It’s over! It’s finally, eventually, well and truly, stick a finger in the plug socketly, over!
Andrei Arshavin is ‘gooner’. He is an Arsenal player. After what seemed like an interminable wait yesterday the club offically announced his arrival with the usual quotey stuff from all concerned.
Arsene Wenger said:
He is a player I have admired for a long time. He is a versatile player with great experience, who will add real quality to our squad. Andrei is an exciting impact player with a huge amount of ability.
Arshavin said:
I am so happy to be joining Arsenal. They are one of the leading football clubs in the world, with a group of fantastic young players and a great manager. I am looking forward to making the Arsenal supporters happy and helping this great Club win trophies.
While John Q Public said:
Is it really over? Can I go back living a normal life now? My wife has threatened to leave me if I so much as mention his name again. I haven’t slept for 17 days and I’m hallicunating like Hunter S Thompson on the way to Las Vegas.
So we can now try and return to something approaching normality again. We’ve signed ourselves a very good player who will most definitely add something to our squad. He’s quick, a good finisher, has an eye for a pass in the final third and he’s not Eboue.
I suspect that he’s going to play wide right but we’ll have to see what the manager has in store for him. I watched his interview on Arsenal.com last night and he already speaks pretty good English. It’s not ‘perfect’ like some of the papers have suggested but it’s good enough. At one point the interviewer asked him whether or not he’d been in touch with Pavlyuchenko before his move. Arshavin said “No”, as if the interviewer was a total idiot, then said “He is no friend of mine”, in a fantastically Russian way.
He’s going to wear the number 23 shirt, which I’m glad about. 13 would have been a bad idea, in my opinion, and now he just has to deal with the level of expectation that surrounds him. There are still some issues to be ironed out in terms of his working visa and I believe he has to go back to Russia to do that.
I would be surprised if he was part of the squad for the game against Sp*rs but you never know. There’s also a lot of talk about how the deal was done almost 24 hours after the deadline has passed but frankly I don’t give two hoots about that. If it were another club I’d certainly point and say ‘Fix! This is a disgrace! How dare they?! That player should be taken out the back and shot in the face until dead!’, but, you know, this isn’t another club.
And if Rafa’s in a rage, Fergie’s fuming, Martin’s moaning or Big Phil is Big Phurious, the crotchety Brazilian rapper, I just don’t care. They call all stick it right up their collective holes. Or individual holes. Whatever. Once something gets stuck up their holes I’m happy enough.
The transfer window is now closed, thankfully, the squad is complete between now and the end of the season, and we can get on with the football again. Arshavin will boost the fans and the rest of the team and while we’ll all be hoping for an immediate impact I think we have to be a bit realistic about what he can bring in the first couple of weeks at least. He’s not exactly match fit, he’ll be adapting to a new league, new country etc, but fingers crossed he can settle in asap.
Obviously the deal was a very complicated one, for various reasons, and Ivan Gazidis, the new CEO has spoken about it, being concerned at:
Unscrupulous operators and third parties taking money out of the game” and of “practices that would not be permissible in American sports leagues.
The article in the Times says ” He does not expand — and is quick to say that he is not necessarily talking about all agents or those involved in the deal to sign Andrey Arshavin from Zenit St Petersburg”, which is kind of funny.
This is the only deal Gazidis has been involved in so unless he’s speaking about football in general it’s fairly obvious he’s having a little dig at the people he had to deal with to complete the Arshavin signing. I mean, he could well be talking about football in general, we all know the grubby hands of agents get into all the nooks and crannies, but chances are he means Zenit and co.
And that’s about it. How nice it is not to have to worry about it any more. Props to my pal over at Gunnerblog and the guys at AST for maintaining a measure of sanity over the last few days. A shining beacon in a sea of scatterbrained hyperbole. People love info but unless that info has some kind of basis in fact then it’s worthless.
Finally, you might have noticed a few changes with the blog. Hang tight, some things might look a bit funny and the fonts etc might change throughout the morning but after that we should be set.
If you do have problems viewing the left hand side of the blog post, click the blog title and you can read it unhindered. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as possible.
More tomorrow.
