Dear Friends URGENT!!! PLEASE CIRCULATE to your friends, family and contacts.
In the coming days, DO NOT open any message with an attachment called: Arsenal sign Schwarzer, regardless of who sent it to you. It is a virus that opens an Olympics torch which destroy many sectors of your hard drive. Send this message to all of your contacts…. It is better to receive this e-mail 25 times than to receive the virus and open it.
If you receive a message called Arsenal sign Schwarzer even if sent by a friend, DO NOT OPEN!!, and shut down your machine immediately. It is the worst virus announced by CNN AND LA TIMES.
This new virus has been classified by Microsoft as the virus most destructive ever. There is no repair yet for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the hard disk and in the end it will make your computer like an Arsenal goalkeeper: It won’t save anything!!!!
And now that this public service announcement is over perhaps we can just get on with enjoying this Interlull.
What’s interesting to me is that Arsenal appears to have the highest number of psychic, soothsaying fans in all the world. So many people are talking in absolutes about our goalkeeping situation. No new keeper will cost us any chance of silverware. We will fail. We will, most certainly, get to the end of the season screaming the Wilhelm scream at every moment. Maybe we will but also maybe we won’t. Will the ones who say we will turn around and say ‘I didn’t tell you so’ if, by some miracle, we win something or it’s not just the goalkeeper’s fault that we didn’t.
I think we’ve certainly made life more difficult for ourselves, not least because the lack of new keeper has sparked a reaction from fans the likes of which I can’t really remember happening before. People are either for the manager or agin’ him, lines are drawn in the sand, insults thrown and at the end of the day the fact we all support the same team is overlooked.
Folk are accused of being Sp*rs fans for their opinions simply because the person they’re ‘chatting’ with doesn’t agree. It’s kind of sad, really, that all of us who have the same love for the club, the same ambitions and hopes, end up squabbling like Kramer and Kramer over who gets mini Kramer in a custody battle. That means one of us has to be Meryl Streep. Think about that for a minute.
I know the internet, generally speaking, is not the place for reason, logic or calm considered debate but some of the shit I’ve read in the last 48 hours has been ludicrous. I have no idea why he didn’t sign a goalkeeper, I know for a fact he didn’t do it out of personal spite to some random guy on Twitter, despite what the random guy believes.
I know Almunia is not SuperKeeper© but then who is? At least he doesn’t wear a stupid helmet. And whatever you think of him, declaring that you’re going to spend the season abusing him because that’ll show the manager what ‘real fans’ think is so dense I’m going to call Bob Geldof so he can arrange a load of pop stars to play a gig at Wembley so we can get the money together to buy you the biggest window in the world which you can sit there and lick all day long.
The line running through all our bottoms right now is that Manuel Almunia is our number 1 and will be until January at least. There’s not a thing any of us – apart from Lukasz Fabianski [insert Wilhelm Scream here] – can do about it. We have to accept it and move on. Which is exactly what I’m doing now.
Arsenal yesterday submitted their 25 man squad to the Premier League. The 25 man squad has either 20 men in it or 76 men, depending on what you read. The 20 senior players are:
Manuel Almunia, Andrey Arshavin, Nicklas Bendtner, Marouane Chamakh, Gael Clichy, Denilson, Vassiriki Abou Diaby, Johan Djourou, Emmanuel Eboue, Lukasz Fabianski, Cesc Fabregas, Laurent Koscielny, Vito Mannone, Samir Nasri, Tomas Rosicky, Bacary Sagna, Alex Song, Robin Van Persie, Thomas Vermaelen, Sebastien Squillaci.
You can include as many U21 players as you like in the list which is why you don’t see names like Theo Walcott, Jack Wilshere, Kieran Gibbs, Aaron Ramsey, Wojscez©® and others. The manager was very publicly opposed to the new rules, I like to think we’ve deliberately submitted a 76 man squad just to make that point again. Funny.
PFA Chief Gordon Taylor has criticised the new rules saying they don’t go far enough. He wants to introduce rules which say a certain number of ‘home grown’ players must play in each match. It’s sad that this is still the mindset – where the PFA is advocating rules which see players picked not on merit, not because of their quality as a player, but their squad status. How anyone thinks that’s going to make English football better is beyond me, but then the dinosaurs that have so much influence on the game hardly surprise anyone when they come out with rubbish like that.
Good news regarding Samir Nasri – he’s making a good recovery from his knee surgery. Whether he’s back in contention for the Bolton game remains to be seen.
So as the keeper stuff dies down, hopefully, and the internationals kick in I think things will get a bit quiet in the next few days. It’s time to start lighting candles and hoping our players come back unscathed. Or if they’re in any way scathed it’s minor.
Till tomorrow.
