Arsecast
8:13 am May 10, 2013 posted by arseblog - 278 arses

A whole heap of nothing + Arsecast 278

A whole heap of nothing + Arsecast 278

Good morning.

Normally Friday is a busy day as we prepare for the weekend’s game. Arsene Wenger holds his press conference, we get the latest team news and so on, but due to the fact we’re supposed playing Wigan our game isn’t until Tuesday because of their participation in the FA Cup final.

It leaves us with a football free weekend, but I’m right behind Roberto Martinez’s team for the game against Manchester City. Underdog stuff, of course, the same way I wanted Man City to win when they were in the final against Sp*rs all those years ago. That might not have been underdoggy and much as Spurshatey, but you know what I mean.

It’d be fantastic if Wigan won the cup … and then we relegated Wigan. Ideally, tomorrow’s game would go to extra time, and possibly penalties (although I’d happily take a winner in Linighan time), and they’d arrive at our place absolutely knackered on Tuesday. Whatever happens I don’t think they’ll be any more or less motivated for the game. Premier League survival, like it or not, is more important for the football club as a whole than a trophy win, but obviously they’ll be trying to marry the two.

So, it leaves things pretty quiet again from an Arsenal point of view. The best we’ve got is a story linking us with Dortmund right back Lukasz Piszczek. He’d tick some of the boxes for sure but it’s difficult to get involved in speculation with the season still running. I do think right back, despite my love for Sagna, is an area which we can improve in as injuries and loss of form have taken their toll this season.

The question is: does Arsene Wenger have enough faith in Carl Jenkinson to make him the number 1 with a younger player like Bellerin understudying, or will he create a Monreal/Gibbs situation on that side of the pitch? While there’s certainly plenty of merit to a competitive environment it also has to be balanced with the need for a measure of stability in the back four. Chopping and changing isn’t always ideal, but if he’s got two players who get the system and can be slotted in and out without causing too much disruption then that’s surely the way to go.

That’s easier said than done, however, and keeping both players happy over the course of a season is one of the challenges the manager will face. As for Sagna, I think he’ll move on this summer. He’s been linked with PSG and Monaco, and while he hasn’t ruled out staying with us for the final year of his contract, I don’t know that I’d bet a lot of money on him being at the club next season.

Elsewhere, David Moyes is the new manager of Manchester United. As I said yesterday on Twitter, I think this is a good appointment for the competitiveness of the Premier League. I can see why he was given the job, you lose one miserable dour Scotsman, you look for something similar. He seems to have been fully endorsed by Alex Ferguson and he is a good manager who has done a good job at Everton.

But with Ferguson moving upstairs, casting a red-nosed shadow over everything he does, and the pressure and expectation far and above anything he’s ever experienced at Everton, it’s hard not to think there’ll be some instability at United next season. Even if he brings in Baines and Fellaini, I think he’s going to find his natural conservatism hard to shake and the bigger point is just how important Ferguson was to what United achieved. He was a once in a lifetime manager; for all his qualities, Moyes isn’t anywhere close to that and that can only be good for the other teams who hope to compete for the title.

Finally, BT won some of the TV rights to Premier League football and announced their plans yesterday. Rio Ferdinand as an ‘an interviewer, programme maker and football expert’, Michael Owen as a co-commentator and a return for the risible Tim Lovejoy. I know there are many media directories, listing ‘talent’ available, but this is ridiculous. Whatever about Ferdinand, who clearly wants to be the next Bruce Forsyth, Owen has all the personality of a shoe … with its tongue cut out, and Lovejoy … well, this says more than anyone ever could.

All they’ve done is ensure more success for the sites who stream because nobody in their right mind would want to pay actual money to be ‘entertained’ by that pack of cretins.

Right then, onto this week’s Arsecast and joining me to discuss the Puma kit deal, the race for the Champions League and Arsene Wenger’s potential spending is John Cross. We’ve also got some newsflashes, a sad Arshavin and all the usual waffle.

You can subscribe to the Arsecast on iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too (this is a much better way to do it as you don’t experience the delays from iTunes). To download this week’s Arsecast directly – click here 25mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.

You’ll notice that we’re now going to be serving the Arsecast through Soundcloud which means it should work via browsers on mobile devices and tablets, as well as their apps. If you’re a Soundcloud user you can follow me and all that stuff, and you can make time-specific comments etc on each podcast, so that’s all new and shiny and stuff. I’ve got most of the archives there too, but if you see any issues just let me know.

Right, that’s that, till tomorrow.

 

Columnists
7:11 pm May 9, 2013 posted by Tim Stillman - 4 arses

Nós colocamos isso em Babelfish para fazer um título

Nós colocamos isso em Babelfish para fazer um título

The Chelsea v Spurs game has been a potential glitch in the formulae of our run in for some weeks. Now that column in the balance sheet (an apt analogy given what we are actually ‘competing’ for) has been filled, the permutations are simpler. Don’t cock it up and we’re 4th at least. Yet somehow the clarity hasn’t brought me a great deal of peace. Regular readers will know that I have never viewed this charge for the Champions League money trough as straightforward and I still don’t.

I think there’s an excellent chance that none of Arsenal, Spurs or Chelsea will pick up six points from their last two fixtures. I think it could just come down to whether 2 or 3 points are surrendered in any given game. I think goal difference could yet have the final say for either 3rd or 4th position. All three teams have visible delicacies. Spurs have been able to raise their game for fixtures against Chelsea and Manchester City of late, but anxiety permeates them whenever they are expected to win.

I think Arsenal have been a tad fortunate that the majority of their recent fixtures have been against teams with little or nothing to play for. Everton and Norwich were the only sides to whom the points were particularly valuable recently and both of those games were a struggle. Wigan will be fighting tooth and nail for Premier League survival and Newcastle could be too. Last week I said that I thought Arsenal’s defence were going to have to continue to carry us and so it proved against QPR.

Giroud’s suspension lasts for one more game and I don’t see a swift panacea for our recent bluntness upfront. Chelsea looked incredibly weary in the last half an hour against Tottenham and their participation in the Europa League might yet produce another spike in the graph. This is a season that might administer the final, injurious blow to cup football, which I think would be an enormous shame. If Wigan are relegated, many managers and chairmen will, unfairly I think, make a simple correlation with their run to Wembley. Millwall’s form collapsed after their F.A. Cup semi final and they were nearly relegated having seemingly looked safe.

The fortunes of the last three League Cup winners following their victories has hardly inspired either. If Chelsea finish outside of the top 4, I can’t really envisage an English side ever taking the Europa League seriously again. Gunnerblog wrote something that really chimed with me this week about “enjoying the race for fourth because it provides the illusion of genuine competition.” I’ve long compared it to Championship sides chasing a playoff place. It’s not really an achievement, it just narrows down what it considered mid-table and removes some of the banality of the Premier League.

James is right to use the word ‘illusion’. It is illusory. I allow “the race for fourth” to occupy me because, well, I want football to be a distraction and an entertaining one. And listen, I understand perfectly why qualifying for the Champions League is so important and it’s not just Arsenal that feel that way. Whilst I feel Arsenal’s big underachievement since 2005 has been almost entirely in the cups, I appreciate why the club prioritised the rewards of the top 4. Especially given the large mortgage they took on for the new stadium.

In fact, this year, it’s arguably more important to us to qualify than ever. Various commercial deals that are being struck and legislation in the wider footballing landscape suggest that, if we can just grimly hang on for one more year, the rainbow could be on the horizon. The revenues we stand to receive from the new overseas TV deal, Emirates and, reportedly, Puma, will boost our coffers more significantly than the new stadium itself.  To fall off of the cash cow at this stage would be a crushing blow when the jam we have been promised for so long is in our sights.

The reports from John Cross this week that Puma have agreed to hand over a fat stack of cheese to Arsenal generated a lot of discussion online. Understandably too. This is undoubtedly A Good Thing for Arsenal because it should have a direct impact on the team on the pitch. Yet I still felt abash about involving myself in the discussion. It made me feel uneasy. It exposes my ignorance and my hypocrisy all too readily.

The relentless commercialisation of society itself is something that I find incredibly uncomfortable. Indeed, a good deal of my professional life to date has been devoted to fighting avarice and greed. Yet I sweep those principles under the carpet for my football club. It’s easier to do with “The race for fourth” because I can bury that hypocrisy on the pitch and conceal it beneath the rug of a couple of London rivalries to boot. But speaking of megabucks deals such as these make my double standards naked. It strips away the delusion I clothe myself in.

There is also a much more practical reason for my unease. I know so little about the minutiae of such deals. I suspect many people are in the same position. Recently I have been taking Portuguese lessons and anybody that has tried to learn a new language in adulthood will tell you that nothing makes you feel more awkward or exposed than trying to speak somebody in else’s tongue. It’s because your callowness is so evident and no amount of reassurance removes that in your early wrestles with language.

To discuss this sort of deal in depth would represent a botched attempt at another language on my part. Hastily punching sentences into babelfish and regurgitating whatever it spits out. There is also so much about these deals that remain undisclosed. For instance, have you noticed that since the Emirates deal was renewed, their advertising presence inside the stadium has almost vanished? That’s surely a deliberate part of the renewed deal. To make room for other companies to advertise their wares on the advertising hoardings and to reduce the Emirates stigma on television. Presumably so that the next time the stadium naming rights go to tender, the Emirates association won’t be so marked. With that, I have slipped into the marketing lexicon, but you see what I mean. There’s so much information that is foreign to us.

I have always understood Arsenal’s need to qualify for the Champions League. It facilitates the ability to compete on a long term basis. That in itself sounds like the sort of phrase that’s tossed about in a boardroom powerpoint. Nevertheless, I’m donning the 3D specs and strapping myself in for this simulated competition and come 6pm on May 19th, I’ll be as relieved / crushed / exasperated as everybody else. After all, we are the generation that sold our souls and we will get what we deserve. LD.

Follow me on Twitter @LittleDutchVA

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
7:53 am May 9, 2013 posted by arseblog - 405 arses

Back in our hands + thoughts on Ferguson

Back in our hands + thoughts on Ferguson

It was a fairly quiet day yesterday from an Arsenal point of view, but there’s definitely stuff to talk about this morning.

Starting with last night’s 2-2 draw between Chelsea and Sp*rs. I didn’t watch, I have to admit. After a long day of work Mrs Blogs and I watched a bit of House of Cards (seemed apt, in terms of title at least), but I followed the score on Twitter. Given their propensity for late goals recently I was expecting the bloke who is trying to trademark having hands (I suppose he’d have Disney on his case if he tried ears, what with Dumbo and all), to score a late one but it remained a draw until the end.

While a Chelsea win would have been preferable, allowing us to draw one of our final games because of our superior goal difference, it’s back in our hands and I don’t think we can ask for much more than that. Win our final two games and we finish in the top four, end of story. We can finish above Chelsea too but are dependent on them dropping points to avoid a qualification round.

Still, at this point of the season, beggars can’t be choosers and while two wins was always going to be the target it makes things very simple now. This weekend may make life easier but I don’t see Chelsea slipping up against Villa and there’s more chance of Joey Barton becoming pope than there is of Stoke getting anything from their game against Sp*rs. The beauty of the situation is that we don’t have to concern ourselves with other results too much. Do what we need to do and we’re there. If we let it slip now we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves.

The other big story of yesterday was, of course, the retirement of Alex Ferguson. Let me get the nice stuff out of the way first. As a football manager what he achieved was extraordinary. His success, once he got going after some barren early years at United, was sustained and that’s an incredibly hard thing to do, as we know. The list of trophies speaks for itself and that, in recent years, he was able to do it with teams far less accomplished than some of his best was a testament to his management skills.

As well as that, the era when it was us against them, like two rutting stags, is surely a high point for any Arsenal, and United, fan. The intensity of the rivalry was something else, the games themselves were events that even Sky didn’t have to hype up the way they’re forced to these days. The drama was inherent in the contests. Vieira and Keane, Ferguson and Wenger, United’s golden generation against Wenger’s best teams.

It was epic at times, most of the time it was merely thrilling, nerve-shredding, passionate and hot-blooded. There were great moments for both sides. Overmars scoring that goal at their place on that incredible run to Wenger’s first league title, Giggs at Villa Park, Wiltord at Old Trafford to win the league, the van Nistelrooy day, the scrap in the tunnel, the day they cheated and booted their way to ending our unbeaten run. It was, despite all the ups and downs, the very best of football and for that we should be grateful to Ferguson as much as Wenger.

Yet, it strikes me there’s a touch of revisionism to the whole retirement thing. I don’t know if this is as prevalent in other countries as it is in Ireland, but regardless of the character of somebody who died, nobody will say a bad word against him.

“Well, there you, Seamus is gone.”

“He is.”

“Decent fella.”

“He wasn’t really, when you think about.”

“Come on, now.”

“He was an alcoholic who beat his wife.”

“Sure, don’t we all love a drink? It was the drink did the bad things, not him.”

“An inveterate gambler.”

“A game of cards never hurt anyone.”

“He was a rotten thief.”

“Needs must, you know yourself.”

“Never paid his debts.”

“Well …”

“Miserable with money, never bought a round, would beat up old people and rob their houses, nicked from the collection plate at church, had an affair with his own neice …”

“Ah, sure he was a grand lad really, have a pint.”

The very best things that Ferguson brought to the football world were borne out of his undoubted will to win, but they were completely and utterly at odds with ours and our desires as Arsenal fans. For all his talent as a manager he was rude, boorish, ignorant and incredibly, incredibly annoying. He was a hypocrite, what was good for his team was means for vociferous, spittle-flecked complaint when enjoyed, however rarely, by others.

People might laugh at ‘Fergie time’ now but think back to when a referee stuck 5 or 6 minutes of injury time on to a game in which we were holding a lead, or in a game in which we needed them to drop points only for a late goal to scupper things. Not so funny. He had a team who would berate and intimidate referees, very much in his image, yet when anyone had the temerity to question him, regardless of the legitimacy of it, he’d throw his toys out of the pram.

He danced on our pitch, he fought with our manager, he was so irritating one of our players chucked a slice of pizza in his face, and while I completely and utterly respect what he did, I didn’t like him then and I don’t like him now. I’m also sure that’s pretty much exactly how he wanted it. I realise there’s a vast difference between someone’s public image and the private reality. Lots of the tributes posted in the last 24 hours have spoken about the side of him that people didn’t see, the decent, charitable one, but having never been party to that I can only go from what he showed us.

And if you weren’t a United fan there wasn’t a great deal to like. He cultivated that, no doubt about it, revelled in it, I’m sure. It was part of how he worked, part of what made him and his teams successful, and he’d never make any apologies for it. Nor should he.

If things were less contentious in recent seasons and he wasn’t the same, objectionable, loathsome old crank, that was entirely down to us not being as much of a threat as we used to be. It wasn’t him suddenly becoming nicer in his old age. If we’d been more competitive you can be quite sure the opprobrium would have returned.

“Ah sure he was a grand lad really.”

No, he wasn’t. What he did was amazing, but I’m glad he’s gone.

The miserable old bollocks.

Arseblog, the arsenal blog
7:32 am May 8, 2013 posted by arseblog - 1217 arses

Puma deal changes the Arsenal landscape

Puma deal changes the Arsenal landscape

Morning all,

and the big news to kick us off comes from the Mirror and the story that our new kit deal is going to be with Puma. I heard about this last week, did some checking but couldn’t verify it, so left it be, but was told the money on offer was massive.

And that seems to be the case with a reported £30m per season plus bonuses which catapults the club to a new level financially. It kicks in when the Nike deal expires in 2014 but I’ve heard there might be an up front payment as part of the negotiation which could be available to us in the summer.

There were, of course, lots of people convinced it was going to be Adidas. They seemed the obvious candidate if we failed to renegotiate with Nike, with whom we’ve been associated for a long time and locked in since they gave us a chunk of money to help build the stadium, but that’s not the case and Puma seems to be something out of left-field.

You can see a list of the teams they already sponsor here, and Borussia Dortmund aside, I think it’s fair to say Arsenal would be their most high profile club deal. There are lots of player deals too. Olivier Giroud, for example, and a certain former captain is one of their blue chip clients – and that’s something that’s bound to set the transfer conspiracy theorists tails wagging.

It’s interesting to read and hear about people complaining about the deal from a fashion point of view. Frankly, who cares? The shirt will be red, the sleeves will be white, and while I don’t want to tempt fate, there’s little chance that they’ll get near some of the abominations Nike have foisted upon us down the years. This season’s away kit is one of the most hideous things we’ve ever worn and if your happiness is tied in with branded leisure wear I’d suggest you need to rethink your life a little bit.

This deal was about breaking us free from the shackles of the one we did with Nike under difficult circumstances. Although many complained about it as time went on, we went into that deal with our eyes open and in good faith, and the fact is we needed money for the stadium project. The problem was, of course, that short-term gain led to some long-term pain and when even the Mugsmashers were announcing £25m a season kit deals, we were left behind.

2014 was long posited as the time when things would change, when we could renegotiate and swell our coffers substantially. Obviously things have moved before that. There’s the £30m a season from the shirt sponsorship by Emirates, and now another £30m on top of that from Puma. The commercial team have faced plenty of criticism in recent times but this is why they were put in place and when you consider we can’t exactly be an easy sell at this moment in time, you have to give them plenty of credit.

These additional funds, on top of what we already have at our disposal, now make Arsenal far more powerful, both in terms of what we can do in the transfer market and how we can make the club a more attractive place to be for top players. I still don’t think we can (or should) compete with the mega-rich in terms of wages, those clubs that have owners with bottomless pockets will always find a way to pay more, but there’s no question this changes things for us.

But here’s the key: this money has to be invested in the team. There’s little point in us earning lots if the quality of the squad precludes us from competing for trophies. We’ve had to cut our cloth in recent seasons, look for bargains and alternatives, but as well as that we’ve had money at our disposal recently which hasn’t been used for one reason or another.

That’s got to change. This is a season in which we’ll finish around 20 points behind the champions and we have to bridge that gap. The first, and most obvious, way to do that is buying better players. Adding established quality and experience to the squad will make us more competitive. We all know where we’ve been lacking this season and if there’s some justification for not spending in January, there’s absolutely none come this summer.

Regardless of how we finish and where we end up in the table, I expect plenty of business to be done in the close season. While one, or two, may depart, it’s all about who we bring in and with new found financial clout to provide security, there’s got to be more Cazorlas on the menu, and nonsensical signings like Park should become a thing of the past.

The club have obviously been working hard for some time on these commercial deals, they’re complicated arrangements that take time to work out and secure, and we can only hope the diligence shown is replicated in the transfer market this summer. Arsene famously said some years ago that when you’re used to caviar it’s hard to go back to sausage. The last few years have been, in many ways, a sausage-fest.

These new deals might not see us dishing out the Beluga, but a bit of filet mignon would make a nice change. Over to you, Arsenal.

Now, where are Mah Poomas?!