Saliba and Zinchenko fire Arsenal’s early-season hopes in sultry opener

Yes: the rumours are true. The Premier League, which never really went away, has returned. And it felt pretty good on a sultry Friday night, watching an Arsenal team of eager new moving parts do an excellent job of raising some tender early-season hopes at Selhurst Park.

It was 24 degrees in South London as kick-off approached on the earliest date the English top tier has ever begun. This was a desiccated kind of heat, the grass scorched white, the sky a deathly blue. The English summer does at least have a sense of irony. To avoid the Gulf sun the Premier League will instead play through a heatwave in England.

For all that this was a fun, breezy start to the season. If last week’s Community Shield felt like a kind of visitation, football reimagined as a 90-minute Sopranos dream sequence, there was a familiar tang to this. A London derby. A densely coiffured systems manager. That sallow summer sun. Maybe this was real after all.

It is a question that might also apply to Arsenal in a season that will define the work to this point of Mikel Arteta. They kicked off with a bold starting 11, the kind of 11 that gets bandied around on fan chats, the hopeful 11, the cake for breakfast 11. Saliba! Martinelli! No filler! Except maybe Granit Xhaka! But that’s fine, he’s also good now!

By the end of a hard-fought 2-0 victory, a scoreline that fails to reflect Crystal Palace’s resilience between the goals, it felt as though something might just be stirring here. Gabriel Jesus was good. Oleksandr Zinchenko was good for a while. William Saliba was very good, and will draw the most attention.

Saliba made seven clearances without ever having to make a tackle. His passing was solid. He didn’t look flustered or even very tired by the end,