So all the talk this morning is about Capi Golightly having a crafty blem coming out of a nightclub the other night.
Arsene Wenger is less than impressed, saying:
I don’t like that. I will check that with him. He has a responsibility as captain of Arsenal Football Club. That cannot be accepted. It is a public job with a public responsibility and therefore it is exactly the same for everybody.
I would disagree with the statement in that it’s not the same for everybody. It’s different for the captain simply because he’s the captain. He is the one who is supposed to lead and set the example. Now, I know some people will say ‘Tony Adams, alcoholic, crashed his car, went to jail’, and they’d be right. He certainly did crash his car and go to jail.
However, I’d qualify that by saying that Adams was perhaps a victim of the era in which he played and captained the side. There was a drinking culture throughout English football at that time and he fell foul of that. Also, he absolutely never, ever let us down on the pitch. He was a real captain, someone who would give 100% every single time, every single game. Nobody’s saying he was perfect or that he performed at a high level each week but he always gave you everything during a game.
I’m not sure that even the most staunch Gallas supporters could say that of the Frenchman. He hardly got caught up in the smoking culture, did he? The Tuesday Night Benson & Hedges club. With the Irish lads smoking twenty Major. The article about this on Arsenal.com makes pains to point out that the cigarette was unlit. Well there’s only one reason you have an unlit cigarette in your mouth and that’s to light it. Of course smoking isn’t great for players and in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal.
However, it becomes just another black mark against a man who has really failed to live up to the standards of an Arsenal captain on the pitch. You also wonder are the performances Gallas himself described as ‘tired’ down to the fact he’s chuffing the smokes and finds himself wheezy and breathless at corners?! The manager goes on to say:
He wants to do well, he wants his team to win and he has made a mistake – who didn’t? Even great captains, we all make mistakes.
Even great captains can make mistakes so it should be no surprise that crap ones like Gallas make them too. I don’t know really how the manager can continue to back him as captain. If a news story emerged tomorrow which showed Darth Gallas going around with a stormtrooper laser gun wiping out baby Jedis in their cots he’d probably back him then too.
That’s about as much as I’m going to say. I like Gunnerblog’s take on it too.
Ahead of tomorrow’s game against West Ham there’s a small chance that Bacary Sagna will be fit. I suspect he’ll probably keep him on the bench though with the Sp*rs game coming up on Wednesday.
The boss says he’d love to have kept Matthew Upson and says that telling young players they’d be better off elsewhere is the toughest part of management.
Robert Pires says Emmanuel Adebayor is ‘literally’ in love with Arsenal. For some reason that just generated an image of a giant Adebayor trying to penetrate the Grove. Bleurgh.
Denilson talks about the team and taking his chance after most of our midfielders left in the summer. He does it in more depth in The Sun with some stuff about his background and childhood.
REDaction want you to make some noise.
And that’s really about it. Have a good Saturday. It’s a bank holiday weekend here so that just means one extra hangover. Joy!
Till tomorrow.
