october 28th
Some worrying injury news ahead of Saturday’s North London derby with Arsene Wenger rating Thierry Henry’s chances of playing at ’30-70′ against. It seems he’s suffered a little bit of a set-back which the boss puts down to bringing him back a little bit too early. It’s always a risk when you really need an important player to bring him back too soon. We saw that with Patrick Vieira in the past but maybe his presence got us back on track a bit and we can continue without him in the short term. With Robin van Persie finding his shooting boots again and José and Freddie back from injury it’s not as if we don’t have options.
José on the derby against the wanky Tottenham Hotsp*rs. “The North London derby is just like the Seville v Real Betis derby. Everybody in the area waits a whole year for the game and the whole build-up turns into a war of words between the two sets of supporters. I like derbies.”
Staying with Thierry Arsenal Managing Director Keith Edelman is confident he’ll stay with the club and lead us out at the new stadium while he also made it clear that there is money for the manager to spend. He was speaking about the 711 apartments that will be built on the Highbury site when we move to the new stadium and while that money is not going to be available to the manager as it’s part of the finance for the stadium he insisted if the manager needed cash in January it would be there. He said “There are ample funds if the manager wants to spend them to strengthen and develop the squad and we would encourage him to do so. Our objective was to make sure that when we went into the new stadium there would be funds for the manager to strengthen the team.”
I know some people have suspected, and sometimes suspected out-loud non-stop, that the board would not provide money for the manager to spend this summer which is why he chose the ‘go with youth’ strategy but that is not the case. There has been money there for some time and it’s always been there if Arsene wanted to spend it. How he chooses to spend the club’s money is always a debate. There are those who like that he doesn’t spend big but makes big players while there are those who think a bit of Championship Manager spending is what we need. Perhaps a middle ground needs to be found but at the end of the day we’re lucky to have a manager who doesn’t waste our money by spending £7.5m on the likes of Seth Johnson or £5.5m on Bosko Balaban. Who? Exactly.
Thank God it’s Friday. My alarm clock was incorporated into my dream as a Siren’s song, beautiful and alluring, instead of a ambulance siren which should have got me out of bed. The weeks’ are flying by though, aren’t they? Don’t work too hard today. There’s no point.
