Arsenal: Alexis Sanchez’s pictures worth a thousand reports

Arsenal’s first training session with Alexis Sanchez portrayed a man completely contrary to the reports, and now we have all we need to know.

It’s all that we want to know – what the hell is Alexis Sanchez‘s future with Arsenal looking like. We have waited two torturous months through the Confederations Cup and the preseason tour and through Alexis’s bout with the flu and finally, finally, he is back in training with his team mates and with Arsene Wenger and finally we can start deducing what is actually going on here.

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The narrative has been very lopsided this summer – every single report says that he wants to leave. The Gunners aren’t good enough, they aren’t in the Champions League, they can’t offer Alexis what he wants.

You would expect, then, for Alexis to look a bit grim and grumpy in training. He isn’t the kind of guy that is going to hide how he feels. When you see him on the pitch, he gives the most clear body language of any other footballer out there.

Do yourself a favor and check out the scenes from his first training session (from Arsenal.com) with the club that he so desperately wants to leave.

Now answer me this, does that look like a miserable player? Does he look like he’d rather be elsewhere?

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That is a man that couldn’t look much happier. Next to Arsene Wenger, the man he is supposedly intensely negotiating with, he looks to be in perfectly fine spirits. I feel like they are both having a laugh about how worked up everyone is getting and about how the media has spun this ‘he wants to leave’ narrative out of absolutely nothing.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it couldn’t be more true here. Alexis has not given us a lot of reassurances this summer, something I have criticized him for. He hasn’t done anything that could be used as ammo against the premade narrative.

But then we see him in training smiling and laughing as if nothing has changed. This is the same Alexis that had just arrived in 2015, ready to conquer the world. If you want something to read into, read into that smile rather than the random reports claiming he wants to leave.

Read into how much he clearly enjoys being around his team mates rather than his one statement about how he wants Champions League football.

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It’s not like one day of enjoyment captured in photographs solidifies that he is staying, but it certainly is more than a bit reassuring.