Morning all, welcome to a new week and there are two big, big games on the horizon. For now though most of the chat seems to still be about Portsmouth.
Clumsy oaf of a falling over his own feet Portsmouth striker, John Utaka, claims that William Gallas admitted that he’d fouled him on the edge of our box. He says:
It was a foul because he pulled me from behind after I ran past him – he pulled me back. It was unfortunate the linesman didn’t raise his flag. I asked Gallas and he said to me it was a foul. What can you say to that? It’s like everything is going against us.
Funny though that the TV replays show Utaka tripped himself up, like some Clouseau-esque French waiter, and the referee and the linesman got it spot on. As I said yesterday even though Utaka’s descent to earth from whatever planet he lives on was entirely his own fault the easy decision for the officials was to give a free kick and a red card to the defender. So while we often criticise referees for getting things wrong Steve Bennet deserves credit for getting it right.
Utaka, meanwhile, needs to take lessons in how not to run like a skittish giraffe.
And speaking about Match of the Day, wasn’t it fantastic to learn that the only reason we’ve started the season so well is because our opponents have been so poor? Lineker and Hansen were simpering like a pair old housewives leaving it to Alan Shearer, of all people, to actually make some sense and give the tiniest bit of credit to us for winning two games and scoring ten goals in the process. When Alan Shearer is the voice of reason it says a lot about the other two.
And does anyone think with a couple of applications of rouge on each cheek Alan Hansen would look exactly like Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge?
I would imagine we’ll find out today the extent of the hamstring injury to Cesc Fabregas. He’s been suffering with it a bit since the start of the season and we can only hope that the manager’s decision to take him off at half-time was more precautionary than anything else. With an away trip to Old Trafford this Saturday having the captain fit would be a great fillip. Keep fingers crossed. Whatever the extent of his injury though I don’t expect him to play against Celtic on Wednesday.
Well done to Jay Emmanuel-Thomas who scored on his debut for Blackpool at the weekend. The young man is there on a month long loan deal and there appears to have been some confusion about who got the goal due to the Watford PA man attributing his goal to someone else.
We are just 7 days away from the close of the transfer window – although I think I saw something somewhere which said it was open until 5pm on Sept 1st. I dreamt last night we signed two players on the final day, unfortunately one of those players was Paulo Wanchope who had been converted to centre-half by a Costa Rican shaman. Surprisingly everyone seemed to be quite content with his arrival. Weird.
Right, not much else going on this Monday morning. The week will get busier though. Don’t forget you can have Arseblog delivered to your email each day by signing up the mailing list here and you can follow Arseblog on Twitter here.
Till tomorrow.
