Welcome to your Saturday morning 100% boilk free Arseblog. Having drank myself into a state of almost perfect pickledom over the Christmas period I have vowed that no booze shall pass my lips for a week or two.
<arseblog brain>: “Not pass lips, eh? We can still do it intravenously!”
Shut up, brain, you bastard. I hate my brain sometimes. Right, well there’s all kinds of things going on this morning so we might as well crack on. As usual on a Saturday morning it’s mostly the boss talking so here it all comes.
Jens Lehmann’s future is still up in the air a bit. Dortmund, having had their press conference to announce two other players, say they’re ‘cautiously optimistic‘ about signing the keeper. Arsene Wenger says he won’t stand in his way and respects the way Lehmann has acted. He really is the most diplomatic man alive when he wants to be. Arsene, not Jens, obviously, who will play in goal for us tomorrow in the FA Cup. Jens, not Arsene, obviously.
Lassana Diarra was not bid for by Spurs, or anyone else for that matter, and while Arsene wants him to stay he’s not being terribly definitive about the subject, saying:
I would love to keep him. You don’t make a player come on August 31st and then want to sell him on January 1st. I want to keep Diarra but we’ll see.
It’s a strange situation. On one hand you have somebody like Flamini who has always been a fighter and has come back to make himself an important player after missing out on most of the second half of last season. Then you have a bloke who’s been at the club just a few weeks before he announces he wants to leave again. Does that willingness to give up so easily transmit itself onto the pitch when you need people to stand up and be counted? That’s the worry for me. You know you’ll get 100% from Flamini. Diarra is obviously a good player but in terms of character he strikes me as suspect. I wonder would Arsene be as desperate to keep him if the Flamster had signed a new deal by now.
Diarra will play against Burnley tomorrow. Others in the mix are Denilson and Diaby. Hleb and Adebayor miss out through injury, Clichy and Cesc are rested while Theo faces an injury test on his shoulder. It looked like he’d done it some damage in the last game so fingers crossed he comes through ok.
David Beckham is training with us but the boss says it won’t be a circus. Whatever you think about his club affiliation there are young players at Arsenal that could learn a lot from somebody as professional as Beckham. There’s a video of it floating around somewhere and he looks a bit like the new boy at school.
Finally for today you might remember last year Arseblog won Best Sports Blog at the 2007 Bloggies. Well, nominations for 2008 are open and if you felt like nominating Arseblog again this year that’d be great. Winning last year really upset some wanky American football site so let’s see if we can do it again. I think you only need to nominate in the sports blog section (unless you have other favourite blogs you want to nominate too) so there’s no need to fill out every single one. It does say you need to nominate 3 blogs in total though, so I assume that’s across the categories. Update: No, you can nominate 3 sports blogs if that takes your fancy. I’ll leave you clever folk to work it out though. Cheers all.
More tomorrow.
