The week leading up the North London derby should be one where the manager and his players immerse themselves in the preparation for one of the biggest games of the season.
Instead, 16 Arsenal players are away on international duty for friendlies which are about as welcome as the inland revenue around Redknapp Towers. Samir Nasri says the game is not exactly well timed:
It’s not an ideal time to be playing this game because Arsenal are in top form and we have some big games coming up in the Premier League and the Champions League.
He goes on to say England v France is always special but I’m not sure that it really is. If it were the final of the European Championships, fine, but a stoopid friendly at a more than inconvenient time is far from that. He’s been quite talky though, Samir, opining on the state of Chelsea’s squad and the good weekend we just had, as well as his relationship with William Gallas. He said:
We played one year at Arsenal without talking. There were other people who didn’t talk to him either. The collective cause was more important, though, and we got on with things.
Nasri has emerged as a bit of a hero this season, his form has been very good and he’s got an enjoyable song now, whereas Gallas returns on Saturday with a cock on his shirt. I have to say I’ve never been as glad to see the back of an Arsenal player as I was when Gallas left. Even then he couldn’t do it well, the situation dragged on and left us with the fear he might stay. A blowhard, ego-tripping, puffed up halfwit who wasn’t half as good as he thought he was. Good riddance. For me he’s one of Wenger’s biggest mistakes and certainly right up there for the title of history’s greatest monster.
A gladiatorial battle to the death between Gallas, Phil Collins, John Terry and a Water Sheringham would be my ideal way of spending a lazy Sunday afternoon. Watching that on HD would be just magnificent, especially when the last man standing came to the horrible realisation that the whole thing was rigged and the podium he thought he was going to be awarded his medal on actually had a trapdoor into a churning wood-chipper.
Meanwhile Bacary Sagna, also involved in this farcical non-event at Wembley on Wednesday, talks about our away form, saying:
We know if we want to be successful and competitive, we want to take maximum points away. That’s what we have missed over the past few years but we know we can win games now, even against big opponents, so we just need to play game after game and give the maximum.
Which is all well and good, and it’s great to see us do well away from home, but we’ve got to be strong at home too. We’ve won more points on the road than at home, the two defeats to West Brom and Newcastle making a real impact there, so we have to make sure that as well as we travel our home patch becomes a place where no visitors dare to tread for fear of us blasting them with the metaphorical footballing shotgun.
‘Get orf our land!’, we might cry as fill their backsides with buckshot. It’s not just the team to do the blasting though, fans have a part to play and more on that later in the week.
Some transfer tittle-tattle. First Gael Clichy’s agent, Ivan la Mee (really), says he’s not going to go to Juventus. These stories always amuse me. You don’t get the BBC newsreader coming on air and talking about how there wasn’t an earthquake in China or how a man didn’t go on a murderous rampage with a rifle. So Clichy not going to Juventus is right up there with that. Gael Clichy going on the rampage in China after an earthquake, now there’s a story.
Secondly, Bayern Munich are ‘monitoring’ Nicklas Bendtner after his comments about how unhappy he is at Arsenal. I really hope Bendtner gets his act together – the more he goes on with this kind of nonsense the more likely it is that Carlos Vela might be involved in the first team – and nobody, bar that fella with the niche website, wants that. And with JET linked with a loan move to Ipswich it’s not as unlikely as you might think.
James Lawton is on the happy pills again, writing about Arsene and Arsenal in a positive light. When you remember how he used to take every opportunity to have a go at the boss and his team it’s quite the turnaround. When you look at how things used to be …
Not much else going on. I blame the Interlull, of course, so I sit here this morning shaking my internet fist (words you probably do not want to put together in a Google search) at the UEFA and FIFA bigwigs.
Till tomorrow.
