May

11

Sunday round-up

Filed Under The Arsenal

Morning all, it’s a beautiful sunny day in Dublin and it is the final day of the 07-08 Premier League season. Despite everything it really does seem to have flown by, eh?

With the summer months usually full of speculation and fans desperate for news on signings - actually, the months of June, July and August are usually the busiest on Arseblog due to the amount people looking for that exclusive on who we might bring in - the manager has spelt out, somewhat, his plans for bringing new players to the club. He says:

I know what I want and I am very confident. I hope to turn that around in the next two or three weeks. They (fans) should be re-assured by what they see.

He’s not usually so up front when it comes to this kind of stuff so you have to imagine a certain amount of contact with clubs for players has been made. At this point the names of Ben Affleck and Niko Kranjcar are the ones most widely touted but it wouldn’t be unlike the boss to bring in somebody completely different.

The Sunday Mirror links us with Stuttgart striker Mario Gomez (£10m), Valencia’s centre-half Raul Albiol (£7m) and Cardiff kid Aaron Ramsey, while The People links us with Atletico Madrid’s 18 year old midfielder Ignacio Camacho and a move for Yaya Toure from Barcelona. Silly season has well and truly begun.

Today’s opposing manager, Roy Keane, admires Arsene’s touch in the transfer market talking about how good he is at moving on players as well as bringing them in at the right price. He must look at the £2m he spent on Anthony Stokes and think ‘You canny Wenger’.

Arsene is also going to rethink his policy of loaning out young players, especially if they don’t play. Kieran Gibbs, a boy who may well be involved today, went on loan to Norwich this season but hardly played. Mark Randall suffered the same kind of fate at Burnley. While I can see where the boss is coming from you have wonder is the reason they didn’t play because they’re not good enough or because they’re not quite grown up enough for the rough and tumble of the Championship.

Mathieu Flamini says he wanted to re-sign for Arsenal last July and that the pain of the title loss was a factor in his decision to move. I’m quite sure the millions of euros from AC Milan are helping to ease that pain somewhat but I’m not quite sure I buy the part about him wanting to sign last July - especially as he knew a good season could see his value increase a lot. Anyway, it’s water under the bridge at this stage.

And that’s about it. Let’s hope we can sign off the season with a good win today. Didn’t we have a final day at Sunderland some years back? I think Freddie Ljungberg got a hat-trick. The same again today would be nice. Without the Freddie hat-trick of course.

Finally, don’t forget that from tomorrow Arseblog’s URL will be changing. You can still go to ‘arseblog.com’ but you should update your bookmarks to ‘arseblog.oleole.com’, the link won’t be live until tomorrow though.

Until then, have a good Sunday.

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May

10

Bleeeeeeuuuuurrrrrrghh

Filed Under The Arsenal

Ouch, I really shouldn’t be up this early but thanks to Mrs Blogs and the Blogette tormenting me this morning here I am. Everything I do I do for these lovely ladies and this is how they treat me. I shall have my revenge, oh yes.

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.

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May

9

Hleb leaving - Adebayor story looks like a plant + Arsecast 75

Filed Under The Arsenal

Well, Arsene Wenger said he wanted to keep Alexander Hleb. He was quite emphatic about it. Sadly for the manager the player wants out. Last night quotes emerged from his agent which left little doubt as to his future. Nikolai Shpilevski said:

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.

Arsecasts

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.

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May

8

The sound of many gauntlets being thrown down

Filed Under The Arsenal

The manager has challenged his team to show that they’re winners by coming back stronger next season. He says:

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.

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May

7

Some Arsenal news and some Arseblog news

Filed Under The Arsenal

We’ll start with the Arsenal news.

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:

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

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