Morning all and welcome to Friday. Hope we find you well at the end of another working week.
There’s an interesting week of football coming up, starting tomorrow with a game against Sunderland at home. Away we just about scraped a draw, you might recall. A last gasp Cesc header, his only goal of the season, salvaged a point for us.
You have to hope we’ll do better this time around. The bad news going into the game is that we’re going to be without Eduardo for two weeks after he picked up a bit of a hamstring strain playing against Cardiff the other night. It’s unfortunate, for sure, but I think it’s just a consequence of being out for such a long period of time.
These little niggles will crop up and I don’t think there’s much anybody can do about them. One of the things we do know is that Eduardo has been getting the best treatment possible in terms of his recovery and ensuring that he’s fit to play again. I’m not sure that we’ll miss him as much tomorrow as we will against Roma on Tuesday but all going well he should be back for the second leg in Italy.
However, on a more positive note Arsene Wenger has said that Andrei Arshavin will be involved against Sunderland. He said:
I have not decided what I will do with him yet. He is still working on preparation and he is not qualified for the game against Roma so we can give him another week of hard work.
Perhaps a hint that he might not start but I think most of us would be very disappointed if Arshavin was left on the bench and Eboue came back into the side after his antics at Sp*rs. And that’s the choice, Arshavin or Eboue – although I suppose he could play Vela left and Nasri right. Anyway, fingers crossed we’ll get to the see the Owl tomorrow.
Johan Djourou will be back in contention having missed Monday night through illness but apart from that nobody else is back.
What’s going on with Silvestre, I wonder. Not that I’m missing him or anything but on January 3rd he limped off and we were told he’d be out for ‘three weeks’ with a thigh strain. Here were are over 6 weeks later and there’s no sign of him. Good work Arsenal doctors!
Away from all that The Sun links us with a move for some Brazilian called Nene. He plays for a Portuguese side and has scored some goals. How would you pronounce his name? ‘Neh-neh’, ‘Neen’, ‘Nay-nay’? I don’t actually care, no need to answer.
Right, time for this week’s Arsecast which is altogether a much more cheery episode than last week’s. Thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch regarding the Arsecast and I have done my best to ensure I’ve responded to all those emails/messages.
On this week’s show I chat with a true gent of the Arsenal blog world, Goonerholic. On the agenda with him is Eduardo’s comeback, Usmanov, Sunderland, Roma and more. As well as that there’s some Talkshite Radio, poetry from big Tone and more.
You can subscribe to the Arsecast iTunes by clicking here. Or if you want to subscribe directly to the feed URL you can do so too. To download this week’s arsecast directly – click here 21mb MP3) or you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.
And that’ll be about that. More tomorrow. Cheers.
