Apr

30

Sunday round-up - Ludovic Giuly has no friends.

Filed Under The Arsenal | 264 arses

A quick Sunday round-up for you.

Poxy little Barcelona dwarf Ludovic Giuly has spent the last few months telling everyone who’ll listen how he’s great friends with Thierry Henry and how Thierry will be joining Barcelona in the summer. He’s at it again. Come the Champions League final I sincerely hope Senderos cuts him in two as he does his best to last longer than 60 minutes. I really hate that little cunt.

Arsene Wenger says he’s fully committed to Arsenal despite some calls for him to be England manager which must be the biggest poison chalice in football. I can understand why guys like McLaren and Curbishley and Allardyce who have achieved very little would want to step up but why would someone like Arsene Wenger take a step down? He also talks about May 17th being the “people’s final” and is pleased for what it will do for the young players, saying:

“For me, and the club, it is the start of a newera because we have such a young team. It’s tremendous for players like Fabregas, Senderos, Flamini, Reyes, Van Persie and Eboue to experience a Champions League Final at their age and the really exciting thing is that it’s just the start for them.”

Robert Pires says Arsenal are a French team and that the language most people speak in the dressing room is French. Mon dieu! Imagine, people who can speak French speaking French to each other. What is the world coming to?

Not much else happening at the moment, if there are any Sunday tabloid stories they haven’t been published or found their way to the other websites yet and I’m not going to sit here until they are. So there. Till tomorrow and fingers crossed that Bolton can take some points off Sp*rs.

Apr

29

Saturday round-up

Filed Under The Arsenal | 285 arses

So welcome to a brand new looking Arseblog. Same old shite underneath the hood though.

We’ll start this morning with Ashley Cole who is set to start against Sunderland. In a lengthy interview on Sky Sports he talks about getting fit, making the World Cup squad and how well Mathieu Flamini has done in his absence. Speaking about the Champions League final he says:

He’s done well, I don’t think I could play in midfield like he’s played at left back so he’s done well, adapting centre midfield to left back has gone really well. The team as a unit has done well, the back four’s done well, so I can’t really complain to the manager that I want to come into the team because I don’t have the right.

Which is fair enough. He’s a bit coy about his own future though and while he dismissed those who say he’s going to Madrid or Chelsea it’s far from clear from his final comments that he sees his future at Arsenal. Although some reports have him saying he’s going to stay others suggest quite strongly he’s definitely going to leave. When you consider we are losing Bergkamp, Campbell looks likely to move on as does Pires and the Henry situation is far from clear it would be a huge loss, in playing terms, if he went as well, despite what some of us might think about his behaviour in the past. Anyway, the summer will be interesting, that’s for sure.

Simon Kuper on Dennis Bergkamp:

On Bergkamp’s first day at training his teammates had bowed before him and chanted, “We are not worthy!” They were right. Arsenal had never had a footballer like Bergkamp. In a decade he transformed the club. “Boring, boring, Arsenal” became, briefly, the most beautiful football team in English history.

Arsene Wenger has praised Thierry Henry’s ‘clean life’ and called him a role model for every striker after the captain won the Football Writers Player of the Year for a record third time. Here’s some background about his early life in Paris, nothing really very new to it, but interesting enough nonetheless. No doubt there’ll be plenty more pieces like this before May 17th. The boss also reveals very little about a scouting trip to see Barcelona other than to say they’re a good side.

Regular reader Rob emailed me to advise me of problems with registering interest for Champions League final tickets. The Online Gooner has a piece about it and a little workaround if you’re having issues. It does seem though as if the club might need to extend the deadline.

Ok, not much else going on. Feedback on the new look very welcome via email or in the arses. Hope you like it. Till tomorrow.

Update: There are some issues with Internet Explorer on PC not displaying the right hand sidebar with the links etc properly. This is because Internet Explorer is a load of shit and you should be using Firefox. Download now. We’ll try and get the IE problem sorted as soon as possible.

Update 2: And that should be fixed now. Thanks again to Peter.

Apr

29

Arseblog moves to Wordpress

Filed Under Site news | 181 arses

In the good old days Arseblog was prepared painstakingly each morning by modifying a PHP page in Dreamweaver. Now we’ve moved to Wordpress which allows us to add more functionality and features to the site. As there were over 4 years of archives it was impossible to recode those entries and import them into Wordpress. The only way it could be done was to copy and paste each day’s post and given 4 years by 1 post every day, more or less, the idea of doing that 1000+ times was not tremendously appealing.

You can now find the old archives here.

So what advantages does Wordpress have?

So those are the reasons behind the change. There are some things which still need to implemented but I’ll get around to them in the next few days.

If anybody has any comments or suggestions or if you notice anything out of the ordinary just simply email blogger@[removethis]arseblog.com

Finally, big thanks to Tom for all his tech know-how and arse integration and to Peter Gasston for Wordpress and CSS help. Cheers, fellas.

Today’s blog to follow in the morning… does that mean there’ll be two first arses?

Apr

28

Henry/Eto’o/Vieira/O’Cearuill. O’Who?

Filed Under The Arsenal | 395 arses

It’s all gone a little bit quiet, relatively speaking, but then everyone must have just spent the last few days making travel plans. A few bits and bobs going on though.

Congratualtions to Thierry Henry who was named the Football Writers Player of the Year for the third time in his career and, as is typical with him, that is a new record. Maybe they’ll let him keep the trophy. He said “It is all about the team and without my team-mates I would not have won. My hope now is that the team go on to create history of their own by becoming the first Arsenal side to win the Champions League.”

Robert Pires shows he’s focussed on Arsenal by telling us every day about which club is offering him a 15 year deal. If it’s not Villarreal or an Italian club now it’s Benfica. He says “I can confirm negotiations with Benfica. I like Benfica very much, my family are Benfica supporters and some of my family still live in Queluz’.

Maybe it’s just me but he I think he should probably stop talking about other clubs at the moment. We have more important things to think about than whether or not Robert Pires deigns to sign a one year deal which has been good enough for Dennis Bergkamp.

“Early in the match, I took a blow to the knee - I heard it crunch and thought I might have to be substituted. But the pain died down, I felt better and played the full 90 minutes. Maybe because I had taken painkillers before the game for a bruised leg.” - Alexander Hleb plays down fears he’ll be out of action for a while. Keep chomping those mogadon, Alex!

Samuel Eto’o shows he’s not worried about Barcelona signing Thierry Henry by saying he doesn’t care that he’ll face the man who would certainly take his place if he left Arsenal. He says “Why should I care if he’s in the final? I couldn’t care less. In fact, I couldn’t give a shit”, which is about as see through as Michael Jackson’s skin. He’s obviously cacking himself that Henry will sign for them because he knows Henry is a far, far better player and also not a massive cunt. He also said that we were lucky to get the final because we played badly against Villarreal. Will I bother mentioning how Milan hit the post in the first leg and that they had a perfectly good goal disallowed in the second leg? If there’s anyone I want to see cry on May 17th it’s Samuel Eto’o. And Deco. And Oleguer. And Valdes. And van Bommell. And etc etc…

Patrick Vieira left Arsenal to win the Champions League. He must be sick now and he’s been involved in a training ground bust-up with Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It’s all going wrong in Turin now. Their 14 point lead has been whittled down to 3 points and the face the very real possibility of being overtaken in the league at the death on top of being knocked out of Europe. By us! Hopefully Thierry will look and realise that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Ashley Cole continued his comeback from injury against West Ham reserves yesterday. Nicklas Bendtner scored 2 as our lads won 3-1. There’s an interesting player called Joseph O’Cearuill playing for us in the centre of defence. He was let go by Watford on the night our reserves played them at Barnet but a watching Arsene Wenger was so impressed he invited him to play for us. He’s done well in two games since and may well earn himself a deal which just goes to show you football is a funny old game. Not good enough for Watford then all of a sudden you’re playing alongside Ashley Cole and Theo Walcott. Good luck to him, I hope he does well.

And that’s that. It’ll be a quiet enough weekend as we play Sunderland on Monday but expect a few little changes around the site to keep you entertained. Or not so much entertained as interested for about 3 seconds. Till tomorrow.

Apr

27

It’s Barcelona in the final.

Filed Under The Arsenal | 524 arses

So it’s Barcelona in the final as the second semi in a row finished 0-0. Barcelona were lucky though, I didn’t see too much wrong with Shevchenko’s goal but there you go. The hype machine will go into overdrive now particularly with all the speculation surrounding Thierry Henry’s future. There doesn’t seem to be a day goes by without some Barcelona player talking about it. This time it’s former Arsenal player Gio van Bronckhorst. It’s all tremendously dull and classless by Barcelona to be honest.

They’re not really my favourite fans in the world either as the overconfident cunts booked up all the flights to Paris last week. I thought I’d at least have a day to get good prices ahead of them, but no. Cheapest flight from Barcelona was around €500. ‘I’ll go to Madrid and fly from there’ I thought! but the cunts have made the usual €50 return to Madrid triple in price. ‘I know! I’ll get the train!’ so I rang up Renfe.

“Hello, I would like to travel from Barcelona to Paris please!”

“When would you like to travel, sir?”

“May 16th an…”

“Sold out!”

Bastards. Anyway, I now have a Bill Brysonesque voyage to Perpignan, then an overnight train to Paris and the same, more or less, going back. It’ll probably be full of Barcelona fans too. There’s no escape. Especially here. Which is quite normal, I suppose.

Anyway, a quick round up of the stories because I’ve got a headache. And yes, I know drinking beer gives you a headache next day but drinking beer makes you not care that drinking beer gives you a headache the next day.

Thierry Henry says he’s proud of the team for getting to the Champions League final but that’s not enough. He wants to win the thing - “I know that our supporters will always remember what we have achieved — but we are going to Paris to win the trophy.”

Hurrah! Arsene Wenger says we have to be careful of Ronaldinho which is kind of like saying you shouldn’t dip your mickey into a piranha tank. Chairman PHW loves Arsene though, he says “I have no idea what happens when he goes. Managers like Arsene Wenger only come around once in a lifetime. He is the best.”

Football most orange vice-Chairman has urged the captain to sign the new deal. He says “We want him to stay, the fans want him to stay and we hope he will stay. If he’s ambitious he should stay at Arsenal because we have got a new stadium and a young team coming through. We would like him to stay and be captain and take us on to even greater successes.”

There’s an injury worry over Alexander Hleb, apparently, but there’s good news about Mathieuy Flamini whose hammy isn’t torn just slightly pulled. Philippe Senderos also hopes to be back before the end of the season and if fit should come back in for the unconvincing Campbell.

Right, I think I need some breakfast. Till tomorrow, arseheads.

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