Morning all.
I don’t know if Arsenal are still in Spain. I hope they are. Everyone deserves a bit of Spain. It’s a great place and nobody should ever go through their life without having the bocadillo de tortilla con jamón from the café beside El Corte Inglés in Barcelona. That’s enough reason to go to Spain on its own, never mind about buying a footballer.
I don’t know if the fact that Real Madrid will have a new manager sooner rather than later will speed things up. Although Ancelotti’s appointment will have no impact on Higuain’s desire to leave the club, at least if he goes on to score a load of goals at his new club (hopefully us) then the president of the club can tut disapprovingly and blame the manager.
I don’t know if we have any real interest in Marouane Fellaini from Everton. I do know that stories about our reluctance to pay his wages don’t make much sense when you think about them. If we’re going to pay a release clause of £20m+, then it’s not unreasonable to expect the guy to want the wages of a £20m+ player. If we’re prepared to pay that kind of transfer fee, we’re hardly going to baulk at paying him the requisite salary.
I don’t know why the people who write these stories can’t see how they contradict themselves continuously when they make up the stuff that they do. On one hand they report Ivan Gazidis talking about how we could afford to pay the salaries of the best players in England – “We could do that and more,” were his words, I believe – then make out like we’re playing poor mouth. The supposed reputation of penny pinching is one we’re not going to rid ourselves easily.
I don’t know why people forget that Arsenal have always paid their best players very well, even if this ‘socialist’ approach to wages has been a thing in recent seasons. Before the likes of Chelsea and Man City came along, we were right up there in terms of what we paid. There wasn’t a better paid player in the Premier League when Thierry Henry was at his pomp, and for all the fuss of Theo Walcott becoming Arsenal’s ‘first £100,000 a week’ player, that’s nonsense. Others have earned that, and more, down the years.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to players like Marouane Chamakh and Ju-Young Park. The latter is currently on a South Korean military boot camp (seriously) and will return to Arsenal when that’s finished. At least he’ll be fit. The former is, apparently, caning it on holidays in Las Vegas with $amir Na$ri, but with reported interested from clubs in Ligue 1, I’d be making him a cheese sandwich for the journey and sending him on his way as quickly as possible.
I don’t know if I’d actually make him a cheese sandwich. I think instead I’d give him the dust from the bottom of a box of cereal. Mixed with some wood chips and mud. And I’d make him eat it. “That’s for everything,” I’d say, as I stood over him with a medieval mace in my hand, the threat of its use implicit. “That’s for everything.”
I don’t know if that’s a good place to leave today’s post but I do know there’s not much point continuing with things I don’t know because I don’t know what weird road we might go down. And I do know that that particular road is one best avoided on a Tuesday.
I do know I’ll be back tomorrow but I don’t know if anything will have happened by then.
