From Romford Mike: Scouting
Hi Myles and hope all is well.
Wenger talks about finding the right players for the correct price.
Looks like Leicester have found a pacy talented striker in Ahmed Musa for approx 17M.
As usual it looks like our scouts and Wenger are asleep again!!
Best regards for the new season.
From Javi : The pre-season injury blessing
Hi Myles,
I still belong to the crop that logs into ANR everyday to get the authentic transfer news/rumours and I am I am as disappointed as many, not because of lack of obvious additional squad requirements, but because of the fact that someone/small group of people can decide to take everybody else for granted and still succeed in extracting the highest amount of money season in, season out.
How Arsene does it, we shall never know.
AW has always left his team 2 players short of being genuine title winners and somehow he does it over and over again. He speaks the right things mid-season, calling out the players we are missing and never does anything about it, so much so that I’ve always wished we could get injuries in the transfer windows to crucial positions in the team (shame that I would want a player injured), but I recall that is how we got to purchase players like Monreal.
I bet he was going to gamble on Holding and mourn his lack of experience midway through the season, but many fans prayers maybe answered with injuries to the BFG and Gabriel Paulista.
Don’t be surprised if we lose Koscielny against Liverpool because he has been rushed back. Hoping we can get a decent CB to partner Koscielny, and with a solid back and midfield we can have a chance at Top 4 again.
Shame once again that our ambitions can’t go beyond this.
From: David Ball : Prediction
Hello Myles,
I wonder how long it will be before Arsene says ” Judge me in May ”
From Norrie : The Theory of Everybody
Hi Myles,
Sorry, not having that.
Ozil and Ramsey’s positions are virtually uncontested. So technically, it’s 12 players for one position.
If Mahrez/Draxler/Mikhi had signed, position filled. That’s not intense.
One could name 21 midfielders/wide-forwards at the beginning of last season’s squad, so why sign anyone? Net result: Flamini in midfield. Serious teams don’t have Flamini in midfield.
If Wenger had signed Xhaka – or even, at a stretch, El-Neny – last summer, we could be starting this season as champions.
But it’s always too little, too late and never in the right places. A full-strength squad is expected to compete; a squad with holes allows perpetual excuses. A squad with holes will nonetheless find its rhythm and play well in patches – ergo, Arsenal the last 12 years.
And now Gabriel. But hey, we have 10 defenders listed in the first-team squad, so no problem.
Yeats said, ‘the best lack all conviction/whilst the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
Wenger seems to embody those two opposites simultaneously, and always in the most disastrously wrong places at the disastrously wrong times.
Myles says:
If half your team lacks conviction, you’ve no chance.
We didn’t do W.B.Yeats for A-level, only Hamlet, Hardy and Hopkins, the Jesuit.
“Frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day” is a line that could apply to most of AW’s Cup Finals.
Did see a Yeats play once though. Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Among other things, this Paris Review piece tells us what happened when Lou Reed was heckled.
Last night we were having dinner with my brother Neil, who’s staying with us till Thursday, and I was telling them about Yeats and this poem.
Jan said, “We did Yeats in my second year at college. Our tutorials were in the library, not in the college library but the lecturers’ library with big upholstered chairs. The teacher was big guy from Lancashire, so enthusiastic, his enthusiasm was infectious. We studied The Second Coming and I really enjoyed it.”
She had never told me that.
Her only slight doubt after we got married was that we might run out of things to talk about. But that hasn’t happened yet.
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/no-slouch/