Happy Friday one and all and with Milan consigned to the ‘open in 10 days’ pile it’s back to the nuts and bolts of Premiership action tomorrow. An early kick-off against Birmingham City who, a little over a month ago, came to the Grove and went away with a point. Since then we’ve won four out of four in the league and, if you need to get extra motivation for each game, we want to put right the two points dropped at home.
There is, I suppose, the danger of a Champions League hangover. We’ve seen it before. AC Milan one day and, no disrespect intended, Birmingham City the next. The manager will need to keep his players properly focussed for this. We can go 8 clear of United, even for a short time as they’re pretty much guaranteed 3 points when they travel to play Kelvin Koogan’s concedeariffic Newcastle. With Chelsea in Carling Cup final action we can open up the gap on them to 11 points.
In terms of team news we’re without the suspended Eboue and there was some good news regarding an injury for a change. Normally we hear a player is going to be out for 4 weeks then steel ourselves for the update that means he won’t be back for 8. Kolo Toure is made of strong stuff though and the injury he picked up against Milan should only put him out of action for a couple of weeks. The boss also hinted at the return of Robin van Persie, saying:
He is not a very long away from being fit at all but he lacks match-practice. Could he be in the squad? Maybe but don’t forget he has not played regularly for five months now.
Five months. Jesus. What talent he has, what goals he scores, what serious bad luck he has with injuries. Fingers crossed, and toes crossed, and any other things you can cross to bring good luck (can you cross crosses or is that to ward off vampires?) that he can stay fit between now and the end of the season. To be honest we’ve coped pretty well without him and if he can get match fit and sharp again then we’ve got a player who won’t be feeling end of season fatigue and that could make all the difference.
Jens Lehmann reckons he should keep his place after a run of four or five games. To be honest he’s done ok but he still looks a bit slow and old, which is natural, I suppose. If it were up to me I’d bring back Almunia but that’s something for the boss to sort out ahead of tomorrow’s game.
Arsenal have released financial results for the 6 months up to November 30th. You can read about them here while Chairman 50HW says:
We have had a very satisfactory start to the financial year driven by the new Premier League TV deals and the inaugural Emirates Cup tournament which have increased revenues in our core football business.
Meanwhile Fat & Orange are now the largest shareholders in the club. They snaffled a few more shares yesterday to bring their total to 24.2 overtaking Danny Fiszman who has 24.11%. His renewed presence, which brings the terrible threat of Double-D’s return, is tedious and irritating. Can’t they just fuck off somewhere else, to some club that deserves a big, fat, horrible cunt to own lots of shares?
The Arsenal Trust have responded by making a proposal to members to join the board’s lockdown agreement, saying:
Arsenal are today publishing another set of excellent financial results. The team is top of the league. We are a well run club that does not need to change ownership.
Now, Arsecast time.
In this week’s Arsecast, brought to you in association with OleOle.com, I chat with GilbertoSilver from Gunnerblog about Milan, Birmingham and Eboue, there’s the culture corner, AWH is there, Eboue, the penis of William Gallas and some of your voice mails, including one guy who is not happy at all with the aforementioned Ivorian.
To subscribe to the arsecast in iTunes – click here. To download this week’s arsecast directly – click here (14mb MP3). You can find the arsecast archives here. And you can listen directly below without leaving this very page.
[audio:http://arseblog.com/podcasts/arsecast_episode65.mp3]So, there you go. More team news and stuff ahead of the Birmingham game tomorrow. Until then.
