At long last, Arsenal are back playing football as they began their public pre-season with a convincing 4-1 win over Spanish side Girona.Kai Havertz opened the scoring for Mikel Arteta’s side after being found nicely by Max Dowman after 16 minutes. New signing Christos Tzolis doubled the lead on his first public appearance as an Arsenal player (the forward played in a behind-closed-doors friendly against MK Dons last week).The second half got off to a shaky start for Arsenal with the hosts, who they played in the 2024-25 edition of the Champions League, scoring from a corner to make it 2-1. The scorer, Arnau, was one of six Girona players who faced Arsenal in that Champions League tie back in January 2025. However, they are now preparing for a season in the Spanish second division after relegation from La Liga last term.Arsenal responded quickly, with Dowman scoring a goal that was viewed as controversial by the home fans as one of their players was down injured for an extended period of that passage of play. Gabriel Jesus made it 4-1 shortly after with a poacher’s finish after the ball ricocheted into the Girona box from a Ben White challenge in midfield.Here, The Athletic assess four of the key themes of the game.Why did Havertz, Gyokeres and Hincapie only play for half an hour?One of the benefits of Arsenal starting their pre-season slightly later than usual was that some of their World Cup representatives would return to take part for the majority.Kai Havertz, Viktor Gyokeres and Piero Hincapie were all eliminated at the round of 32 with their respective countries, and joined the first team group for their flight to Girona last weekend. That trio have spent the week getting back up to speed and were given their first minutes of pre-season at the Estadi Montilivi. However, all three were given around half an hour of action — 33 minutes to be precise — in what appeared to be a pre-planned triple substitution as they built match fitness.Havertz and Gyokeres could compete for the starting centre-forward role this season, but as he did at times last campaign, Arteta opted to play them together. Havertz had a deeper starting position but had the licence to make surging off-the-ball runs in behind, which is what resulted in his opener. As Girona’s backline were preoccupied with Gyokeres, he took advantage of the space created time and again, and was unlucky nobody made darting runs to get on the end of his cutbacks.Gyokeres was not as influential on the ball, but one interesting moment came when Kepa decided to launch the ball long to him from a goal kick rather than play short. The Sweden international nodded the ball down to Havertz, who then kept it moving, allowing Arsenal to build an attack slightly differently to usual.Hincapie was not too busy, but was alert enough to track runs across the width of the pitch and cover Cristhian Mosquera when necessary.Havertz scored during his 33 minutes on the pitch (Alex Caparros/Getty Images)How did Christos Tzolis perform?The Greek international has had an encouraging start to life with Arsenal in the past week-and-a-half. He started off with an assist for Reiss Nelson in the aforementioned behind-closed-doors friendly against MK Dons and backed that up with a finish against Girona that seems to be customary for him.