An early start this morning due to me being a complete and utter moron, even more than usual. Still – early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, Morcombe and Wise.
I have to say this week has been the slowest ‘football’ week I can remember for a long time. You can get used to international weeks being slow but this is something else. We’ve hardly heard a thing from Arsenal all week long and you can only assume the media blackout means they’re concentrating on getting themselves ready for two games in two days over the Easter weekend.
Hopefully we’ll get some idea of the boss’s intentions in terms of team selection today and tomorrow. In the meantime it’s all fairly dull stuff.
Arsene Wenger has backed Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho’s idea that reserve teams should play in the football league, like they do in Spain, for example. Certainly there needs to be some change made to reserve team football to make it more competitive but I’m not sure I like the idea. If you read what the boss says about the structure of the reserve/U-18s leagues you can understand his concerns and with Arsenal getting 38,000 to an FA Youth Cup game you could argue the demand is there too. Can’t see it happening any time soon though.
Patrick Vieira says Abou Diaby reminds him of himself and he’s looking forward to playing with him in the France national side. You can’t imagine Arsene ever playing Patrick Vieira wide left though, can you?
The Sun, rather speculatively, links us with a move for Sevilla’s Daniel Alves, one of the stars of La Liga this season. He was all but set to sign for Liverpool last summer but the deal broke down and apparently he’d prefer London to Liverpool. The Brazilian is quite a player and a signing I’d be very happy with. Have a read of what the Guardian’s Sid Lowe had to say about him. I’m not sure where the story has come from though so unfortunately we’ll have to pass it off as Sun fantasy for the moment.
In more transfer news we have, apparently, signed Valencia’s Portuguese U19 defender Yago Fernandez. He says it’s the biggest opportunity of his life and I have to say I agree with him. I don’t know very much about him at all though.
And that’s about all the news. Just to keep you up to date about what’s coming up on the blog over the next few days we’ve got an Arsecast tomorrow, with thanks to Savile Rogue, and next week there’ll be the start of a series of competitions from goalhanger.com in which you can win one of their new t-shirts.
So there you go. More tomorrow.
