Martin Ødegaard resumes his role as Arsenal’s smoothing agent and pass master | Barney Ronay

His goal was like something from It’s A Knockout, but the Arsenal captain showed signs of recovery from an injury-wrecked campaign

We’re back, baby. Welcome to the content zone. And yes, we did actually go away for a bit. Seriously. Check back. We really did.

In the lead-up to this Premier League opener, Sky Sports had been trailing the fact it will show a total of 1,500 live games this season. Lay these end-to-end and that adds up to about 3,000 hours, or 125 whole days doing nothing but watching football. Chuck in the endless over-gorge of clips, highlights, noises off, VAR rage, furious punditry shemozzles, and that’s pretty much the next eight months spent slumped in your memory foam chair, cramming in those great dripping handfuls of sweet, sweet football-derived product.