Morning to you all.
Timing is important in many aspects of life. For example, crossing the road. Get it wrong and the consequences are quite often poor indeed. Also, on quiz shows – hitting your ‘buzzer’ to get the answer before any of the other ugly, desperate people who go on quiz shows is vital when it comes to your chances of winning prizes.
Announcements, there’s another one. Imagine BP releasing an ad talking about their ultraclean fuel or a John Terry family planning pamphlet. Sounds ludicrous but very often these kind of things happen at the very worst times. So it was with some quiet amusement I read this story in the Mirror about how we’ve upped our bid for Fulham keeper Mark Schwarzer.
Arsene Wenger is set to win his battle for Mark Schwarzer – after going back with a fresh £3.5million bid. Wenger sees Schwarzer as the experienced keeper he needs to steady his defence and also not block the progress of his youngsters coming through the ranks.
Which all makes perfect sense to me but it comes a few short hours after Schwarzer made another big mistake in Australian’s World Cup game against Serbia. It was Fabmuniatastic in it’s woefulness, adding to the error he made against Germany in the first game of the tournament. Now, I’m not saying he’s a terrible goalkeeper or anything like it, just that it’s typical that the story about us buying him comes after another high profile cock-up.
Full disclosure: I am somewhat grumpy at Australia this morning as they rather bollixed up my accumulator yesterday.
Anyway, if the story is true at least it shows we’re trying to do something about the problem position between the sticks – even if the joke about them playing badly to get noticed is a bit tired and a bit too truthy for my liking.
Meanwhile, as another tiresome Catalan loudmouth talks about Cesc Fabregas joining them this summer, Matt Slater on the BBC examines the whole situation and makes a lot of sense, which is more than most articles about this whole saga have done. Looking at the finances of both clubs is the most important part of this – Arsenal are in good shape and have no need to sell, Barcelona have been chucking money about, owe plenty and simply can’t afford the kind of fee it would take to get Arsenal to sell our captain and best player.
Laporta’s reign of terror comes to an end on June 30th, whether he’ll try and make another play for Cesc remains to be seen. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it happen, his ego demands that he’s the one who does the deal. I don’t think he’s that interested in whether or not Cesc plays for Barcelona at this point once he’s the one who gets the credit for bring him ‘home’.
I’m ignoring parasites (sites, geddit? *sigh*) like Goal who are running stories about Pep Guardiola being Cesc’s idol because we know this already. We have known this forever and a little bit before that. It’d be kinda like me talking about how James Blunt ought to be covered in wasps and beaten about the place with a witch’s broom. It’s just common knowledge.
In the final little bit of transfer tittle-tattle today, William Gallas is on the verge of joining Juventus. I remember when Chippy joined Juventus. It burned. It left in me a deep loathing of black and white stripes, hence that incident with those zebras that time. No, I refuse to elaborate. When Vieira joined them it stung a bit too. This time I feel nothing.
Update: According to L’Equipe Gallas has turned down Juventus and his options are one more year with us or a move to Panathanaikos or PSG (via @benlyt).
World Cup – well England are through after a better performance against Slovenia but it still wasn’t convincing. The USA’s late winner send them into the knockout stages as winners of the group so England face Germany on Sunday. Very tasty indeed for us neutrals.
There’s Arsenal interest today as Holland face Cameroon. Song v van Persie but with Cameroon playing for little else than pride it could be a relatively easy day for the Dutch. In the other game in that group Denmark face Japan but Nicklas Bendter is a doubt. It looks as if they’re nursing him through the tournament which can’t be good news for us really.
Paraguay v New Zealand and Slovakia v Italy are the afternoon games, with no real Arsenal interest in either.
And that’s about that. Thursday already? Where does the time go?
