Good morning all, it’s surprisingly quiet I have to say.
There appears to be nothing new to tell you regarding Hooty McOwl. Zenit say they’re negotiating with Arsenal but the price is going up and down and sideways and twirling, twirling, always twirling. Now we have his agent saying Zenit need to be more realistic with the price, Owly saying he wants to prove himself at a top club, and it can all just be condensed into one ‘We really want to get the fuck out of here’ statement. The whole thing is beginning to stink of the Beast.
Was it summer of 2005 or 2006? Every day there was a new story about how close Arsenal were to signing Julio Baptista from Real Madrid. One day it would be all agreed, personal terms done and very much dusted, the next day it was a different story altogether before it was once again all agreed and just a matter of dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s.
As we all know it never happened and so much time, energy, speculation and words, valuable, precious words, were wasted. So much so that when we did sign him on loan a season later the Gods decided to punish us for such linguistic frippery. They removed 97.53% of the Beast’s footballing ability and we ended up with a bloke who made Kaba Diawara look like Johann Cruyff.
Now we have an owl who stinks like a Beast so until such time as we see any kind of official announcement I may treat every story that emerges with a certain amount of something that isn’t quite disdain but sounds more jovial and light-hearted than that but means more or less the same thing. Note how I am refusing to waste good words on this situation lest he arrive and become the Russian Jimmy Carter?
I shall treat the stories that are sure to follow in the same way I might treat one about Emmanuel Eboue going to Inter Milan. The Ivorian is quoted as saying:
I have been linked with Inter before, but at the moment I am happy at Arsenal. I am happy at the club. Inter are a great club as well, but I don’t know what will happen. Let’s wait and see.
I suspect we’d be waiting a very long time for anything to happen in terms of Eboue and Inter Milan. I was speaking to the Italian correspondent for the week in football podcast yesterday and asked him if he’d heard anything about this particular story. He said that during January there have been hundreds of names linked with transfers to Italy but Eboue certainly wasn’t one of them. Which is no surprise really.
Kieran Gibbs talks about his emergence as back-up for Gael Clichy in the left back position. He’s taken the same route as Cuntley Cunt, he was an attacking player moved back (but hopefully that’s where the similarities will stop – apart from being a good left back. You know what I mean). It’s always nice to see a young guy make the breakthrough from the youth set-up and while he does look a bit raw at times he does look to have something about him as a player. It’ll be interesting to see how he goes.
Apart from that there’s not much else happening. We’re bound to get some team news ahead of the game against Bolton on Saturday so we’ll catch up with that and preview the game over the next couple of days. The Arsecast will return tomorrow as well.
Till then.
