Another Friday, another morning coughing up lumps of radioactive green stuff that you could probably use to stick a person to a big white plank and then hang him upside down over shark infested waters. I never quite understood why anyone would need to do that but there you go.
We’ll start with Arsene talking about his new contract and life at Arsenal. He says he sees the rest of his football life at the club, comparing it to a marriage. Hopefully a good marriage like Paul Newman and his wife and not Fred and Rose West. We know what he means though. He also said that while he had to think about it there was ‘never really any doubt‘ in his mind about remaining at the club. That, coming from the horse’s mouth, is rather different to the scenario David Dein tried to paint last week when he suggested Arsene was ready to leave the club. It’s not the first time since the Orangeman’s arrival back on the scene, albeit hanging on the coat-tails of somebody else, that Arsene has openly contradicted statements made by his friend. Interesting.
All eyes now can focus on tomorrow’s game against Sp*rs and the only return to the squad is that of Bacary Sagna who will play at right back. That means Gallas misses out, Senderos we know is suspended while Eboue and Lehmann remain out. With centre-halves at a premium it looks like Gilberto will play there despite only arriving in London today after being away with Brazil. Under normal circumstances I think we’d see the Brazilian rested but when the manager talks about Alex Song being an option at centre-half then you have to hope that he gets over the jet lag quickly.
It’s always a tough game at the Lane, they’re as fired up as they ever get, and a draw is more often than not the result. How they used to hate the sight of Robert Pires who loved scoring against them. I know Adebayor has his critics but he seems to enjoy scoring against them as well. I have a sneaky feeling Eduardo could make the difference too. We know that they’ve got decent quality up front but at the back they’re suspect. Look at the recent game against Fulham. 3-1 up with just over 15 minutes to go and it ended up 3-3. They can concede at any moment and if we get about them then we could unsettle them. I don’t want to make any predictions, just keep fingers crossed for the right result.
For those of you in Dublin or surrounding area (Dublin stretches far and wide these days) there’s a group of us meeting to watch the game in the Wool Shed on Parnell Street tomorrow. Feel free to come along and join us.
Now, time for the Arsecast.
In this week’s Arsecast, brought to you by OleOle.com – whose Fantasy Football game begins today but there’s still time to get involved and win prizes like trips to football matches and PS3s – I chat with GilbertoSilver about the Sp*rs game and next Wednesday’s Champions League game with Sevilla, the Man in the Bar has a player history, there’s a funny story about Nicklas Bendtner and that’s about it.
To subscribe to the arsecast in iTunes – click here. To download this week’s arsecast directly – click here (11mb MP3). You can find the arsecast archives here. And you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.
[audio:http://arseblog.com/podcasts/arsecast_episode44.mp3]And there you go. Now, I’m off to work. See some of you tomorrow for the match, the rest of you will have to make do with my words on a screen in tomorrow’s blog. You’re the lucky ones.
