The North Bank – “It’s got va-va-voom” (An Arsenal blog)

You can’t beat the feeling of waking up on a Monday morning content that your team put in a solid performance at the weekend and extended the gap to the team immediately below them. ManUre beating Villa due to a goal in the 147th minute it means that we now have a six point lead over the Villains with seven games to go. Quite a nice position to be in considering that only a few weeks back we were looking at the possibility of being eight points behind Villa. Football, as they say, is a funny old game. The thing is though, it’s only a funny old game when the luck/results go in your favour. I’m quite sure that Villa and it’s fans won’t be thinking football is a funny old game right now… But their loss is certainly our gain, so all is good. The downside being that our slim chance of winning the league, and it was the slimmest of slim chances, would now appear to be gone.

Got an email from my brother this evening in which he had forwarded the latest ANR post. The reason he sent it to me is because he knows how much I despise Miles Patsy Palmer. I really can’t stand the man and he just gets worse as time goes by. To name but two things; one: he often refers to himself in the third person, which only mental people do and two: he always talks about the ‘EPL’ and writes hyperbole. He tries too much to be sensationalist and writing with an ‘I’m the man’ kind of style/attitude. Gets on my nerves. So, I gave up making it my business to check out what he said a few years back and therefore I get the occasional email from my brother with the article and then I vent my Myles-rage back in a reply. In today’s article he tries to twist a quote from CEO Ivan Gazidis wherein Gazidis basically says that ‘Kroenke is a model owner’ into saying that ‘Kroenke is the owner of Arsenal’ and you can almost imagine Myles, as he is wont to refer to himself, strutting around his room like a cocky rooster (arms flapping and all) at how he had come up with this ‘genius’ insight and twist on a quote. No doubt he said it to his wife too, then went off to do something hip later that evening…

That last paragraph went on for longer than intended but such is my disdain for Patsy Palmer. I wonder does he also shout ‘Kroenke!!’ instead of ‘Ricky!!’… It’s clear that Gazidis was just making a general statement about the type of business owner that Kroenke is, NOT that he is the owner of Arsenal Football Club.

Back to Arsenal again and the boss has said that all direct contract negotiations with the players themselves are on hold until the summer, but that doesn’t mean that the club won’t be talking details over with their respective agents. I must say that I agree with Wenger’s thinking on this one as the most important thing right now is to concentrate on football matters alone and to ensure that we get the most out of our remaining games and see if we end up with some silverware at the end of the season. We have all summer to get pen put to paper on new contracts. Of course, it’d be nice to not have to worry about player contracts, as fans, but i think that Wenger is right.

Elsewhere, Adebayor talks about how it is time to achieve things since he has won nothing since joining the club. You can’t knock that attitude, but it still didn’t stop him asking for an astronomical pay-rise after one decent season. Still, let’s hope that the lack of trophies will drive him on to work his socks off in every game between now and the end of the season and he may just get the silverware that he is looking for.

Early team news ahead of tomorrow sees Villarreal without their Spanish international winger, Santi Cazorla. He broke his Leg at the weekend as his team slumped to a 3-0 defeat to Almeria. Pires was sent off in that game for picking up two yellow cards and thus he will have an enforced rest in the league between the two Arsenal games and so is sure to feature against us in both games. Marcos Senna has been included in their nineteen-man squad for Tuesday’s game.

Okay, time is short this evening. That’ll have to do for today.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 19:45 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.