Arseblog meets Peter Marinello

Morning all, not a huge amount going on but we’ve got a packed show nonetheless.

The latest from Spain regarding Thierry Henry is that a price of €35 has been quoted and Barcelona would like to unveil him next Monday but they now appear to have competition from Inter Milan. Marca ran a story yesterday, by the mole faced little gimp Balague, saying that Arsenal have stopped producing ‘Henry’ merchandise like shirts etc. Funnily enough I got an email from somebody who works in the publishing industry last week and they said that they have been told not to include Henry on the cover of any of the official Arsenal books they produce. Of course this is all speculation so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Jeremie Aliadiere is looking forward to playing for Boro and bemoans the lack of opportunities he was given in comparison to Reyes or Robin van Persie. The difference, as I see it, was that both Reyes and van Persie are both very good players who don’t get injured when hit by a stiff breeze. Maybe that’s just me though.

Ian Wright, complete with ridiculously staged ‘sad’ photo, continues his David Dein propaganda and is concerned that we might get overtaken by Newcastle, Aston Villa and Manchester City. No, really, he said Manchester City. There’s no question we need to spend some money but this kind of scaremongering is fucking pathetic.

Arsenal have been seeded amongst the top teams for next season’s Champions League which means we avoid any of the ‘big boys’ in the group stages.

And that’s about that. Time for the Arsecast.

On this week’s Arsecast, brought to you as always by OleOle.com, there’s the usual guff, a player history from The Man in the Bar and I speak to former Gunner Peter Marinello. He joined Arsenal in 1970 for £100,000 and while great things were expected from him it didn’t quite work out. Off the pitch his life took some strange turns including being kidnapped in Ghana, arrested for attempted murder, having to buy heroin for his addicted son and facing bankruptcy.

He’s got a book out called Fallen Idle: Fighting back from the booze, swindles and drugs that ripped my life apart which you can get from Amazon.co.uk here. Peter very kindly some time out to talk to me yesterday about his time at Arsenal, what went wrong and what he’s up to nowadays. My copy of the book has just arrived this morning and these are the kinds of stories worth reading, not some swerve off the road bollocks by some jumped up little twat.

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So that’s that. More tomorrow, I suppose!