Morning all, apologies for the late blog but my internet connection was bollixed all morning. Seems all better now. I’m guessing the 30 minutes I spent on hold before being cut off by some little fucker is what fixed it.
After Jens Lehmann’s comments yesterday about Frank Lampard the rotund Chelski midfielder has hit back saying Lehmann shows no respect to anyone. He also recounts a tale, like so:
The other week myself and my cousin Jamie Redknapp were out to dinner in a London restaurant and Lehmann was sitting just feet from us on another table. We acknowledged him and he completely blanked both of us. In fact, when he left, we walked right past our table and didn’t even have the decency to say anything.
While the stuff like diving with Drogba does annoy me it’s stuff like that which makes me like Jens so much. It must have been awkward for him though. Imagine those two shithounds sitting next to you in a restaurant. They’d only arrive after you’d ordered as well so you couldn’t leave and go somewhere else. Anyway, what did Lampard expect? Jens was probably afraid that if he said anything Lampard would take it as a sign that he could come over and scoff up all the food on his plate. Well played, Sir.
Arsene Wenger spoke yesterday ahead of the Wigan game and expressed his concerns about the glut of foreign investment in Premiership clubs. He fears it could put Arsenal at a disadvantage and he’s right. He said:
Once the financial potential of the club goes above their natural resources by far, we will be in trouble because we don’t have that. At the moment the income basically is the gates, television and sponsorship. If the income is gates, television, sponsorship plus private gifts then we cannot compete.
It must be galling when the club have embarked on a project (Ashburton Grove) to give the club more income to allow them to compete financially with their rivals – at the time Manchester United were the top of the pile – only to find people like Abramovich come in and blow all that out of the water. Now you have the billionaire at Villa, Dubai about to buy Liverpool and the investment, as Wenger said, is going to be based around making profit and not for the love of a club (the boss was right to note the difference between someone like Jack Walker or Dave Whelan of tonight’s opponents).
My fear is that it will go too far before the FA decide something has to be done about it.
The boss also confirmed that Thierry Henry would be out until the new year with a hamstring problem.
Alexander Hleb, guilty of a poor miss against Chelsea on Sunday, says Arsenal’s finishing is what has let them down this season. There’s no question we need to be more clinical in front of goal but it’s not just poor finishing that has us so far behind the leaders.
What was missing for a few games was the passion and spirit that we’ve shown against Sp*rs and Chelski. As Goodplaya pointed out on last week’s arsecast if we played with that kind of determination every week we’d win more games even if we didn’t play particularly well. What has let us down this season is playing the so-called ‘lesser’ teams. We’ve beaten United, Liverpool and Sp*rs and drawn away to Chelsea. However, we’ve lost away to West Ham – who were a shambles all season – Man City, Bolton and Fulham. With the greatest of respect those are teams we should beat if we want to win the league.
Wigan have always given us a game since they came up and I don’t expect tonight to be any different. We have to ensure we don’t suffer another disappointing away day and that means scrapping and getting stuck in. If we do that the goals will come and the boss is concsious of that too.
In team news we have Kolo Toure back and surely it’s time that Julio Baptista got a start. I also hope the game against Fulham doesn’t deter the manager from playing a 4-4-2. Going to Wigan and playing 5 in midfield is just too negative.
In other news the boss says he’s ‘very happy’ at Anthony Stokes’ progress during his loan spell at Falkirk and denies that the club has received any bids for him. With Lupoli and Bendtner angling for moves away perhaps the young Irishman could be the striker to make the grade.
Don’t forget, if you have a comment about the Wigan game or anything else that you’d comment about for the arsecast on Friday you can go to this page and record directly from your computer.
And that’s it. Better late than never, eh?
