It’s quiet this morning as the lads have headed off to Austria for the training camp. They need a couple of days to get to know where all the trendy bars are before they go on a drunken rampage, letting off fire extinguishers, getting into trouble with taxi drivers and collectively wetting the bed. In serious though, it’ll be hard work out there to get the fitness levels up.
According to ANR Freddie Ljungberg didn’t travel with the squad. That means he’s either staying at home because he’s got a leak in his ceiling and the bloke said he’d be around this morning at 8.30am sharp or there’s something else going on. After the boss said he was 90% certain Freddie would start the season with us it’s a bit strange so perhaps something has been agreed with Fiorentina. We’ll see.
The Chairman, PHW, spoke to Arsenal.com yesterday about life at the club and in order to counter some of the negative ‘Arsenal in crisis/meltdown/turmoil’ stories that have been going on he says the club is in good shape financially because of the new stadium. He said:
The stadium has not held Arsenal back at all in terms of bringing in players. It’s actually given us the opportunity to compete with the biggest clubs in the world. If we had stayed at Highbury that would have limited our resources and over the long term affected our ability to financially compete with the top sides.
I know people will point to signings like Torres and Hargreaves etc etc and say we haven’t seen evidence of the new stadium providing this kind of money but people need to be aware of one important factor: Arsene Wenger. Ultimately it’s down to him how much we spend and who we spend it on. It’s always been quite clear that the board trust Arsene implicitly and if he was to come to them and say “I need £20m for X player” then I am sure they would do their best to give it to him. We just know that Arsene likes to do his shopping a bit differently.
Arsene’s future was also under discussion and the Chairman revealed talks have taken place about a new contract and that hopefully something will be sorted sooner rather than later. It’s nice to see a bit of good PR for a change.
Speaking of Arsene he’s revealed that the new signings will be taking part in the Emirates Cup tournament. Certainly Eduardo and Sagna need to get bedded in as soon as possible while Fabianski should get some playing time too.
Jose Antonio Reyes could complete his move to Madrid by Friday, according to the Spanish press. Wonderfully definite, aren’t they? I can also exclusively reveal that I could have a chicken and coleslaw sandwich before Thursday.
Finally and completely as expected, that story about Rodrigo Palacio was entirely made up by some lad with a blogspot blog and, fair play to him, he made the back page of the Sun, the Evening Standard and the sports pages of countless other newspapers and websites. It should be a lesson for everyone to see how little fact checking goes on when it comes to transfer stories and football stories in general.
“But it was on Wikipedia, I saw it and you let me tell you-”
*KABLAM*
Till tomorrow, rumour lovers.
