March 18th
Good morning, Arsechums, hope your hangover isn’t too bad after all the green beer, green whiskey and green Creme de Menthe. Oh.
Anyway, we’ve got a game today at 3pm against Charlton and as usual the boss has been talking. He reacted to speculation linking him (or Carlos Ancelotti) with the Real Madrid job by saying “I love Real Madrid. It was the team I admired when I was a kid and I have a lot of good memories for Real Madrid. But my priority is to do well for Arsenal because I am here and I feel we are in the rebuilding process of a big team again and I want to do that.”
He also denied a deal had been done to bring Thierry Henry to Barcelona and again challenged the captain to create his ‘legacy’ at Arsenal. Even without the 4th Champions League spot he thinks he’ll stay, saying “A player like Thierry will certainly want to play in that competition but there is more at stake than just one year in the Champions League or not.”
He also reminded everyone that Thierry does have a contract until 2007 so any deal Barcelona might have concluded with our player would be most illegal indeed. Anyway, the whole Thierry + Barcelona thing is most boring now so that’s all I’m going to say on it. I refuse to be drawn any further down the road of speculation.
Yesterday FIFA did what UEFA have fannied around for years and announced new penalties for clubs involved in racist chanting. The new penalties range from match suspensions to deductions of points; three for a first offence, six for a second and relegation if there are further incidents. They have also threatened to suspend associations from international competition for up to two years if they fail to impose them.
It is great that somebody is finally addressing the issue in a serious way, fining super rich clubs is no deterrent, however, there is always the fear that the system could be abused and Arsene expressed his concerns about that too, saying “I feel it is difficult to tackle a club 100% because you cannot be responsible for 50,000 people, if there are five silly people in there. It can happen. As well you can have fans disguised in the colours of your team and start when you are in a relegation battle to say absolutely silly things. You can work for opponents.”
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what happens the next time we have an incident like Eto’o at Zaragoza or Cole and Wright-Philiips in Madrid. Interesting though. Are Scousers a race?
Team news for today sees Robin van Persie return to the squad while Sol Campbell has to get fitter by playing in a reserve game on Monday. After that he’s supposedly ‘in contention’. I am indifferent.
Right, that’s all I’ve got. It’s early on a Saturday morning. I’ve got to go get a haircut and do the shopping. Have a good one and come on the lads!
