Welcome to the start of the pre-season of the new season. The players are due back today for a few laps of the pitch and tell tales of their holidays.
From here we begin the slow descent into warm-up matches, pre-season tournaments and then we’re back into the real thing again. Of course a number of the players will be returning late. Among them Theo Walcott and Kieran Gibbs who were away at the U21 European Championships and Cesc Fabregas who was away with Spain for the Pointless Cup.
And speaking of Cesc there’s yet another dull as dishwater story in this morning’s Sun where they say we’ll sell Cesc if we get offered £40. An ‘Gunners insider’ is quoted in the story but frankly I am fed up with these stories now. Firstly I doubt any Gunners insider has been talking to the Sun about this and even if they did I’m pretty sure they’re an insider of little importance because nobody with an ounce of professionalism would do it.
I have some suspicions about the constant flow of Cesc leaving the club stories. Given Cesc’s change of agent last year and the relationship between that agent and someone else in whose interests it is to unsettle things at the club I’m just a bit dubious as to why stories like this appear.
After the most categoric statement from the player himself about his future at the club the focus of the story changes so it looks like the club will sell him. Honestly, it’s all complete fiction and most tiresome indeed.
But the worst part are the hypermuppets who take that fiction then spin it into ‘£40m midfield maestro bid’, as if there were even a shred of fact to it. Morons. Remember, if you use NewsNow and you’re cheesed off with the rubbish, Rocky (an Arser) made Rocky NewsNow which sorts that problem out. It gets rid of pretty much all the crap and makes news much more bearable again.
There’s been a lot of talk about Felipe Melo. Swap deals involving Eboue and even William Gallas but as good and all as that would be it really doesn’t look as if the player himself is too keen on moving this summer. He’s quoted in the Italian press, saying:
I have a contract with Fiorentina in which it was written that should I have a good first season, the club would have the possibility to extend my contract automatically from five to six years. They utilised this clause and I am really happy. I owe Fiorentina a lot. I arrived and I immediately became a regular. I have never been on the bench.
You might say he’s just saying that so that when a move comes through he can maintain a relationship with the fans, for whatever that’s worth, but really it just sounds like he’s happy enough in Italy, and content to wait until after the World Cup next summer when interest in him might be more widespread than just us. We may have to set our sights elsewhere – and the Eboue/Melo swap deal is probably just too good to be true.
David O’Leary says he’d return as a number 2 at Arsenal. Sorry but my brain has just gone haywire with jokes about David O’Leary and number twos.
Derby County want to take Mark Randall on loan next season, according to the Mirror. Makes sense. He’s never really shown enough to suggest he can step up to the first team any time soon so a season somewhere else might just be the making of him. Or show us where his level is.
And that’d be about that. More tomorrow.
