january 31st
08.36 – Well, the Arsenal squad got freshened up yesterday with the arrival of José Antonio Reyes, so I figured what better time to freshen up the site a little bit. Not all the changes have been put in place yet, and the old monthly pages will remain as they were (not because of any great desire to remember the design, just that there’s way too many of them to change around). One small thing, you can now link directly to a day’s posting as each day has an anchor tag. So to link to today’s entry, you’d make the link to http://arseblog.com/index.php#jan31 – this will change to http://arseblog.com/jan2004part1.php#jan31 when it’s no longer the index page. To the superstitious among you, I refer you to this date to look at the colour scheme. So there you go.
To your right there you can see a very happy Arsene Wenger with his new signing. He’s confident about young José and describes him as ‘another piece of the puzzle‘. It was interesting to hear AW speak Spanish at the press conference, and David Dein needs to work on his pronunciation big time.
The vice-Chairman tells the story of how we signed Reyes in less than a day and how everything fell into place very quickly. There was more good news in that Sevilla got their fax machine repair man out, the clearance has arrived and our new number 9 (bye Frannie) could make his debut on Sunday against Man City.
The player himself had a few words about his new club and what lies ahead for him. He’s not bothered by the price tag, and is looking forward to getting started. He says “This is a big club and everyone would like to play here. I chose them as they are a club I have liked since I was a child. I know a bit of history about the club, I’ve found out for myself. What I do know is that it’s a sensation. There is a great collection of international stars here, and what impresses me is the speed and precision with which Arsenal play.”
Despite splashing out all that money for Reyes, the manager still has a few bob left to spend if he wants to bring in some more players in the summer. “To say we cannot buy anyone at all any more is not right, but we will have a smaller budget. If needed, we could, of course, go for more players, although not on the same scale as this transfer.”
There’s a good piece about Edu in the Standard, and he really does seem like one of the game’s nice guys. “I want to win every game I play – and I want to enjoy doing it.”
Now I must go spend my precious Saturday morning teaching. Hurrah.
