Good morning to you.
The reaction to yesterday’s post was quite conclusive. The vast majority of you think that yes, Arsenal players need to be electrocuted on the top of the penis. I shall prepare a proposal immediately and send it to the club. I expect they’ll ignore it but should we go through next season without a trophy then it won’t be anything to do with what we do in the transfer market this summer, it will be entirely because they have not opened their minds to new methods.
Also, if my computer were to have a penis I would electrocute it this morning. A great big dirty ‘no entry’ sign on start-up. I’ve zapped the P-Ram and all that but the main HD appears to be bollixed. I ran ‘disk utility’ and it basically laughed at me. ‘Haha, this disk can’t be repaired. Fix it and try again’.
I’ll fix it all right. Fix it right in the face. Stoopid thing. Anyway, I have a back-up but what if my back-up is also bollixed? To be perfectly safe, don’t you also need a back-up of your back-up? And then what if the back-up of your back-up is fucked? It’s a never ending story of worry and angst, let me tell you.
As you can gather by this interminable waffle there is little in the way of Arsenal news to be going on with. I expect all the players are away on their holidays, feet up, mojitos in hand, reading the latest John Grisham or doing word puzzles, soaking up the sun in far away resorts like Salou or Bridlington.
Some of them won’t be back, replaced by shiny new players of dubious quality and character about whom we can make up cutting nicknames which highlight their deficiencies. Some of them will, having spent the summer learning Chinese, and it will all begin again, same as it does every year. Until then, or at least until we get things moving on the transfer front, I reckon we’re in for a bit of a dry spell.
As with every year I hope we’ll get our business done nice and quickly. A quick cleaning of the decks, unwrap the new boys and away we go. It all makes perfect sense to me but then the myriad of difficulties regarding your average transfer are rarely taken into account. It’s not just a case of making a bid and flinging over a cheque.
This summer all the clubs in the world know that Arsenal need to go shopping. Our need gives them a stronger negotiating position. And our refusal to be held over a barrel, ever, means that we’d better have a long list of targets. If a club starts acting the goat, looking to extract more money from us simply because they think we’re desperate, then we’ll walk away and look elsewhere. Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that we might be going shopping with a great big wad of money on top of our existing transfer fund and you know clubs will chance their arm a bit.
Then add to that players own foibles and desires, agents looking for their share and a bit more and then a little bit more and a bonus simply for existing and then a percentage of everything because they’re an agent and agents are special, and Arsene’s refusal to countenance a deal that goes beyond his valuation (“We want £5m for this player!”, “No, I value him at £4,999,999.99p, and I will not pay a penny more”. “Ok then, fuck off”), means that it’s just not as easy as all that.
On the other hand, football’s finances are pretty much in the toilet. There are clubs who face bills they can’t pay, sustaining themselves with TV money just to keep their heads barely above water, so perhaps that’s an angle we can exploit. All’s fair in love, war and football transfers. Obviously I hope it all starts soon from a selfish blogging point of view but also because I just like it when we sign players. Mostly. One or two exceptions aside – most of them in recent seasons – a new player is like when you’re waiting for a package to arrive and it arrives and you’re all like ‘Yay, it’s arrived!’.
Don’t we all deserve to open our packages? Then we can compare packages just like in … erm … forget that. Anyway, the point is that we need more mojitos. I wonder could you liquidise bacon and eggs, throw in some mint and some Havana Club and invent the breakfast mojito? There must be a reason why it hasn’t be done.
Aside from all that nothing there’s nothing. Tonight will be the the final Arsecast recording session of this season. A round-table discussion in which we’ll discuss things like how terrible we are, how shit we are, how awful we are, how brutal we are, how many of our players need to be fed to velociraptors, and so forth. However, the guests are not all from thegloomblog.com or ilovearsenalsomuchihatethem.net, so hopefully there’ll be a healthy dose of perspective, wit, humour (gallows as it might be) and common sense to sustain us.
All participants are expected to begin drinking at 4pm this afternoon to ensure a healthy debate. Anyone found shirking their responsbilities in this matter will be dealt with by the man in the bar. And nobody needs that, let me tell you.
Right, time for breakfast here. Where’s my liquidiser?
