october 8th
Ok, the AGM took place yesterday. If you missed the report on NewsNow you can find it here. I’m not really going to comment on it because it speaks for itself really. Some interesting stuff there though.
The Henry – Aragones race row rumbles on. Robert Pires was less than happy with the Spanish coach’s remarks and late yesterday Aragones issued an apology. I don’t want to keep talking about this as any attempts to try and explain the difference between a Spanish person making these remarks and, for example, an English person are quite difficult. I want to stress that in no way am I making excuses or condoning what was said. What I do want to say is that if there are Arsenal fans who feel aggrieved at José’s response to the comments then you must take into account that there are cultural and idiomatic differences which, when translated directly into English, make Aragones comments seem worse than they were. And that’s all I have to say about it.
Better news yesterday was that Sol Campbell is moving closer to signing a new deal. According to the big man “It’s going well. There are still a few things we’ve got to organise but it’s going in the right direction and hopefully it won’t be too long.”
Some more info on next year’s shirt – according to an email I got today from somebody involved in the market research it’s going to have a picture of the Clock End clock. So there.
Arsene Wenger talking about possible doping in football. “We have had some players come to us at Arsenal from other clubs abroad and their red blood cell count has been abnormally high. That kind of thing makes you wonder.”
He’s obviously referring to performance enhacing drugs like EPO which is endemic in cycling. Given the fact that the drug testing regime in football seems to be hit and miss at best it’s not really shocking to think that players are taking, but more likely being given, drugs. Anyway, it’s another can of worms that’s bound to be opened properly at some stage in the near future. For now we’ll just think of football as a nice clean game. Apart from the booze. And cocaine. And marijuana. And roasting. And drunk driving. And sex videos. Apart from all those things. Yes.
Thanks a million for all your entries to the Cesc competition. Thanks as well for your kind comments and offers of delicious bribes. You won’t be surprised to hear that everyone got the answer right. Well, almost everyone. One person chose ‘Dermot’. Well, it made me laugh. So there were 500+ correct answers and only two t-shirts, so in traditional fashion each entry was given a number and then the reliable random number generator did it’s stuff. Congratulations are in order for Gary Howe and Paul Davies who will both receive one of these ‘Highly Fabregas‘ t-shirts courtesy of goalhanger.com. I’ll be in touch with both of you to get addresses and size information.
If you didn’t win, you can always buy one, because they are cool. And as this is the blog that keeps on giving, we’ll have more giveaways next week. Details on Monday.
And I did score a hat-trick, so I did.
