to begin. “We used to do the Cola Cao and cakes in the under-19s and under-21s, copying the seniors, but not any more. Everyone has their own routine, but the main thing is to normalise it all: just another game, doing something we know how to do, that we’ve done since we were five years old and that we love. Treat it like something to be enjoyed, another day in our lives.” Continue reading...
The midfielder has risen from the bench to come up with the decisive goal in the last two rounds – his country’s first World Cup knockout wins since they were champions in 2010“I look behind me and I see Mikel Merino and I think: ‘I’m calm as can be,’” Luis de la Fuente said when at last the heart rates had returned to normal. Everyone else’s heart rates, anyway. In those moments when time is running out and the tension is running high, there’s something about the Spain coach. And there’s certainly something about the midfielder.On the afternoon before Spain faced Belgium in their quarter-final, De la Fuente had an attack of the giggles as he recalled how when he was a kid only three television events gathered his family around the screen: the national team, Eurovision and the gloriously silly, inexplicably bizarre gameshow Un, dos, tres (whose UK version was 3-2-1). He had watched Spain fall at this stage repeatedly, the quarter-finals a barrier they couldn’t overcome, knocked out there in 1986, 1994 and 2002, but now that it was his turn to face it instead of stress here he was falling about, crying with laughter. Continue reading...