Quick bank holiday round-up for you. There’s a lot of Arshavin this morning and he’s responded to the manager’s comments about his comments, saying:
I am often translated wrongly. If I talk to the English press, there is no problem, but when I say something in Russia, some special news agency takes it, translates it and sells these quotes. During the process of interpretation they translate my words as they see fit. I find this unpleasant.
Do you know what I find unpleasant? Cloves. I never understood why anyone would want to use something that tastes like a hobo’s socks, but there you go. I can understand why Arshavin would be unhappy but I’d suggest there’s more of an issue with context that actual translation.
For example, he might say:
One day I would like to play for Barcelona. It would be the pinnacle of my career but I am at Arsenal and Arsenal is awesome and frankly I’d just like to go to Barcelona when I am older and my pot belly is much larger to enjoy a bit of sunshine and perhaps to score Penelope Cruz. I believe she has a house there.
Of course we only get the bit about going to Barcelona. Headlines too can be misleading. In today’s Mirror they reckon that Arshavin ‘hits out at Arsenal medical team’. This is what he says:
This is a painful issue both for me and for the team I play for now. We need to do something to avoid it in the future. If it was only my own problem I would agree that it is my fault. That the Premier League is too hard for me with too many games etc. But when this happens almost to everyone for the last two or three years… I believe there should be some more global reason which we need to deal with.
Something needs to be done about it in general and I talked to all Arsenal people who are responsible for medical care.
I wouldn’t call that ‘hitting out’. I would call that a fair assessment of Arsenal’s injury problems and I think the sentiments expressed there are ones shared by a large majority of Arsenal fans. We have had a conveyor belt injury room in recent seasons. Yes, we’ve been unlucky with some but the constant parade of little muscle tweaks, pulls, strains and niggles has been almost non-stop. Arshavin said he talked to the medical team. He didn’t say he ‘blasted them’ or complained, just talked.
And if that goes some way to finding anything approaching a solution I’ve got no problem with that whatsoever. Anyway, as Andrei has a very popular website, perhaps he could deal with mistranslations and comments being taken out of context on there. It would be very easy to counter if an English version of a Russian interview took his words and twisted them. A quick story on his site and everything’s done and dusted and any confusion would be cleared up. He can’t do much about shit stirring headlines, like the one above, but hopefully people can see through them easily enough.
There was an interview with Eduardo on ATVO yesterday but there wasn’t a great deal to it. Some waffle about his injuries, his preffered position and the team’s approach to the Blackburn game. I hope he starts on Monday, to be honest, it’d be nice to see if he’s got anything to contribute, but as I mentioned yesterday I think he’s one of those players with a big question mark hanging over him at the moment.
Do we care that Robin van Persie has been linked by the Spanish press with a move to Barcelona? No, we do not. It’s come from AS, one of the more Madrid friendly papers, and they say Robin is an option as they chase David Villa. Given Arsene’s comments about how he felt van Persie could be up there with the world’s best, should he stay injury free (hahaha) I think any further speculation, Spanish or otherwise, can be ignored.
Not much else going on really. This Monday evening game seems ages away and I think we’re getting an early taste of what the summerlull is going to be like. Oh joy.
