Morning, it’s very, very quiet, to be honest. There’s nothing new from the training camp and some quotes from Arsene in the new Arsenal magazine lay out the ambition for the new season. He says:
The aim is to continue to progress as we have been doing. We were very close last year – closer than the previous season – so we are heading in the right way. We hope we can continue that this season.
It is important to start well, start strongly and get into a good position early on and to try to maintain the level.
Which kind of goes without saying really. Do better. Start well. Don’t fade. The starting well bit might be made slightly more difficult by the delayed return of two of our most important players. Cesc and Robin won’t return to the club until the end of this month having gone all the way to the final of the World Cup with their respective nations.
It’ll take them a bit longer to get up to speed, having started their pre-season so late, but I don’t really expect any World Cup hangovers, to be honest. Cesc missed the last 6 weeks of the season with his broken leg while Robin missed a great huge chunk of the season so it’s not as if they were going into the tournament exhausted. Not to mention the fact Cesc really didn’t play much in South Africa. Arsene says:
Physically, it is an advantage when you don’t play at the World Cup. And mentally, when you play in the World Cup final on 11 July, it is difficult to come back with complete recovery before the end of August.
It’ll be interesting to see how they’re used in the first games of the season, in that case. The opening day trip to Anfield isn’t exactly a game you’d want to leave them on the bench for. I suppose the trick is get yourselves 6 up by halftime so the 5 we concede in the second don’t matter at all.
The Guardian is suggesting we’re going to make an improved bid for Mark Schwarzer but there’s not a great deal of insight there, more sensible guesswork, I think. Meanwhile, talk of Manuel Almunia being the subject of talks between Arsenal and Osasuna is wide of the mark. The story began in the hopelessly, relentlessly inaccurate Metro, but the Spanish club say:
We have never spoken about this possibility.
Reading the various papers Almunia is ‘distraught’ at being frozen out. Clearly there’s nothing quite like making a player miss a game against a bunch of postmen and plumbers to put him in his place. If we do sign Schwarzer though we’ll have a goalkeeper surplus and at least one of them will have to go. Wenger’s rather odd love of Fabianski suggests it’ll be the Spaniard but if you put a gun to my head and told me to choose between them I’d keep Manuel and donate the Pole’s body to science. While he was still alive.
Maybe he thinks Lukasz is at an age where he can improve more than Almunia. And unless he starts booting goal kicks into his own net he can’t exactly get much worse.
Jack Wilshere, who lists Now 73 as his favourite music on Facebook, is hungry for first team football. Which is good. The spell at Bolton has given him the experience of playing week in, week out and he wants that at Arsenal. I like the way he scares defenders by making faces at them.
The Daily Star, the paper that ran with the “EXCLUSIVE: Arsenal sign Joe Cole” story, say we’ll make a £10m bid for Per Mertesacker if Everton turn down a further bid for Phil Jagielka. Attach to that as much credibility as you wish.
And finally the Daily Mail runs with a story which says that Aaron Ramsey and Eduardo are a scourge to the English game, run a gang which imports illegal immigrants in hidden spaces in the back of lorries and make them work as cockle pickers (only when the tide comes in), claim social welfare payments which they use to maintain their sex tourism business, whilst selling GM foods which give you give you a mix of cancer and AIDS but only if you’re English.
Ok, they don’t, but they probably will one day.
Till tomorrow.
