Right, well yesterday brought us confirmation of a couple of things that we had long suspected.
1 – Cesc’s agent condemned Marca’s story about Real Madrid as ‘totally false’. This morning Marca is running another story (Spanish) in which Arsene Wenger is quoted as saying:
I met with Directors of Atletico Madrid, nothing more. Cesc will be with Arsenal next season. I did not offer myself to Real Madrid. I will be with Arsenal next season.
Fairly clear cut, isn’t it? Will it dampen the speculation? Sure. Will it stop it? No chance.
2 – Julio Baptista will not be moving permanently to Arsenal. No surprises there at all. The clumsy Brazilian, Clumzilian if you will, never did enough to impress and with Real Madrid not interested in keeping Reyes his price-tag of €20m is ridiculously high. It would have been nice if it had worked out but there won’t be too many tears over his departure.
In other news Togo have lifted the suspension on Adebayor and two others which is good for Togo but bad for Arsenal.
Theo Walcott talks about how his shoulder injury hampered him badly last season and how much the goal in the Carling Cup final against Chelsea meant to him. Last season must have been a real struggle for him so let’s hope with the operation a success and a good pre-season under his belt we can see him really start to achieve his potential.
And that’s the news. Now on to the Arsecast.
And on this week’s Arsecast, brought to you in association with OleOle.com, there’s a ’round table’ (not literally, although Goodplaya is under a bridge somewhere) discussion with Goodplaya, GilbertoSilver from Gunnerblog.com and the Man from East Lower about last season and where we need to improve our squad. The Man in the Bar has another player history and there’s a bit of waffle from me as well.
To subscribe to the arsecast in iTunes – click here. To download this week’s arsecast directly – click here (17mb MP3). To download a zip version click here. You can find the arsecast archives here. And you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.
[audio:http://arseblog.com/podcasts/arsecast_episode29.mp3]And that’s that. Have yourselves a very good Friday.
