Joe Fitzpatrick 
Now that our favourite live bi-weekly soap opera is on the verge of returning for its record-breaking 126th season, we are all busy scratching our beards and pondering what plot-twists and dramas await all of our favourite stars.
Will the teenage heartthrob Jack Wilshere fully recover from his horrific injury nightmare to regain his place in the Arsenal first team? Will Robin van Persie and Theo Walcott betray Arsène Wenger and run off with another manager? Will Gervinho and Chamakh finally find the long-lost shooting-boots that abandoned them at birth? Will Nicklas Bendtner drown in the Thames after getting drunk and catching a glimpse of his own reflection? Will the trend of players advertising on their underpants take off and lead to misspelt celebratory messages being scrawled across the grass-stained (we're pretty sure it's grass) Calvin Klein boxer-shorts of our favourite players in bright blue marker pen?
Will Abou Diaby make the greatest comeback since that of our good lord and saviour? Will the least talented Brazilian footballer of all time walk off into the sunset after finding true love in his home town of Sao Paulo and, rumour has it, even a forward pass? All of these questions and many, many more will be answered for us soon enough but, without building the suspense any further, arguably the most important question to be answered is, just how big a role will Steve Bould be allowed to have as Arsène Wenger's brand new understudy?
The question is a difficult one to answer, because it is not 100% clear to most of us outside the club what Pat Rice's role within the set-up actually was, and what his day-to-day responsibilities were. Some would have you believe that Pat Rice was a nonentity with absolutely zero input into Arsène Wenger's vision of the beautiful game, while other people, such as Freddie Ljungberg, tell it a bit differently. In a recent interview with Arsenal.com, Freddie said "Pat was in charge of the defensive unit and helped the likes of Ashley Cole to develop; he helped us in midfield as well and was an important member of Arsène’s staff - he did wonders. Pat played a big part in incorporating a French culture into an English one and making it work perfectly”.
Because of Ljungberg's comments, I'm going to be working on the assumption that Pat Rice was in charge of a lot of the defensive coaching at the club, and possibly even certain aspects of the defensive organisation of Arsenal’s midfield. I'm not going to go as far as to suddenly attempt to paint Pat Rice as some sort of a scapegoat for Arsène Wenger's recent failures, but the silver lining to these comments might just mean that Steve Bould could be given a crack at organising our shambolic back four and explaining the importance of defensive cover to players like Arshavin and Song. I want to make it clear that the blame has to rest squarely with Arsène Wenger here, and if Pat Rice was not delivering the same kind of results with the players that he produced earlier on in his career, then Arsène Wenger should have let the ageing Mr. Rice retire three or four years ago when he first communicated that he had little desire to carry on.
The full picture behind Arsène Wenger's stubborn persistence with keeping Pat Rice on as his assistant for such a very long time will probably not be fully understood until the Frenchman writes his memoirs. Alex Ferguson has changed his assistant every five years or so at Manchester United, and we can only hope that Arsène Wenger will now finally realise just how revitalising, inspiring and valuable bringing in a new person with different opinions can be to a project, as long as you are willing to listen carefully to them, of course.
There is no doubt that Steve Bould knows exactly how a defence should be organised as, after all, he did play in one of the greatest defensive units of the modern era, so we should be quietly confident that if he is allowed to take control of the defensive coaching at the club, we will see a sharp decline in the number of soft goals conceded next season. Steve Bould will surely make sure that the basics are covered at the very least, and If M'Vila, Baines and Vertonghen are not going to be signed by the idiots running our club, then Steve Bould is going to have to undertake the extremely difficult task of drilling Alex Song, André Santos, Carl Jenkinson, Kieran Gibbs, Laurent Koscielny, Bacary Sagna, Thomas Vermaelen and Per Mertesacker into a defensive unit capable of challenging for the Premier League title. It will be a difficult undertaking for Mr. Bould, but it is by no means an impossible one, because our first choice goalkeeper and back four are actually fine players individually. Our squad is about as deep as a paddling pool but Szczesny, Sagna, Vermaelen, Koscielny, Song and Gibbs give Mr. Bould something substantial to work with, and, if we can get and keep those players fully fit, we have a fighting chance of improving our shaky defence.
Most of the defensive problems with the team seem to stem from poor positional play and lack of defensive cover from the midfield, so the first order of business will be to make sure that our midfield three (I'm assuming that will be Song, Wilshere and Arteta) are made fully aware of their defensive duties. We could have the best four defenders in the world, but still concede a lot of goals due to a lack of defensive cover from the midfield three in front of them. If Arsenal are not going to sign a decent defensive midfielder, then Steve Bould is going to have to play the likes of Alex Song, Frimpong and Coquelin old videos of Vieira, Makelele and Essien to show them how to play that most pivotal role for any team that plays in a 4-3-3 formation. I think it would be far easier to sign M'Vila and/or Vertonghen myself, but that's just my opinion.
The other reason that further new signings are required is that Sagna and Gibbs have injury problems that seem to constantly recur, while their replacements, Santos and Jenkinson, seem to lack the positional sense they were born with, let alone that required to play at the highest level of the game. Leighton Baines would have been the ideal signing for us at left-back but, unfortunately, Arsène Wenger doesn't seem to rate the Scouser as highly as the rest of us do, and he must be confident that Gibbs will be able play 30 consistently good games for us next season. Wenger must be equally confident of the fitness of both Vermaelen and Koscielny, as Per Mertesacker is so slow that he appears to be moving underwater, while Squillaci and Djourou are just accidents waiting to happen.
The final position for which we desperately need cover is that of back-up goalkeeper. Szczesny is an exciting young prospect, but lacks the discipline and positioning required to make him a truly exceptional goalkeeper, and he just isn't going to learn that from Gerry Peyton, the man who brought us Almunia the Morris-dancing vampire, Lukas Flappyhandski and Vito "the chin" Mannone.
Steve Bould could yet go on to reorganise the Arsenal defence into a solid unit, but I fear that, without the signings we so desperately require, he is going to face an uphill task as the season wears on and the injuries and suspensions start to pile up.
The good news is that, historically, Arsène Wenger teams have always scored a fair number of goals, and the signings of Giroud and Podolski should ensure that pleasing trend continues, even if Walcott and van Persie decide to abandon ship. Let's just try to start to concede an average of less than a goal a game in the Premier League and then see if Vermaelen, Wilshere, Arteta, Podolski, Song, Giroud and Chamberlain can score the number of goals required to compete for the title. I want to believe.
