The snooze function on my phone is the greatest thing ever.
We’ll start this morning with team news ahead of tonight. The squad was announced yesterday and there were four notable absentees. Kolo Toure and Tomas Rosicky miss out because they’ve got small knocks while Cesc and Alex Hleb are ‘rested’. It certainly seems fair enough. Cesc in particular has played almost every minute of every game this season and we’ve got plenty of cover for him. It remains to be seen who exactly plays though. With Philippe Senderos out injured the boss might be tempted to use Gilberto at centre-half and bring in Diarra alongside Flamini. If not Alex Song will partner William Gallas at centre-half.
With Hleb absent it looks like Theo Walcott will start on the right hand side with Eduardo starting up front as we go back to the 4-4-2 we’re most familiar with. You can read the boss talking about Gilberto, Alex Song, Cesc and Tomas Rosicky’s continued injury problems in one long article here. That’s environmentally friendly linkage right there.
Of course there are no easy games but you have to think we’ve got more than enough to win this and book our passage to the knock-out rounds.
Responding to Alex Ferguson’s comments about foreign players at Arsenal, Arsene Wenger hit back, saying:
It is not very nice to his own foreign players, first of all. I would not be very happy if I was a foreign player at Man United. If you look at the investments of Man Utd this year, they have invested a lot of money in foreign players.
Which was just the point made here yesterday. He goes on to say:
I always felt that sport rewards quality and does not hide behind artificial rules. If you put the level of the class down, it does not necessarily make the bad students better. It makes them worse. The real question is how can England take the opportunity to produce world-class players?
And that’s spot on, in my opinion. It’s too easy for people to say that the lack of England’s quality players is down to foreigners. There’s no question that some local players don’t get the chances they should but that is almost entirely to do with the inflated transfer market for English players. Simple economics dictates that a manager who can buy a Frenchman or a Spaniard or a German for 1/4 of the price of an English player of the same quality is going to shop abroad. If you have a Seat car for €10,000 and a Rover car of the same spec for €20,000 you’re not going to buy the Rover because it’s English. Not unless you have money to waste. Who would spend £9.5m on Ashley Young when you could get Robin van Persie for £2.5m?
For as long as I can remember we have spoken about foreign players being technically better than English players. It’s not a new phenomenon. Whether it’s to do with deprived upbringings or better coaching or whatever, the fact is that most players from the continent have more technical ability than those from England or Ireland etc. Sure, the so-called ‘British’ player probably has more heart and plays with more energy but that’s the way kids are brought up and coached. Blaming everything on the influx of foreigners is not going to make the English players better. Improving coaching, getting rid of stupid restrictions like clubs only being able to recruit English players from within a 90 minute radius of their home ground and focussing on the technical and not just the rough-and-tumble side of the game will. But nobody wants to hear that.
FIFA’s ideas about limiting the number of foreign players are not designed to improve the game. Not one bit. As I’ve always said they’re designed to lower the quality of the club game so the decline in quality of international football becomes less obvious. Septic Bladder won’t be happy with the EU’s comments that such a rule is unenforceable and would be a restriction of free movement of workers within the community. What did he expect though? Still, the charade will go on. The next time England fail to qualify for a tournament or get knocked out in the 1/4 finals the bleating about foreigners will start again and the real issues will be ignored again and again.
Staying with things that are a load of old bollocks Man United are preparing a dossier, at Arsenal’s request apparently, about the ‘abuse’ suffered by the United staff at the game on Saturday. Some eyewitnesses say that at least one member of the United group was very much involved in provoking the crowd and while one Arsenal supporter was ejected from the ground it will be interesting to see just how culpable United are for generating that kind of reaction from the crowd. I wonder will they compile a dossier after we play them at Old Trafford and those 70,000 cuntbuckets sing that song about Arsene. No, I don’t wonder at all. Wankers.
Right, busy morning. Things to do. Fingers crossed for three points tonight and come on you reeeeeeeds.
More tomorrow.
