April 14th
Good Friday to you all and if your name is Jesús watch out for Romans. Not a huge amount happening, I have to say. We had confirmation from the club that Sol Campbell’s nose is broken and he now faces the dilemma of having surgery now or at the end of the season. If he waits his World Cup place is surely in jeapordy, if he has it now his Arsenal future is set to be very limited. Personally I think he should have the operation now, he can swan off to the World Cup and maybe a decent performance or two, if he gets a game, will add a few quid to his value when he gets sold this summer.
I’m not sure how we’re going to line up tomorrow against West Brom but Villarreal play Barcelona tonight and they’ve made their intentions clear by resting Riquelme, Forlan, Sorin and Tacchinardi ahead of Wednesday’s Champions League semi-final. Where they have an advantage, if you can call it that, is that they’re 9 points behind the 4th place side Osasuna and the chances of catching them are slim so they are going to be 100% focussed on the European game. We still have a battle on our hands for the 4th which does complicate things a bit. The only thing I will say is that we’re not really a team of veterans and with most of our best performers this season young players their recovery time will be much quicker.
There’s not much point in me saying how vital three points are tomorrow. We all know already. Expect team news to break during the day – check out NewsNow to keep up to date.
Congratulations to Arsenal Ladies who have won the Nationwide Women’s Premier League for the 5th time in 6 seasons.
Ok, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The Football Manager 2006 competition for Sony PSP and xBox360. I asked you: If in 2006 PV = Patrick Vieira who is the PV that in 1980 connected Arsenal and Juventus?
You would be amazed how many people answered ‘Liam Brady’. I said “PV” which would make it Pliam Vbrady. Doesn’t work, does it? The answer I was looking for was Paul Vaessen who, as an 18 year old, scored the last minute winner against Juventus which put us into the Cup Winners Cup final in 1980. .
So the RNG did its thing this morning and the winners are as follows: For PSP – John McGahon and Michael Birchall and for xBox360 – Bob Davis and Chris Wright. I’ll be in touch with you guys for addresses and so forth. Thank you all for your entries and amusing comments. More prizes to give away soon. Lots of you also mentioned how tragic Vaessen’s story was. The highlight of his career was that night, a knee injury forced him out of the game at 21 and at 39 he was dead from a heroin overdose. It’s not all flash cars and pop star girlfriends. You can read more here.
Finally for today those of you who subscribe to Arseblog via RSS (if you don’t know what it is it’s not important) please note the feed URL has changed, so if you could all update your subscriptions to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/arseblog – that would be just super. Ok, till tomorrow.
