We’ll start this morning with some quite unsubstantiated rumour - that we’ve apparently signed Hatem Ben Affleck for £16m. I can’t find anything in the paper this morning, only vague rumours on other blogs. This could be because I’m not looking hard enough or that I’m so hungover I’m actually blind but whatever. We’ll wait and see what happens but I was told last night by a very trustworthy source.

Emmanuel Adebayor rubbished claims that he wanted to leave the club yesterday. He said:

I rubbish claims that I want to leave the club. Those reports are rubbish and whoever made them up is completely rubbish and fat and orange. And rubbish.

Can’t say fairer than that, can you? The manager says there have been no new developments regarding Alexander Hleb but Hleb strikes me as the kind of bloke who wouldn’t say anything to the boss himself. He’ll wait until he’s been given his holidays then he’ll get his agent to inform the club he’s leaving, the spineless cunt. So you can see where Arsene is coming from but I’d still put all the money I had on Hleb leaving this summer. Even if it meant my family went hungry. Actually, after this morning, especially if it meant my family went hungry.

Meanwhile the boss says he’s not willing to let anyone else go and there are 220 players who want to join us. Did he count them all? That’s pretty fucking impressive. Here’s an idea - get rid of some of the shite like Hleb and Eboue and the chances are that of those 220 there must at least be a couple who aren’t as bad. Buy them. Hurrah, everyone’s happy. Quite why he wants to keep Hleb, a player who obviously wants to leave, is a mystery to me. We got shot of Diarra because he was about as committed to Arsenal as Gazza is to not being a fucking lush, the mad cunt. And I don’t want to hear any moaning about calling Gazza mad and respecting his ‘mental illness’. I don’t give a fuck. If he wanted me to respect his mental illness he shouldn’t have scored that goal in the 91 semi-final, should he? Cunt.

Wenger says it’s fishing time for the agents - those scummy bottom feeders will be trying to make as much money as possible between now and August 31st. These people are parasites, they suckle their living from others, their first objective is to make money for themselves, then comes any interest they might have in the player’s career. They lie, cheat and steal from clubs and their clients, they really are the most despicable bunch of cunts in the world. If you read tomorrow that Josef Fritzl was a football agent you’d say ‘Oh, now it all makes sense’. Cunts.

Jermaine Jenas says Sp*rs will be bigger and better than Arsenal next season. Frankly, why anyone pays the slightest bit of attention to anyone whose name rhymes with penis - and this is an important consideration when evaluating statements of bravado - (John Smith says ‘Sp*rs will be bigger than Arsenal!’ and I say ‘Hmmm, perhaps the man has a point’ but Derek Menis says ‘Sp*rs will be bigger than Arsenal!’ and I say ‘Be off with you, scoundrel, your name rhymes with my cock!’) - is quite beyond me. And talk about the boy who cried wolf. We hear this every year from Sp*rs and they still end up being the same shit-eating cunts they were the previous season. Cunts.

Tomas Rosicky will miss Euro2008. In fact, I have exclusive news. Tomas Rosicky has been ruled out of life until 2019.

I need a fucking breakfast roll and some coffee and the only thing I have is the coffee. I would trade you all the coffee I had for a breakfast roll now. I may have to go to Tesco. I can’t drive though because I’m still about 92 over the limit. Walking is for cunts. Jesus, this is one shit morning.

More tomorrow.

Alex is preparing to make one of the most important moves of his life. He is leaving even though Arsenal want to offer him a new long-term contract.

Only time will tell if it is the right decision but there’s no way back now. Everything will be settled in the next two weeks.

Oh well, I can’t say I’m really that bothered, to be honest but it’s a shoddy way for Hleb to treat the manager who showed more faith in him than others might have done. It is the moral equivalent of 11 goals in 3 seasons from an attacker. How the deal goes down is going to be interesting though. It’s fairly obvious that Inter are the club on his radar, we know from what Arsene said that the ice-cream was more than an ice-cream and frankly any player who goes to meet another club the night before such a huge game is a bit of a cunt when you think about it.

Will he do a Webster? Will Inter try and maintain some kind of cordial relationship with Arsenal and offer a fee? That remains to be seen. What is in little doubt is that he’s on his way and for all his skill and ability on the ball we’re not losing a great deal of end product. Hleb always seemed to be the square peg trying to fit into the round hole - not a winger, he preferred to play behind the striker but wasn’t even close to being good enough to fulfill the ‘number 10′ role. He can twinkle his toes out the door and go and fuck himself. I know we don’t really need to be losing players this summer but next please. He is very replaceable, in my opinion.

Another agent apparently stirring up trouble is Emmanuel Adebayor’s. The Mail has a story which claims Adebayor is demanding £80,000 a week to stay at Arsenal but that Arsenal can’t afford to pay that kind of money. Now, I can’t imagine Adebayor making those kinds of demands. I just don’t see it. And let’s remember the Mail is the paper that ran the story about Gallas having no mates at Arsenal, spinning a story about international colleagues to make it look like he was dumping on the club. But the biggest clue that this story is a load of shit comes when you read this line:

All that could be solved if the club were to accept the help of Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, but chairman Peter Hill-Wood and director Danny Fiszman say no.

You don’t have to be any kind of genius at all to work out that the story has been planted by Fat & Orange. This has the dirty, spray-on tan fingerprints of Dein all over it. I mean seriously, if you’re going to try and undermine the club in the press at least distance yourself from it slightly so it’s not so blindingly fucking obvious that’s what you’re doing. Fucking pathetic, I have to say, and I hope everyone else can see this blatant piece of scaremongering shite for what it is - half-arsed, subpar PR for F&O, the fat and orange cunts.

The Daily Express reports that Birmingham’s Karen Brady was interviewed by Arsenal last month and thought she had done well enough to get the job as Managing Director, a job which wasn’t available last month. Hmmm. Anyway, her arrest in relation to a corruption in football investigation has apparently scuppered her chances of the job and we’ll be looking elsewhere.

Some early team news ahead of Sunday’s vital…*cough*…game against Sunderland reveals that some kids are going to get a chance. Kieran Gibbs and Mark Randall are likely to be involved in the squad and with injuries the way they are one of them may even start. More thorough team news from the boss and his press conference today. It’s going to be an interesting one with the Hleb story and I’m very curious to see his reaction to this Adebayor thing.

Right, Arsecast.

In this week’s OleOle sponsored Arsecast I chat with Goodplaya about Keith Edelman, Flamini, Eboue and more. There’s a player history, Eboue, some more on the OleOle deal and some other bits and pieces.

To subscribe to the arsecast in iTunes - click here . To download this week’s arsecast directly - click here (16mb MP3 ). You can find the arsecast archives here . And you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

Right, have a good Friday. More on the fallout of all this on tomorrow’s blog.

We were close this year but we did not win and what I expect from my team is that, if you are a winner, you say ‘let’s come back next year and win’. If our players are not capable of doing that and just want to walk out for bigger contracts, for me that would be the biggest disappointment.

Not only to not win this year but to not be capable of coming back together.

A nice little dig at the departed Flamini there and the gauntlet well and truly thrown down to the rest of the players. While the manager admits the Flamini situation wasn’t handled as well as it might have been the fact is he was on the point of leaving last summer, a new deal had been on the table since before Christmas and the player held all the aces when it came to negotiations. Had Flamini made the breakthrough a season earlier I’m sure he’d still be our player now. Oh well. Such is life.

We’ve seen Wenger’s teams come back from intense disappointments before and he’s obviously looking to replicate that. You just wonder if there isn’t quite the right character with some of the players. Is new leadership on the pitch required? A fresh face in the coaching staff? We’ll see.

Gael Clichy is a young man who has his head well and truly screwed on. He has warned players thinking of leaving that the grass is not always greener on the other side, saying:

No one can ever say they are leaving to win trophies because you don’t know what you are going to find when you join another team. Thierry Henry left us because maybe he wanted to win La Liga or the Champions League with Barcelona. But that is not how it worked out.

With the squad we have at Arsenal I am sure we are going to do something great very soon. All I am saying is that if everyone at Arsenal sticks together we can achieve so much.

We often talk about how continuity in managerial positions brings its rewards. Clubs, in England anyway, that chop and change their managers rarely win trophies. I suppose that could translate itself to the pitch as well. The longer the players stay together the better they know each other, the more of a team they become. However, there is the danger that things can go stale, that fresh faces are needed to add something to the squad as well. I’m certainly in agreement with Gael that we can’t possibly allow the number of players to go that papers and fans have been speculating about, that would be ruinous, but at the same time I don’t think it would be wrong to accept that some of the players in squad aren’t quite first team material.

We know that the manager wants to keep Hleb, I’d say beyond Lehmann he probably doesn’t want anyone to go. The more players that leave the more players we need to bring in this summer and while we do have some promising up and comers that’s not the sort of augmentation the squad needs. Experience is vital or we’ll have another batch of youngsters learning the hard lessons.

Emmanuel Adebayor is looking to improve for the season ahead, quashing any rumours he might on his way out. He’s quite candid about the fact he’s scored a lot but admits he’s missed chances too. Still, at 30 goals he has every right to look back on his season with a measure of pride. However, the manager isn’t going to allow him to rest on his laurels, by any means. He says:

I believe if Adebayor keeps his work ethic, there is still 20 per cent more to come from him. Does he want it enough - to get this extra 20 per cent out? Well that is where his future lies. If you lose that desire, you quickly become a nobody. We have seen players before, when they start getting the recognition, they ease off in their team work, and very quickly they die.

There were some suggestions that this was exactly what happened to him when he went through his fallow spell but I think that would be unfair. I think there were games when he felt the effects of playing up on his own for so long and doing so much work but the manager is dead right to spell it out the way he did. You start each season from scratch and he’s got it all to do again next time around. Hard work, that effort and running he puts in, will play a huge role in how successful he is.

Arsene says Jens Lehmann helped Manuel Almunia improve as a goalkeeper. I think ‘help’ probably isn’t the right word. I’d say he gave him about as much help as you’d give a Sp*rs fan with a broken down car at the side of a country road who was about to be raped by a bear, but I take his point about the pressure to perform bringing out the best in the Spaniard. He knew that if he fucked up then Jens would be ready and waiting to take his place. What a shame we didn’t have that kind of competition for places in other areas of the field this season.

Spare a thought this morning for poor old Freddie Ljungberg. After less than a year at West Ham they’re willing to pay him £3m to go away. It’s a hard life being a footballer, eh? In seriousness though, it is sad to see a guy like Freddie, who was so excellent for us, suffer the constant injuries which have slowed him down so much. A move to Spain might just suit him.

Right, finally for today the RNG has done its stuff and picked the winners for the Cesc TV show. I asked you which Arsenal player ‘Scarface Begs’ was an anagram of. To the people who answered ‘Bacary Sagna’ can I please have some of whatever you’re smoking, and to the man who said ‘Kanu’ I am lost for words! Anyway, the two winners are Chris Athanasi and Mark Nicoll. Well done to you both, I’ll drop you a mail when I have all the details about how to get your tickets.

Right then, till tomorrow.

The Arsenal Supporter’s Trust met with Arsene Wenger yesterday. Points to come from these discussions are brought to you exclusively by Arseblog and are as follows:

• On Flamini, Wenger said that Flamini had left purely because of the
  money on offer. He commended the Board for having done the maximum they
  could to make Flamini a good offer within sensible limits. Interestingly
  he pointed out that one of the risks of having overseas players at the
  club is that they are attuned to the concept of moving clubs.
• On transfer activity. He said he was looking for a defensive player, to
  address the team’s weakness defending route one. He said we defended as
  well as Manchester United and Chelsea from set pieces and open play; but
  not the long ball aimed down the middle and he would address this. He
  also said he wanted a creative player and told Ken Friar that he
  shouldn’t plan for much of a holiday as the phone would be busy.
• He was very clear that he did not want Hleb to leave. He said that he
  was sceptical that the Webster clause would be invoked. (This is
  probably a reference to the gentleman’s agreement between clubs not to
  do the dirty on each other). In Wengers own words, ‘we have lost one
  player and we do not want to lose any more’.

Interesting stuff from the manager and my thanks to the AST for providing that info. In terms of clubs not doing the dirty on each though that’s really a bit of a dream in this day and age. The manager has reacted furiously to comments about Cesc by Real Madrid president Raman Calderon. The boss says:

I don’t want to sit there and hear Madrid come out and say they want this player and Barcelona come out and say they want that one. I never come out and say that I want a player from Real Madrid or Barcelona because of respect to these clubs.

The rule when a player is under contract is that you first contact the club to see if a player is available. We’re not stupid enough to believe it really happens like that…That they contact agents behind our back, we understand. But that they come in a newspaper I find disrespectful.

Unfortunately that is how the Spanish press works. With two newspapers to feed stories and unsettle players it’s a major part of their transfer tactics. I’m right with the boss on this one and while some might suggest that recent comments by Arsene about Ben Arfa were somewhat injudicious there’s a massive difference between saying somebody’s a good player that you’d be interested in they were available and encouraging a player to tell his club he wants to leave because of the huge amounts of money he’d be offered if he did. Fuck Real Madrid. This will be the third season in a row they’ve tried this shit with Cesc. May they all get dodgy paella, the miserable cunts.

Theo Walcott says Arsenal won’t make the same mistakes next season and that the younger players will have learned from the disappointment of this, while Lukasz Fabianski says he learned a lot from Jens Lehmann. Should be fun next season when the laid-back Pole starts pretending strikers stood on his toes.

Don’t forget the competition to win tickets to the Cesc Fabregas TV show - details in yesterday’s blog, winners announced tomorrow.

Ok, so from Arsenal news we go to Arseblog news. And rather big Arseblog news at that.

To give you a little bit of background, for those that don’t already know, Arseblog was started on February 27th 2002 in my house in Barcelona. There was no great plan, no real design to speak of, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to write about something that interested me and really nothing interests me like Arsenal.

From very humble beginnings, I can remember being ever so excited at having my first ever +200 visitor day, it has grown over the years to what you see today. There are hundreds of thousands of comments, a forum, podcasts, columnists, competitions and, most importantly, a daily helping of Arsenal news, comment and opinion.

In that time Arseblog has become a real community both online and offline. Online there are regular visitors and contributors, single debaters and mass debaters, people who agree with what I write, people who don’t, people who like it, people who hate it, people with strange views about Arsenal, people with the most conservative views of the club, but the bottom line is that we all have one thing in common and that is Arsenal FC.

Offline there’s a tremendous group of people who go to matches together, home and away, who are genuine friends, and what brought them together was Arseblog. I made my own friends living in Barcelona via the site, we’ve had 5-a-side tournaments, many, many pints of beer have been drunk and good times have been had by so many people. And every season more people are becoming part of it. I have never quite been able to say how much I appreciate the generosity of people I’ve met through the site, for the hospitality they’ve shown me and my family down the years. And that doesn’t even include those I haven’t met who have made offers of tickets, taken time to send emails to the site, to take part on the arses or the forums and just be a part of this website.

You’ll know that rain or shine, hail or snow, crippling hangover, holiday, illness, rotten hangover or the most boilkiest boilk of all time there’s an Arseblog there for you first thing in the morning. Once again I have to doff my cap to Tom for not only filling in but for all the technical assistance he’s given the site down the years. It would be much more broken without him.

So, where am I going with all this. Well, I’m sure most of you are familiar with OleOle. They’ve been sponsoring the Arsecast for over a year now and myself and the Mugsmasher record a weekly podcast for the site (every Thursday!). Some months back they approached me with a proposal which was both exciting and nerve wracking. After putting so much work into Arseblog for the last 6 years I needed to be sure that what they were proposing was not only the right thing for me but the right thing for my website and for the people who use the website.

We talked, we drank some Guinness together, we talked some more, drank some more Guinness and in such a gentlemanly way was the agreement reached - Arseblog will become part of OleOle.com from Monday 12th May.

‘Goodness’, I hear you say, ‘what does all this mean? Will I still get my steaming hot Arse first thing in the morning? Will it do all the same stuff it did before? Where’s my mummy?’

To answer those questions:

The blog will continue and I will continue writing it. Rail, hail, shine, hangover, boilk and all that. Every morning you will get your Arseblog the same way you have for the last 6 years.

The biggest change will be the URL - from Monday Arseblog will be available at http://arseblog.oleole.com. You can update your bookmarks then but, if you forget, the old URL will redirect right to the new place.

The comments system will be the same, everyone will be free to take part in the arses exactly the way they are now.

The forum will remain the same as it is now. The columns will be the same as they are now with the guest contributors and writers adding their wit and insight to Arsenal news.

The site will look and feel almost exactly the way it does now.

I have no idea where your mummy is.

What is OleOle?

OleOle has just launched a new site and not only does it look and feel like no other football site on the web it’s aim is to become the biggest football site on the web. It will do that by providing great content through blogs like Arseblog but it has some outstanding features (customisable pages, history wikis, blogs and blog hosting, videos and more) that I’ll go into in more detail throughout the week. If you think of Myspace for music then OleOle is going to be the football version…just bigger.

To join up with OleOle at this stage was the kind of opportunity I just could not pass up. Those of you who know me, and even those of you who know of me only through the blog, will know how much Arseblog means to me. It’s been a massive part of my life for the last 6 years, it’s something I’m unbelievably proud of even if it did all kind of happen by accident! It’s seen me through good and bad times and I have a very intense emotional attachment to it - which is odd when you consider it’s ‘just’ a blog. I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought it was wrong for Arseblog, for all of you who read and contribute to the site, or for me.

What this deal does is allow Arseblog to become part of something I think has the potential to be really huge. It allows Arsenal fans to get in on the ground floor on a site which promises to be a fantastic resource and lots of fun. And it allows me to make my living doing something I really love - writing about Arsenal.

Arseblog is now, essentially my full time job. How fucking cool is that? It means that I can spend more time on the site, hopefully introduce some new features over the months to come and generally be much more involved (hahaha, I can hear people say ‘Oh no!).

I don’t want to go on too long and I’m sure there are loads of questions you might have that I haven’t answered in this post. Feel free to ask them in the Arses and I’ll do my best to answer throughout the day.

I want to very sincerely thank every single one of you who visits and reads the site, those who arse, those who send emails, those who use whatever part of the site, for all your support and for helping to make Arseblog what it is today and what it can be in the years ahead.

Cheers,

‘blogger

What is important is how the manager replaces him. What Flamimi did this season was allow Cesc to flourish in a more attacking role and I think it’s vital that whoever comes in has to be able to do that as well. I don’t see anyone at the club who can perform that role in the way that Flamini did so you’d have to think the manager will be looking elsewhere to find that kind of player. It is way to early to start the speculation about who that might be. We have the whole summer ahead of us to build up names then get disappointed when we sign somebody else.

What is interesting is that some newspapers are reporting Flamini has left for a £50,000 a week deal at Milan, leaving some fans to question why Arsenal couldn’t match that kind of money. Remember that Flamini left on a Bosman so the deal he did with Milan is worth a lot more than £50,000 a week. It strikes me that there’s a bit of shit stirring going on here, perhaps from those it would suit if Arsenal were seen to have ‘no money’ and some friendly journalists to help spread the ‘crisis’ stories. Be very clear, Arsenal may have a wage structure but it doesn’t mean players don’t get a paid a lot of money. Even with the arrival of Chelsea and their obscene money I doubt there was a better paid Premiership player than Thierry Henry.

The Times, one of those papers, also reports that Alexander Hleb has apparently confided in teammates that he and his representatives have concluded a 4 year deal with Inter Milan. He’s apparently frustrated at Arsenal’s lack of silverware, which is quite ironic because I’m frustrated with Hleb’s inability to do anything to help us win silverware. It seems likely that he’s going to invoke the Webster clause to buy out his contract and frankly I couldn’t care less. If he goes, even if we were to replace him with a cheap hacker from the Championship, the chances are that player could manage more than the pathetic 3 league goal return we got from Hleb this season, and his even more pathetic 11 goals in 3 years at the club. Say what you want about his quick feet and unbelievable skill on the ball, his end product just isn’t good enough. He’s obviously not committed to the team, let him go if he wants. The Independent runs the same story.

With doubts over Gilberto’s future as well we could start the season having lost 4 midfield players. Flamini, Hleb, Gilberto and Diarra whose departure is likely to cause much debate over the summer. Why did the manager let him go when Flamini’s future was still up in the air? I really don’t know the answer to that but you have to imagine the circumstances where any manager would sell a player they’d just bought a couple of months earlier were nothing short of extraordinary. Diarra’s behaviour forced the issue, complaining about lack of first team football just weeks after joining, and his apparent refusal to play in the FA Cup was the final straw. A decent player but absolutely lacking in the kind of character you need at the highest level. He failed at Chelsea, he failed at Arsenal, with the greatest of respect perhaps he’s found his level at Portsmouth.

Anyway, it certainly promises to be an interesting summer ahead but we still have one game left to play this season. We know that 2nd place is now out of the question after Chelsea’s win over Newcastle but the aim has got to be the 83 points and to keep the momentum going. Don’t forget the 49 game unbeaten run came off the back of an intense disappointment, similar to this season. We lost the title at home to Leeds, of all fucking people, with that big fat Viducunt scoring a late winner. Now, I’m not suggesting we’re going to do similar next season but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this isn’t the first disappointment we’ve ever suffered and it won’t be the last.

Jens Lehmann says the goodbye he got at the end of the Everton game will always stay in his heart. The German says:

I had one or two tears in my eyes. It was a great farewell for me. This farewell will always stay in my heart. There are more memories than only just playing, there is the reception of the supporters. The respectful kindness of the supporters.

Cheerio, Jens and in the Mirror he suggests that players will come and go this summer, hopefully to make Arsenal successful.

Congratulations to the Arsenal Ladies who won the FA Cup yesterday to add to their league triumph. Silverware! Arsenal silverware!

Finally for today if you fancy going along to the Cesc Fabregas TV show I’ve got two pairs of tickets to give away. No doubt you’ll have already seen some of the clips, including one where Cesc gets set on fire and does some ball juggling (is it just me or is that really not the kind of thing you want to see your best player doing?!), so if you want to go along to the recording, which takes place on Tuesday May 13th in London, then simply answer the following question:

‘Scarface Begs’ is an anagram of which Arsenal footballer’s name?

Answers by Wednesday night to cesctv@arseblog.com and I’ll announce the winners on Thursday morning. Please be aware that you do have to be able to attend this show, the prize is the tickets only, first class air fares, hotel stays, massages, 5 course silver-service dinners and post show cocktails are NOT included.

Right then, until tomorrow, Arsefans.

There really isn’t a great deal to say about yesterday’s game. I’m thankful I was watching it in a pub with other Arsebloggers yesterday because it was a snoozefest and a half. A real end of season game and even though Everton had something to play for the lack of ambition they showed meant they deserved exactly what they got. Which was nothing.

The goal came when substitute Armand Traore whipped in a good cross and Nicklas Bendtner, who had started the move, arrived with perfect timing to power home a header. That’s 9 goals in total for the young Dane and while his game still needs work and he can improve a lot of his play, that’s an impressive return for somebody who played very much a cameo role this season. When you look at how Aliadiere fared in similar circumstances it’s easy to see the difference. The Dane has more goals in one season than the Frenchman in his entire Arsenal career.

There’s not much else to talk about really. Alex Song did well at centre-half again and there was a nice touch from Arsene Wenger who brought on Jens Lehmann to give him a chance to say a real goodbye to the fans. And that’s the most memorable thing about yesterday, the fact that we’re losing two of our players.

Jens has found it hard this season after being dropped. Some of his comments were rather impolitic and I was critical of him for that but I’m going to miss the mad old cunt. What he achieved with the club shouldn’t be forgotten. He had the unenviable task of replacing a true legend in David Seaman and he was ever present in the team that went unbeaten for an entire league season. I remember at the Champions League final in Paris seeing him after the game walking to one of the family/sponsor areas and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look as gutted in my entire life. After the heroics of the semi-final against Villarreal it was heartbreaking. He’ll go and play for Germany in Euro2008 and then make a decision on his future - so for now it’s thanks Jens and good luck, you toe-stamping, Drogba pushing, ref baiting, Gallas shouting, top save making loon.

Extra: Sky Sports interview with Jens.

Mathieu Flamini appears to have flown to Italy to sign a 4 year deal with AC Milan (who kept their Champions League hopes alive with a 2-1 win over Inter and saw nearest rivals for 4th place Fiorentina lose - boooo!). Whatever way you want to look at it, AC Milan is a massive club with huge pedigree. The chance to join a club like that doesn’t come along for too many players and when you factor in the kind of money he was being offered it’s understandable that he’s gone. Disappointing too but we have to be realistic about it. Go back 12 months and how many people would have been up in arms if Flamini had gone to Birmingham (like the rumours suggested) and how many would have sanctioned a wage deal of £55,000 a week for him?

I suppose in the modern game all you can really ask of your players is that they give you 100% every time they go on the pitch and that they respect their contracts. Flamini did that on both counts. He was a trojan worker and all he did was take play the game by its rules when it came to his new contract. It’s a shame he’s leaving, I think we had the perfect combination with him and Cesc in midfield (something the manager needs to replicate for next season), but there you go. Good luck to him but life goes on and the Arsenal will, like the Dude, abide.

By his own admission the manager needs to sit down with Gilberto regarding his future and with Hleb potentially about to do a Webster it could be a busy few weeks ahead. More of the manager’s thoughts about yesterday, Flamini, Jens and Bendtner, here.

It’s a bank holiday here so it’s a short one today. The sun is shining, there’s a game of five-a-side later on and I’m going to spend the day chilling out.

More tomorrow.

Wigan’s win over Aston Villa could have a bearing on today’s game as well. Villa were battling with Everton for the final UEFA Cup place and now the blue scousers have a 3 point gap so it’s not as crucial for them to get a result today. A draw would cement their place in Europe next season though so I expect them to be a bit ‘behind the ball’ today.

You wonder with nothing left to play for now whether the boss will bring in a few youngsters for the last couple of games. We’ll wait and see what happens there. Right, a quick Sunday round-up.

Reports in Italy suggest that Mathieu Flamini has signed a 4 year deal with AC Milan. Of course we’ll wait for official confirmation on that but you wouldn’t put much money on him staying now. He’s been a great player for us this season and I think we’ll miss him but it’ll be interesting to see how the boss replaces him. There’s no other player at the club with similar qualities so a transfer move is on the cards. And while I wish Flamini well at his new club (except when he plays us) there’s just a little part of me that hopes Inter cream AC in the Milan derby today and the Flamster finds himself playing Everton in next season’s UEFA Cup. Petty, I know, but still!

The Times runs a piece about the search for the new Managing Director. There are some interesting names in there. Birmingham’s Karren Brady, Premier League Chief Exec Richard Scudamore (booooooo!) and even Michael Grade, ITV and former Channel4 boss. I think this is something the club will want to sort out sooner rather than later with what looks like a busy summer ahead of us.

Theo Walcott talks to the Sunday Mirror and says he wants to start more games while the Observer reports that Bacary Sagna is to be offered a new deal.

The Daily Mail has a report, based in figures from the AST, about our transfer budget this summer. They reckon the manager has around £25m to spend but some of that money is/was earmarked for the renewal of Flamini’s contract and a new deal for Hleb. With Flamini on his way we need to prioritise and frankly giving Hleb more money seems foolish to me. The AST are meeting with Arsene and Ken Friar in the week ahead and hopefully we’ll get some info from them to pass on to you here on the blog or the Arsecast.

The manager talks about his transfer policy and in the cold light of day the fact is the team has made an improvement this season. As we go into the final home game of the season that’s not something that should be overlooked.

Hopefully the lads can respond and put on a good show today. The fans deserve it, the players deserve it and everyone who has worked so hard this season deserves it. Wasn’t it a final home game of the season some years ago when we stuck 6 or 7 past Everton? Same again please.

Right, that’ll do. See some of you later for a pint, talk to the rest of you tomorrow.

Where to begin. Flamini? Ok then. The manager has given him a couple more days to make his mind up. The boss is all like ‘Ok dude, you can like stay here and play some football and get some money or you can like go elsewhere and play some football and get a million billion money and then a bonus and then some extra money and then a bit more cash and then you’ll get your wages and stuff’.

Frankly with the money on offer elsewhere Flamini would be as mad as a rabid badger in a box filled with Phil Collins music if he stayed with us. The wage structure would be shattered if we were to even try and match what he’s been offered by other clubs and the manager says:

Despite what people say, we have £360 million debt. So we have to respect the wages structure or we will go bust. Therefore it is not that you cannot respect the wages structure, we cannot afford not to do it.

To put it in Lehmann’s terms, if we were to match what Flamini was being offered we’d have to pay him in the region of £6m a year, AFTER TAX. At that point you have Cesc, Gallas, Clichy, Sagna, Toure, Adebayor and possibly van Persie (if he was feeling cheeky) looking for the same. Then other players, while not expecting the same kind of money, will still want a good increase on their salaries and all of a sudden you’re faced with a wage bill which is larger than Gazza’s bar tab. The simple fact is that even going out and buying a player, spending the money on a transfer fee and his wages over the course of his contract is the most cost efficient option.

You’ll have read elsewhere that Flamini has made all kinds of demands to stay at Arsenal but don’t mix those up with the offers he’s been made from the likes of AC Milan and Bayern Munich. If he comes to Arsenal and says ‘This club has offered me this’ it’s not the same as saying ‘I want this or else’. It’s easy to say that if Flamini is focussed on football then he’d stay with Arsenal. How many of us would turn down incredible money if it was on the table in front of us? Not many, I’d wager.

So while Flamini is likely to the leave the boss says he’s the only one who can go and rejects the suggestion that there’ll be a massive clear-out at the end of the season. Reading around you’d think we were going to sell the whole lot of them which would obviously be quite mad. Doubts remain though over the futures of Gilberto, who may want to go elsewhere and play more football, and Alexander Hleb. Arsene says he’s going to report Inter to FIFA over Hleb, saying:

I will of course do it, with Inter Milan especially. I now know more about what happened over there. I will keep the information for those who need to know it. I don’t want to speak much more on that but it is unfair what happened.

And I’m sure he’s well within his rights to do it but he also needs to look inwards a bit. Whatever happened, and I’m sure it was more than Hleb getting a flake in his 99, the player himself was a large part of it. He was the one who went to meet them, so we can gauge his commitment to Arsenal on that. My view is that if a significant offer comes in then we should take it without question. Hleb only has two years left on his contract and can do a Webster if he so desires, perhaps the man who doesn’t have the balls to shoot will surprise us with his bravery when it comes to buying out his contract.

Arsene also called the departure of Keith Edelman a ‘surprise‘ and says that the new man doesn’t necessarily have to be a football man. I think it’s clear the club are looking at somebody who is more football savvy though. The contracts and player purchase side of things should not be damaged at all with Ken Friar in charge. He’s a man of vast experience and a canny negotiator. There should be no worries in that regard.

The father of Portsmouth’s Nico Krancjar has confirmed that Arsene is interested in him, saying:

Wenger likes players with a sense of the game. Arsenal plays creative football and Wenger recognises this in Niko and he would be a logical replacement for Hleb.

I like Kranjcar, I have to say. I think he’s the kind of player who could bloom at Arsenal but it’s obviously all speculative at the moment.

Manchester United kick off against West Ham shortly and a win for them would end our very outside, slim, unrealistic chance of the title. I don’t know whether to watch or not. I might. But then given the way my very head in pounding it might be a bad idea. Come on West Ham, you cunts. Do it. And then Newcastle on Monday night. Come on. What a final day it would be.

Right, I have sausages, bacon, eggs, white and black pudding, fried tomato, toast and orange juice calling me. Who am I to resist?

Update: If you fancy a pint and the Everton game tomorrow in Dublin, upstairs in O’Neills in Suffolk Street is where some of us will be.

The Times reports that the board felt he had taken the club as far as he could, that Arsene Wenger wasn’t particularly fond of him and that the manager might have more freedom to spend money in the transfer market without Edelman’s ‘penny pinching’.

The Sun says Arsene wants somebody with football experience to be hired, something repeated by the Guardian who suggest that some of Arsenal’s failures in the transfer market could have been avoided if somebody with better contacts in the world of football had been in place. No doubt we’ll hear from Fat & Orange in the next day or two as they look to make some hay from this situation but just because Edelman has gone doesn’t mean the board are in any way more vulnerable.

Some might say that because Dein and Edelman were such great enemies, they really hated each other, it might be a softening on the board’s stance towards F&O but this, I’m told, is not the case at all. In an interview in today’s Arsecast Tim Payton from the Arsenal Supporters Trust reveals he has spoken to Danny Fiszman and explains the reasons why the time was right for Edelman to leave the club.

It will certainly be interesting to see who they get to replace him, somebody who is more football focussed seems to be the type of candidate they’re looking for. I suppose there’ll be all kinds of speculation about how it might be but I bet it’ll be someone nobody expects - a boardroom Sagna, if you like. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Ken Friar is in temporary charge and he is more than capable. But in the long term the club needs somebody who can step things up a bit, take some of the workload off Arsene and provide that bit of wheeler-dealerness that perhaps we miss at the moment when it comes to players. More on this to come in the days and weeks ahead.

Mathieu Flamini has apparently told teammates he’s going to join AC Milan. I wonder if he’s 100% sure of that yet. AC play city rivals Inter this Sunday and the outcome of that game promises to be significant whatever happens. If Inter win they have won the scudetto and AC will find themselves really struggling to make the Champions League if Fiorentina beat Cagliari. Would Flamini move to a club that isn’t playing Champions League football? We’ll see. If his move is just about football then yes he will, if it’s about ambition and winning things then you have to suggest that he’d be taking a step backwards going to Milan if they’re only playing UEFA Cup football. Anyway, come on Inter!

Not much in the way of team news for Sunday’s game yet. Flamini could be back, Robin van Persie misses out as a ‘precaution’, and the usual long term suspects are out. More news from Arsene’s regular press conference on tomorrow’s blog.

Now, Arsecast time.

It’s a truly action packed Arsecast today as I speak to Tim Payton from the AST about the departure of Keith Edelman, Goonerholic talks football, the Man in the Bar is around, as is Eboue and a couple of other unexpected items.

To subscribe to the arsecast in iTunes - click here . To download this week’s arsecast directly - click here (14mb MP3 ). You can find the arsecast archives here . And you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

Right so, enjoy. Have a good bank holiday Friday, do drink too much. Till tomorrow.

It is logical that Emmanuel is demanded. I have to meet his club when the season ends to speak about his future, but we have not received concrete offers. Today he is happy at Arsenal, he showed it on Monday. But you know football, everything goes very quickly.

In other words, my boy has had a great season, I’m going to spend the whole of the summer trying to engineer a move to another club and then use that threat to wangle more money out of Arsenal. What horrible people they are. The world reacts with shock when we read about the horror of that Austrian man and depravity he forced his daughter to endure but if I’d heard that he was a football agent I wouldn’t even have blinked. In fact I’d be thinking ‘That’s fairly tame considering what utter, utter cunts agents are’.

Now, there’s no suggestion Adebayor is agitating but his agent is certainly loose of lip. It’s barely a week or two since he started talking about big Italian clubs being interested in Ade and given the uncertainty surrounding so many of our players this summer the last thing we need is a whole pile of speculation over another one. Someone shut the cunt up.

Update: The club has confirmed the news, the usual platitudes are rolled out and Ken Friar will take over Edelman’s position temporarily until a new man is appointed.

The Sun is reporting that Arsenal will today announce the departure of Chief Executive Keith Edelman. They suggest that it will ‘fan the flames of the power struggle simmering in the boardroom’. No doubt Edelman has been loyal to the current board and done a good job over the last few years so it’ll be interesting to find out exactly why this has happened and what their plan is to replace him.

Theo Walcott has been named in the England U21 squad and named Arsenal player of the month for April. It’s a measure of how the young man has come on that he scored over 50% of the vote. His run and assist at Anfield and the goal against Derby, coming not long after he’d missed an easier chance, shows his improvement and I’m really looking forward to seeing much more of him next season. Well done, Theo.

Mathieu Flamini is fit again for this weekend’s game against Everton but there’s still no news on his future. While the title is still mathematically a possibility we have to play our best team against Everton on Sunday and Flamini fits into that. And if it is his last home game I think, after the season he’s had, he deserves a chance to say goodbye to the Arsenal fans.

Lukasz Fabianski talks about his Premier League debut against Derby. The Pole will continue for the games against Everton and Sunderland.

Not much else happening. Watched the Champions League semi last night and as far as I’m concerned that’s the competition over and done with for me. A United v Chelsea final is such a complete and utter shitfest that I don’t think I can possibly watch it. Nor do I care who wins. And I will go around with my fingers in my ears going ‘la la la la la la la la’ rather than find out the result.

If it was a film trailer it’d be ‘The Champions League final - 22 cunts and a ball’. Fuck off the lot of them.

More, including Arsecast, tomorrow.

Update II: Oooops, completely forgot to fire up the RNG for the Toff’s competition winners. Have just done so and the two winners of that great shirt are: Robert Conway and Chris Gillman.

Thanks to everyone for their entries, I’ll be in touch with the winners this morning, and watch out for more competitions next week.