Our first pre season game kicks off tomorrow against Barnet and so I write my first Arsenal blog. It's been a long time coming, since my parents bought me a yellow Addidas top with matching blue shorts and yellow socks, a blue wool hat and a red and white striped scarf all in boys small. I was 7, we lived near Regents Park. Now, 17 years on, I'm spending a summer in the woods in Wisconsin and I've finally got the time. My brother, who got his first away kit age 3, will be pitching in with the blogging too. There'll be more about us (if you're interested) later.
The game kicks off at 9AM Eastern time. I'm not sure about TV coverage in America, to be honest it doesn't look good, but you can catch the game on ArsenalTV online on Arsenal.com and might be able to get a feed on www.justin.tv. They've announced the players to be involved and it's a typical mix of reserve teamers (those on the fringe of the first team), first teamers coming back from injury and our new man Vermaelen, who I'm immensely looking forward to. It will also be interesting to see the fitness levels of the boys returning from holliday. No doubt that Cesc and Walcott and the others who have played a host of internationals will be a few feet ahead in fitness. But I'm not looking forward to anything more than seeing Tomas Rosicky kicking a ball. If he can come back to good effect and play well in a system with Arshavin, we could have the deadly wingplay we used to with Pires and Ljunberg, and before that Overmars and lets not forget the graft of our man Ray Parlour.
It's been a strange summer for football and there has been much to talk about so we'll be doing a little catching up in the coming weeks, which won't be difficult considering how slow things are at the moment. The recession has affected football as it has the rest of the world, but like the rest of the world there are unaffected pockets, pockets that even come to thrive. Man City have money burning holes in their pockets, having been passed on by a very rich man to a group of very, very, very rich men. Their project is reminescent of the one at Blackburn around 94/95, where they won a title and very much like Chelseas recent money punch, where they've won plenty of trophies, which of course doesn't include a final in which they were denied the holy grail of trophies by a slip by Dickhead Terry. Man City's project, however, seems a fair bit less reasonable than the others. They've had double the money injection that Chelsea had from a group of people who spend little time actually watching games. It seems more of a play project, a real life session on Football Manager, than the money laundering project at Chelsea, which by nature needs to be more businesslike.
City have so far bought Carlos Tevez, for around 45m dollars, Roque Santa Cruz for around 30m, one time distant Arsenal target Gareth Barry for about 22m and look set to sign current Arsenal misfit Adebayor for around the same as Tevez. I can't say I'm too sad to see him go, not the Adebayor from this past season anyway. He didn't perform, simple as that. Beyond that he was lazy, bad for moral, caused unrest in the dressing room and gave outrageous and unprofessional press conferences in which he spoke against the club and l'Boss, which is just about as criminal as his performances against Man U in the champions league. He's had a work permit granted and had his medical earlier today. Not sure how it went but I can't imagine there was any problem. 25m pounds will buy us a capable replacement, although you could argue that we don't necesarily need one with the attackers we've got already, not to mention the returning Jay Simpson, who I hope got some good experience with West Brom last season, and a defensive center mid, which I think we'll all agree should be our first priority this summer, having seemingly sured up the defence. I'm not sure who we should be looking at with our most appealing target having signed for Juventus this past week. I doubt we would have paid the 21m we needed for Filipe Melo, but it's still a shame. Xavi Alonso was too expensive last summer and with a very good season behind his belt his stock would only have increased. We've given up the chase on Inler, who I admit I know near nothing about, just that he's Swiss and bald and given evidence of our very own bald Swiss center back, he may only hurt us anyway. We'll speculate more on this another time.
Not much else to report, plenty to talk about, but like I said, we'll be doing that over the next few weeks. Hope you enjoyed it. I'm not sure how this all works with responses and things and we'll surely get better at making this more user friendly but if you have any comments, questions or concerns, which I hope the three people reading this will, then send an email to
No comments:
Post a Comment